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Weekly Contest #363
The Call of the Sea I stood at the rail, amazed to be alone on the promenade deck. Only yesterday, we had lined this rail, two deep, as friends and family stood on the docks and waved their farewells. Today, most passengers were seasick below deck. Beyond our storm-tossed ship, the sea was a sharply peaked range of rolling gray hills and valleys – immense wave crests capped with foam that the wind sliced free, then shaped into clouds of mist that stung my skin with cold. While my face grew numb, the hooded mackintosh and waterproof trousers ...
Weekly Contest #362
Afreet I’d never encountered a living coffee cup before. I mean – if a bulbous, blinking eyeball stares up at you from the porcelain’s concave bottom, doesn’t that qualify as alive? ----- My life has taken many strange and unexpected turns. As a boy dreaming of walking on the moon, little could I have foreseen my current profession. And how, this morning, just twenty minutes ago, I was running for my life, pursued by my would-be assassin. Imagine darting in and out of train cars, dashing down crowded corridors, bounding up escalators and bey...
Weekly Contest #361
First Light I step down off the train, onto a crowded rush-hour platform. The long line of electric lamps above us buzz annoyingly, and flicker rapidly on and off. The stroboscopic light pattern makes me feel dizzy. It’s five PM, here at the open air train station, as the mood of the commuter crowd drops from gloomy to abysmal – strange for a Friday afternoon. “Same old shit,” someone complains. “Make twenty Lux a week, and still I gotta stumble home in the dark.” Then the station lights stabilize, brighten a bit, and the crowd grumbles out ...
Weekly Contest #360
The Interview Royce walked beside me. I wore a brand new suit, while he wore khaki slacks and a polo shirt. Our disparity made sense – after all, I was the one being interviewed. I was the guy desperate for a job. This was my last, best chance. If I bungled things, I’d lose my lease, my car. I saw how little Royce had changed over the years. Since grad school, we’d communicated solely via email and phone calls, but his manic gesticulations were still on full display as he prepped me for my first interview in months. “I’ve been telling you e...
Weekly Contest #359
Two Homes on Snickleway Street My next-door neighbor is a kindly old spinster. She lives alone, with no family nearby - like me, actually. She’s four feet tall, with well-coiffed gray hair gathered neatly in a bun. Can’t weigh more than eighty pounds. Unfortunately, she's quite forgetful. And I fear she's losing her mind. Or already has. I thought so anyway, until one of my visits last month – the radio incident. That's when I started to doubt my own sanity. I visit her most days after work for a welfare check, a bag of groceries in hand, be...
Weekly Contest #358
Rosenhurst Asylum I awoke, suffocating. My lungs were paralyzed. Or I’d forgotten how to breathe. I sat bolt upright. Shoved my hands hard into my diaphragm. Five seconds. Nothing... Ten. I kept pushing, and gasped an airless prayer for life. When at last my chest heaved upward. I sucked in a lungful of cold, damp air. Then I smelled the stale, acidic breath of my three cell mates. And thanked God I was alive. Emily lay closest to me, snoring in the bed beside mine. She was given to wild mood shifts, alternating between bouts of fevered mani...
Weekly Contest #357
Halleran House My hands have gone numb, so I pull on gloves. A portable heater sits beside me in the van, but I can’t indulge creature comforts. We need all the juice stored in that lithium pack. Given the remoteness of our location, no alternate power sources were available, and this is our most ambitious ghost shoot yet. Outside, in the light of a full moon, snow begins to fall. Despite Jack’s location – deep inside the Halleran mansion – his helmet cam signal is plenty strong. Bits of fuzz appear on the main monitor, but I’m still recordi...
Weekly Contest #356
The Engulfed Cathedral I hover at twenty meters, here in the warm, sun-rippled depths. Puffs of silvered bubbles rise about me in a ragged column. Their sound is calming, synchronized with my outbreath, while my heart plays a faster rhythm in my ears. For thirty years, I’ve found my peace, my refuge, down here in the sun-stabbed depths, where curtains of pencil-thin beams form, morph, disappear, layer upon layer, until they vanish in the distance. A cardinal rule of diving is – never dive alone – but what does it matter, with sixth months to...
Weekly Contest #355
The Wake Carl had a small circle of family and friends. Today they converged not on the Nautical Lounge (Carl’s favorite bar), but on his creaking asbestos-shingled homestead on Asbury Road. Storm clouds lined the horizon as his mourners arrived and parked their cars, trucks, and motorcycles along the curb out front. The home’s cramped interior grew louder by the minute. Most folks muscled their way into the kitchen, where bottles of booze – Canadian Club, Popov, Seagram’s 7 – lined the countertop. They filled glasses in their grief, while c...
Weekly Contest #354
What a monolithic masterpiece – one hundred pounds plus of World War Two era electronics, from an age when things were built to last. My fingertips traced the words Super Skyrider on its brushed metal panel. I felt their deep engravings and knew – this was destiny… Heavy steel face plate. Analog dials that measured heavens knew what, their glass windows hazed over with the cataracts of time. Heavy black Bakelite knobs, switches, and control wheels. Neither I nor the old timer selling it could divine its true purpose. Some kind of radio, near...
Weekly Contest #353
Your Country Needs You I’m lucky to be alive. And terrified of myself – for doing something I never thought possible. A man, or what was once a man, stands before me in the pouring rain. He’s seized solid, motionless, gray – the switchblade still in his grasp. It all happened so suddenly – I’d no time to react. Now, he’s made of stone, not flesh and bone. I extend one leg, push my foot off the still-warm figure, topple it backward where it shatters into several large chunks on the pavement. Frozen images of him, and of my own head silhouette...
Weekly Contest #352
The Dark Man I pray as I step across the threshold – both that I’ll find him, and that I won’t – out here in the middle of nowhere, a two-hour’s drive from town where Rob was last seen. Where investigators are still following up on dead-end leads. From the moment he went missing, I guessed Rob had gone off to explore some abandoned house or factory, to take more photos for his book. Had he met with foul play? Was he injured, or trapped somewhere in a locked room? Police found his stolen car halfway between here and town. Many took that as a ...
Weekly Contest #351
Call me Angry. That's not my Christian name, the one Mother penned on my birth certificate. My own contributions to that document focused on the inked imprints of ten tiny toes in a singular impression. If only my fingers, my hands had been similarly preserved, so I might now recall their size, their shape. And remember how, until a few days ago, I could move my fingers freely, separately from one another - to sign a letter, make a sandwich, dial a phone. Oh, the things we take for granted. But I digress... --- Two days ago, on a Tuesday, I ...
Weekly Contest #350
Misguided Monsters It was a foggy, clammy morning as I bumped down the access road on the west side of Ned’s cow pasture. I’d taken the call just after finishing breakfast at the Three B’s, and I knew this one’d be a doozy. I could see the sun through the fog, its sharply-edged white disk hanging in the sky like a too-bright full moon. With the front windows rolled down, I smelled him first – the scent of burning cloth mingled with the stench of rotting flesh. Fortunately, I had a cast iron stomach, so my Three B’s breakfast special was in n...
Weekly Contest #349
The Companions I glanced out the window as night fell. Towering charcoal thunderheads slid low and fast toward Ravenhill House, from across the untended meadows and forests of the estate’s enormous land reserve. The wind rose ever higher, a wall of heavy summer rain behind it. A bolt of lightning flash-bulbed the room in light and shadow– the room’s mullioned window projected across walls, the ceiling, a clutter of dark, dusty furniture, and two strange antique dolls. Then the resonant boom. Everything in the bed chamber shook – picture fram...
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