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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...
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 ...
Weekly Contest #342
CW: Sexual violence, Physical violence, gore or abuse Me and Travis, we decided to make a porn. That's not the hard part to tell. Travis had a gift for things that last thirty seconds. The rent, he said it would work out. The electricity, we'd pay tomorrow. He said that and I looked at him and I believed him. I believed him for a moment. Before that he worked at Leroy Merlin. Blue polo, plastic badge. Three weeks. His section manager asked him to tuck in his shirt. Or wipe something down. — I fucking quit, he said. He'd go out. He'd come hom...
CW: Physical violence, sexually suggestive content Four in the morning and I was there in the dark. Sleep had left a while back already and it wasn't coming back, that much I knew. There was this smell in the room. The formaldehyde and the soap and the skin and then underneath all of it, like it was hiding, something sweet. Vanilla. Her shampoo. The one she bought at Walmart in the yellow bottle and always left uncapped on the rim of the bathtub.Faye.She was downstairs. In the oak casket I'd picked out myself, cream lining, bronze handles. I...
My mother held the Book. She held it against her belly the way she never held any of us. Both hands on it. Her thumb crushed against the edge so the pages wouldn't move. They'd made room for her on the front seat. They'd wedged rags so it wouldn't knock around in the turns. The Book traveled well. It traveled better than us.Father's pickup was loaded. Crates, tools rolled in rags, bags of laundry tied shut. A sheet over everything. The vehicle sank on its axles. It drove slow. We were in the back. Piled in. Knees in ribs. Elbows in soft bell...
Weekly Contest #341
Latex has a taste. If you don't know it, it's because you've never put it in your mouth.I did. Eight times an hour. Ten. Fifteen. The rubber tip between your lips, you blow, you swell it, you twist. By the third balloon your lower lip splits. By the fifth it bleeds. You swallow without thinking. Rubber and blood. The taste of a coin heated against the gum. You keep going.The kid across from you is waiting for his dog.You twist. You knot. The balloon squeals under your fingers. A high, strangled sound. Your fingertips go white. The shape appe...
CW: Themes of mental health, stalking, gore, sexual content and the threat of sexual violence. Do I know you?She didn't scream.I hadn't planned for that.In my head she screamed. She always screamed. The scream was the starting gun. The shot fired. Six hours. I'd been in her closet for six hours.Do I know you?Three words. She stood in the doorframe of her bedroom. One hand on the light switch. The other clutching a rolled-up towel. Her hair was dripping. Water ran along her temples and down her neck. It smelled like coconut. Sweet. Clean. Too...
Shannon had never trusted a white man. Not once. It wasn't an opinion. It was the body. The body had known since Scott Street. Since the landlord who came up on the first of the month with his eyes that counted before they looked. Eyes that saw the rent before they saw the woman and the lateness before they saw the child. Shannon had learned white faces that way. The tics. The lips. The nostrils. The way a neck stiffens when a white man steps into an elevator where there's a Black man.That morning, the guard in front of his cell had a differ...
Greg was not a man who went back over the past. He'd sworn it to himself. Since prison, he had learned to live off-center.He had held.And then, one morning, it no longer held.An ordinary morning. No anniversary, no date, no sign. Just the ordinary: the bathroom, the mirror, the toothbrush.It had started in the mouth.An acid taste.On the ceramic of the sink, the night guard waited: a piece of pale plastic, molded to his teeth, to the exact shape of what his jaw clenched at night without knowing. A smile that had been ripped from him and set t...
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