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Weekly Contest #363
My mother builds stone piles when life feels chaotic. I find them on the desk in the window. At the center of the kitchen table. Beside my bed, under the lamp on the nightstand. I think it’s her way of helping me see myself in the world, a small visual cue for courage when the well is depleted. Not a gusher that well, even on the best days. For me, anyway. I envy people with tappable reserves. Strips of sunlight slip through the window shades and knife the bed diagonally. I yank the chord and yellow warmth comes flooding in. J...
Weekly Contest #342
Warning: memories of a sibling's suicide and child miscarriage. I need an opening line; she's not a girl to approach with an empty mind. She's by herself, sipping at the bar. I wonder what she's doing. Grappling with an inner monologue, like me? The bartender splashes an old fashioned with bitters and the barback restocks tequila bottles on the posterior wall. The wall is backlit with warm LED strips, the top shelf especially bright, haloed, small-batch Kentucky bourbons and limited-edition Japanese single malts glowing in sin. She looks far...
Weekly Contest #341
We’re supposed to stay in our own beds at night; those who don’t are punished. The adult monitor checks on us intermittently for the first hour after lights out, easing the door and poking her head, never bothering to kill the hallway overheads first, harsh, yellow light spilling in like the flashlight of a belligerent officer. The door closes. It opens. Closes. When we’re sure the last visit has come, our small feet touch silently to the floor. Breathlessly, we creep in the moonlight, the old wood cold and hard and capable of crashing every...
Weekly Contest #340
I’ve never seen glass windows so tall, nor an infinity pool so pristine. The city of angels rises unbroken from its edge, clear water trickling to a vanish. The furniture’s imported – from everywhere: Madrid, Bogotá, Reykjavík. Imperialism via acquisition. It’s outrageous stuff: folk chairs carved from repurposed Nordic longboats. Glass iron tables from the war room of an overthrown dictator. Vessels sold private from prestigious art museum collections, the rumored sums enough to make you gag. A grand piano sparkles in the center of the imme...
Weekly Contest #308
The year I turned thirty, the woman I planned to marry abandoned me. The year prior, Lily and her boyfriend Alex dropped acid in a field on the foothills of the Santa Lucia mountains. Alex was killed when he wandered, hallucinating, onto the highway and was struck by an eighteen-wheeler.We met at an artist’s collective in the town of Harmony.How did I wind up in Harmony? I fled Los Angeles in the dead of night. By then everything was boxed in storage or sold and hauled away by strangers. Body cold, mind numb. I sat in the kitchen darkness, e...
Weekly Contest #293
warning: violence, depression, drug abuse Do you ever feel that the world is unfolding without you? That you’re on the detective side of the glass, but what you’re peering into is not a drab interrogation room filled with brown tile and a single scorching bulb, but rather the rhythms of the people you know and the goings on of existence that used to give you meaning? On that side of the glass there is color and warmth and belonging. On this side, in your heart and tattooed across your face, there is endless night, numbing cold, and an ot...
Weekly Contest #282
sensitive material: mental health, substance abuse, thoughts of self-harmMuted breaths before dawn. Silent world and first traces of faint light – impossible to tell if real or a mistake of imagination. The air frigid and everything blue, deep navy wrestling night away from the darkness, flooding everything it no longer swallows. Strange shapes float at the edge of my corneas, shadows on the cave wall that blink off and on, fade and harden under changing scrutiny. A soft glow in the windowpane, subtle radiance shimmering in the glass and a t...
Weekly Contest #279
Content warning: Includes graphic violence, cannibalism, and psychological distress. I am so crushed by time. Time and these oozing wounds and the rotten flesh like mealy apple that is my chest cavity. Rotten skin and an infected mind. Gangrenous parietal. So insatiably starving for living flesh, to rend it in my grinding jaw, the music of muscle mashing between molars and canines. A beating heart, my own a thick, bloody steak. The fog of insanity. I am a monster. A living dead.  ...
Weekly Contest #265
Dear Mae, I’m coming to see you beautiful. All my things crushed and stashed away in a black roller bag, an illogical, chaotic mess. I banged my knee barging through the station turnstile – hard. I’m sure it will throb endlessly tomorrow, but for now it’s nothing. Truthfully, I can’t feel anything at all. I’ve only uttered a few words the last four days. So maybe silent words, f...
Weekly Contest #235
Early September in the Northwest. Spider veins of frost splinter in the upper corner of shaded windows. The fog outside is dense; it tumbles about in deepening shades of dreary gray. Charlie’s eyes are milky. The drone of the alarm clock breaks the silence for a moment before his hand proclaims there will be no cadence today. 5:47 am. At 5:48 he’s dressed and striding out the bedroom door. He scarfs a banana like a wolf and heads for the front door. Chilly outside - good...
Weekly Contest #225
Doppel by Sean Glenn Douglas Packard Why is it that when we stare into terror, we often stare into our own eyes? I think it’s the way we’re wired. It’s our thoughts. We have access to them but nobody else; and just as it is impossible for foreign hands to unscrew our craniums and peer inside, so too do the minds of others remain unknowable to us. We’re alarmed at minds different from our own. We fear those that could be similar. Because we don’t have to imagi...
Weekly Contest #224
A gray reef fans on the edge of the eastern horizon. Cobalt blue mixed with midnight. An hour until the first fingers of sunlight. An hour back I quit twisting in the bed sheets. Wouldn’t do any good to fall asleep at 4am. Four is a time to relieve yourself and duck back under the covers for another REM cycle before the world starts calling. That’s for the people who can sleep. For those that can’t, it’s a time to surrender and roll outta there. I don’t sleep much lately. You, only when the med...
Shortlisted for Contest #216 ⭐️
One More Shot by Sean Glenn Douglas Packard Show-and-tell is a sacred thing for young boys. There is nothing more dopamine stroking to a five-year old than a stage all his own, the attention of his fellow carpet crawlers, and nothing to talk about but himself and his favorite object in the world. I was a revved engine when my name was picked from the hat. And I knew exactly...
Weekly Contest #211
Two things happened last week: my dog Brodie died and I met a little green alien named Pterodactyl. I called him Terry. I was sitting on my swing in the backyard, not swinging just sitting, when a trail of smoke zoomed across the sky like a comet. I sat up straight to see what it was. It was getting closer, heading straight towards me. I heard a noise. It started soft then got louder, a high-pitch whistle. Like the letter ‘e’. “Eeeeeeeeee!” A yellow ring around the saucer and flames glow...
Weekly Contest #182
“Follow that taxi.” You’ve just seen a ghost. “Wha-Which one?” The driver in the front seat is shaken from his slumber. He’s an obese, mountain of a man, so big that sitting is his natural state. The cab smells like cheeseburgers and cigarettes. “That one, pulling out, two down. Hurry.” &nbs...
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