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Weekly Contest #348
— I'd like to talk to you about your daughter. I looked at his mouth. Then the other one behind him, the camera already resting on his shoulder. Already in position. His eyes were open like holes in a door.— Logan Mercer. Four hundred thousand subscribers. This is my cameraman, Benji.The street behind them was clean and empty. Sun everywhere. Mowed lawns. Perfectly straight mailboxes. Drawn curtains across the way.— What I do, he said, is tell stories like Samantha's. Stories that deserve to be heard.Samantha.My hand closed over the wood of ...
Weekly Contest #347
Biscuit died during the night. My dog.Usually his tail thumps against the foot of the camp bed. Tap tap tap. It's the first sound of every day. Before the hunger. Before the thirst. Before the strikes of Papa's shovel somewhere underneath. That morning the tail said nothing.I laid my hand on his flank. The fur was stiff. Underneath, nothing moved anymore. I kept my hand there. You think a body is going to start again. You tell yourself one more second. One more. But the seconds pass and nothing comes back. Nothing ever comes back.It was Papa...
— I need a muse, said Matteo.That's where I cheated on my husband. Not in the kiss, not in the bed, not at the Sun Coast motel on the edge of the 41. It was with those four words from the upholsterer in front of the reclining chair left open in the middle of the living room like an animal gutted and abandoned.Fifteen years writing love. I knew how to hold a desire in three details: rain at the wrong moment, a cup forgotten on a table, a silence held one second too long. And during those fifteen years Joel lived beside me. He knew the brand o...
The first thing I felt when I understood I'd been wrong about the only thing in the world that mattered was the urge to buy a gun. Not to cry. Not to pray. Not to call my mother. A gun. Go to Haskell's on Ridley Road, where the guitars hang on the wall behind the rifles. Put the cash on the counter. Feel in my hand the weight of a thing that doesn't lie. Walk out and shoot the first person I saw. The guy at the gas station. The woman dragging her trash cans. The kid standing on his pedals, cap on sideways. Anyone. I needed something to fall ...
Weekly Contest #346
Poetry in Paris wasn't hell. It was smaller than that and uglier. Decent people with their loyalties and their corridor hatreds.And everywhere the same poorly hidden fear. That a real poem might arrive. Just one. That it might walk in without apologizing. And bring everything else crashing down.I was one of them. Not as a tourist. I knew how to strike the right tone. That slightly weary tone. I knew when to furrow my brow while reading.I'd become competent. They called it taste. Standards. Discernment. It was fear. Everyone knew it. No one s...
Weekly Contest #345
— I love her. Said just like that. Low. Almost shameful. Like something that should have stayed buried in the gut.— She's not my daughter. Not my blood. But at night I get up. I go to her room. I hold my hand in front of her mouth. I feel the warm air. Only then do I go back to bed.What I don't tell the officer is that sometimes I stay. My back against her bed, knees pulled up, and I listen. I listen to the house. The wood working. The nails in the joists. The roof. The walls. I listen to see if it holds. I've known places that didn't hold. ...
— This way, Miss Greer. The corridor smelled of chlorine. Underneath there was something else. Cold metal, linens boiled too many times, the air of rooms without windows.She signed the register. The pen was cold. Her name came out crooked. Her hand had written it on its own. The rest of her was no longer in the room.The attendant walked off. He walked fast. For him it was a Tuesday. He opened one door, then another. The third resisted. He pushed harder.The walls were gray. Not painted. Worn. The gray of what's left when everything has been r...
— Hey. I can hear you breathing. So quit acting like you ain't there. The voice arrived in bad shape. Scraped raw by the sheet metal. Drowned by the shit water sitting in the pipes. By the time it came out of the bowl it wasn't really a voice anymore. It was a noise that had decided to be human.— You can hear me. I'm sure of it. Two months the hole next door's been empty. Two months I've been talking into this bowl and listening. And you know what comes back. My voice. Except it comes back with a taste it didn't have when it left.Somewher...
Weekly Contest #344
Witness Interview Transcript: Wayne Elrod Harlan County Sheriff's Office, March 14, 2009. Tape 1 of 1. Present: Det. R. Sizemore. I was about fourteen when I understood. What I put under the word normal didn't weigh the same as what other people put under it. We lived in one room. All of us. Live isn't the right word. Live is a wide word. Live is a word for people who don't count how many they are before going to bed. We fit in one room. Stowed. Like tools in a shed. Standing by day. Lying down at night. Counted by habit.No electricity. No w...
1895, Leonding, Austria.The first time a bee stung me I screamed and my father looked at me the way you look at a dog pissing on the carpet.The summer of his retirement, he brought home hives. Set them at the back of the garden, against the hedge. Nobody said a thing. In our house, nobody said anything. You made room and you shut your mouth.The garden had never been any good. In summer the earth cracked. In winter it was mud. Tall grass. Rusted tools. After the hives, it became his place.He made me put on the veil.The cloth stuck to my face....
My sister is not like the other little girls.On Sundays the girls of the village would put on their dresses. They would take a candy at the church door and laugh with sugar filling their mouths. They would walk down the road holding their mother's hand. Mercy did the same. She chose the mints, naturally. The ones that sting. She held them on her tongue with a patience the other children did not have, and nobody wondered why an eight-year-old girl needed to feel something burn in her mouth to stay still. When it was time to cross, it was not ...
Bobby Harlan was my best friend for nineteen years. I want you to know that. I want you to hold that between your teeth before you walk into this story. His mother used to say I was her second son. She didn't say it with violins. She said it between cans of beans at the grocery checkout. On the phone at two in the morning. She set it down like a plate on the table. Obvious. Normal. Here's Jimmy, here's Bobby, here's dinner. Bobby would've laughed. He found the knot in the sentence. The place where it hurts. And he pulled on it just enough to...
The problem with sleeping is you always end up waking.I opened my eyes to a gray sky. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know who I was. For a few magnificent seconds I was nobody. Then the world came back the way it always comes back, like a dog you kicked out that comes back anyway.I was on a bench. The wood was damp. A park. One of those places nobody goes except those who've got nowhere left to go.In my gut, something hollow knocking against emptiness. The belch rose slowly. When it reached my mouth I got the taste.Not bourbon. Bourbon ...
Weekly Contest #343
The first time they gave me lithium I was sixteen.Laurelwood.It was a year after my mother died. The room smelled of bleach and lino too new. That cleanness that burns your nostrils and leaves your tongue dry. The sheets scraped. The light came from everywhere, flat, without angle, nowhere to hide. A washed-out white. The kind of white where shadow has no right to exist.The nurse's name was Brenda. Or Glenda. A name that doesn't stick. She had dry hands. Cracked. And a wedding ring too tight. The band bit into the finger and the skin spilled...
Weekly Contest #342
The first time I saw Ruth, she was screaming.Barefoot in the gravel. Three in the morning. The Shady Pines parking lot, and this woman standing there like someone had thrown her from a moving car. She was screaming from her belly. Not her throat.I thought I knew her for a second. I didn't.The mobile home was burning.Not a clean fire. A greasy fire, orange, eating the vinyl and the carpet and the cheap glue. The smoke went down instead of up. It stuck to everything. To skin. To tongue. I spat. Chemical taste.The patrol car was parked on the o...
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