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Weekly Contest #350
Whiskey always runs clear.That's what people never understand. In their heads it's already amber. Caramel. Light trapped in a glass. But at the end of the worm it comes into the world transparent. Like water that passed through fire and kept no memory of it. Mamaw poured the first run into a jar. She held it up to the window and handed it to me.— Look.I looked. The light passed through without catching on anything. In the whole county nothing cleaner or emptier than that first run of whiskey held before the window of a hill kitchen by the ha...
Weekly Contest #349
I was seven.The pastor laid an engraving of hell on the table in front of us. He spoke low. The flames rose straight. Red. Black bodies piled one on top of the other. Mouths opened too wide.But the pastor's hell was a spectacle. The real hell doesn't make a sound. The real hell lets you walk right into it without telling you you're there.The country had had a president. Or a man of that sort. Suit. Tie. Hands with no cuts. No dried blood in the creases. I'd worked thirty years a butcher with my hands and my hands told thirty years. His told ...
I laughed at my brother's funeral.Seven minutes.My sister told me afterward. Seven minutes. Once in the church parking lot. Then in my mother's kitchen in front of two cups of coffee nobody touched. And both times the number was the same and both times it meant nothing. The number between us. Nothing around it. Seven minutes laughing in front of the varnished casket, under the copper crucifix, between the lilies that had started to turn, to smell of rotten sugar, soft flesh.It came out in spasms, in bursts, and while it came out I could hear...
Weekly Contest #348
Raphaël's nurse resigned on a Tuesday in December.Lise Tanguay. Fifteen years in the service. Two lines on a sheet folded in half. Personal reasons. Period. I asked her why. She stayed standing. Didn't sit. Looked me straight in the eye. Her hands were behind her back but I saw them anyway. They were shaking. She said it's personal doctor. She left. The door made a sharp sound and the draft lifted the corner of the sheet on my desk. I didn't ask the question. I posted the position. No one. So I asked around. One nurse. Then two. Then three. ...
— 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
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 #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...
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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