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Weekly Contest #350
When my neighbour Harris was thirteen he stopped talking to his best friend when he caught him cheating at Snakes and Ladders. They still live just a few doors apart, and the long sulk is a comical sidestepping farce. He’s in his late seventies now. Yesterday he told me that all good people eventually learned to hate everyone. ‘It’s the only sensible conclusion,’ he said.‘Everyone?’Harris gave me the fisherman’s side-eye. I watch out for him; run errands and drink brandy in his kitchen, which smells like the inside of a biscuit barrel. A cou...
Weekly Contest #345
Every Monday to Friday the train goes through the small station. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it briefly stops. On Tuesdays and Thursdays it inexplicably does not. I have never thought to ask why.For several weeks now, there has been a woman standing on the platform with a small dog on a lead. Well, it would be, I suppose. At a station. She always wears the same clothes: a Barbour jacket with a sky blue scarf knotted around her neck. Skinny jeans. Tan leather ankle boots.Perhaps she changes clothes in the afternoons.She has long hair t...
Weekly Contest #344
I shared nothing in common with my mother, so when she told me that I should not talk to the old man in the willow tree, that is exactly what I set out to do.My mother was a pretty woman with ugly views, and her attitude towards the elderly at that time was that they were either contagious or were motivated by nefarious desires. The elderly women she was sometimes forced to mingle with were treated with loudly vocalised condescension, and old men were avoided entirely, on account of their obvious perversions. At the bottom of our long garden...
Weekly Contest #343
The bolt-action Mauser 98 is the weight of a healthy baby and the length of a young child. There is a method for calculating its recoil energy, but without the pain the algorithm means nothing. I was simply told that it kicked, and that the prize, (a slain tiger, a dead dictator) had better be worth it. It has a capacity range of 3/4 km, or half a mile as the British and the Americans would have it. I prefer the more poetic measurement of a thousand yards.But I didn’t need anything like that. I only needed 20 meters, or 0.012 of a mile.Or 22...
Weekly Contest #342
If you were to pick a month of the year to celebrate love, it would not be February would it? In fifth century Rome it was perhaps warmer. Perhaps the rosebuds were bursting and the goats were getting frisky and those Lupercalian romps on the Palatine Hill, flogging women into compliant desire, all made sense at the time.I love my wife. I love her so profoundly that I hardly think of it as anything unusual. But on this one day of the year, beneath this unvisited mantle of sky when the tourists and the pilgrims are few, I have more time to ob...
Weekly Contest #341
In the New Forest there is a rare kind of crossroads, the kind you usually see in the prairies and deltas of the US. When they laid down the asphalt in the early twentieth century they could not have predicted the speed of modern vehicles. In fact, the crossroads simply followed the path of ancient, well-trodden cart tracks. There are no lights at these crosswords because the New Forest is a National Park and the locals get sensitive about light pollution. The council have been trying to create a dog-leg on the approaches to the main road, b...
Weekly Contest #340
Claris? Clarissa? Claire?The last time I saw Fereshteh was distressing. Aaron had just returned home, crumpled, too thin and absurdly handsome. Within minutes he was racing down the stairs again, clutching a leather box in his right hand and rubbing his cheeks in a gesture of distress. I was afraid he might fall, and moved, (too quickly?) in front of him, offering to drive, waving the car keys to prove my bona fides, but after the briefest, (startled) glance towards me, he muttered something about a taxi and disappeared from view.I wondered ...
Weekly Contest #339
Robert stands at the sink in the kitchen above the pub. His view takes in a bus stop where a woman nervously smokes, picking bits of loose tobacco from her teeth. The bins at the side of the Indonesian restaurant are overflowing. Cars crawl along, stopping, starting, whenever a pedestrian wants to cross the road, which is often. The Army Navy Surplus Store is opening its shutters three doors down from the restaurant. On the river, a ferry boat takes passengers to the other side. It is cheap and worth it. The bridge is a mile downstream.It be...
Weekly Contest #338
Men write journals for posterity. For this reason it must be assumed that not a single word is true.Women write only what is true, but forgo the posterity. The blank page is our confessional, the detail known only to ourselves. Every woman who keeps a journal fears its discovery. Every woman destroys their journal when death feels imminent - unless, of course, she confined herself to decorative sketching and whimsical observation, in which case posterity might yet be its purpose.Every woman who keeps a journal fears sudden death the most, no...
Weekly Contest #337
The fumigator rapped on the black vicarage door using the lion’s head knocker, a door which Reverend Lefroy’s wife had called ‘too traditionalist.’ It should be changed, she argued, to something more modern. He remembered her saying it and thinking of falling. In his mind he imagined a hole opening up to swallow him, to consign him to depths unimagined, where the roots recoiled from him and allowed him to just plummet, without hope, to the centre of the earth.His mother had once told him that the centre of the earth was where all the odd soc...
Weekly Contest #334
Once upon a time there was a young woman, all of eighteen years, who was trapped in a multi-million town house in Chelsea.Isn’t this how all fairy tales begin? The home may be grand or humble, and the girl may be a princess or a pauper, but it is imperative that the girl is good and the girl is beautiful - and that is the beginning and end of all things.She was not, of course, a princess. Her father was a theatre director and her mother a high court judge. They moved in air-kissing circles of egregious insincerity. She was their only child. ...
Weekly Contest #333
Terence Bay, Nova ScotiaJune 1873 The Reverend William Ancient returned from a job of ministry to find James where he had left him, in the vicarage kitchen staring at a bare wall on which the only adornment was a crude cross. The bowl of chowder, untouched, sent his stomach growling. The aptly named Mrs Isabel Cook would be rightly disappointed if she knew just how little James ate. He was getting thinner while the Reverend was undoubtedly getting fatter by eating all that surplus.The glass though, the glass by the side of the smoked cod cho...
Weekly Contest #332
The summer of '76 did it for me, back when everyone was still imperfectly alive. My father, an infrequent visitor, chose that year of all years to convert the loft into a living space. The image of him lying prone, slick with sweat while unravelling a bale of fibreglass for the lower rafters is sharper than other memories I have of him.It was also the year I went on a class trip to the Welsh borders. It was the last act of our primary school days before we had to grow up in September. Some of my friends fainted on a walk we took on the secon...
Weekly Contest #331
CW: contains allusions to child abuse and death. Maris is a beautiful woman if you like them ice cold. Her blonde hair is styled in an immaculate chignon and she has such a little waist. Waspish, one might say. Tonight she is at a party hosted by a neighbour, tinkling and twinkling with her dry martini in one hand and a Sobranie cigarette in the other. But, despite her supremacy amongst the shackled wives, she is bored. There are no conquests to be made in this vanilla landscape. Who knew that plain women could be so Valkyrie-like in the pr...
Weekly Contest #330
What a wonderland! What a heart’s desire! Beyond the wooden doors it was fearfully cold and yet it was not. It was bracing and wonderful and still and everything, just everything that is not hot, and fetid and grasping and hopeless.She whisked on her cloak, dyed red with summer berries, while Nicholas straddled the stove and cooked an enormous fish, simmering in tundra grasses and berries. There are chickens and livestock here, there are potatoes which grow in special cloches, and cows which produce milk and butter and cream. In this barren ...
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