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Weekly Contest #360
I sat in a fancy restaurant in Paris. It was my first time in the city. The place was ridiculously pretentious, with absurd prices and portions that seemed designed for people much smaller than me. I was smoking – it was still legal to smoke indoors back then – and tapped the ash into a large silver ashtray that looked more like a small bucket. After a while, the head waiter, who looked like Hercule Poirot, approached me with an expression of barely concealed outrage. He snatched the bucket-sized ashtray from my table and replaced it with an...
Weekly Contest #358
The final field exercise of our grueling training program was fast approaching. We’d been preparing for it for months, sharpening every skill we’d learned along the way and counting the days until it was over—until we’d finally earn the right to call ourselves real soldiers. This exercise was the culmination of everything we’d been training for.Each team was assigned a hill to defend and a flag to protect. The objective was simple: capture the opposing team’s hill and take their flag.A lot of time and money had gone into planning the exercis...
Weekly Contest #356
It was hot. Hot like hell itself. It was Rosh Hashana – Jewish New Year - and it felt as if summer was giving one final burst, unleashing a wave of desert heat, before surrendering to autumn. I stood outside the ammunition bunker at the artillery base, webbing strapped to my body, rifle in hand. The uniform weighed on me in a way it never had before. Sweat trickled slowly down my back and soaked the collar of my uniform. Even the slightest movement made the fabric cling tighter to my skin. The air itself felt thick and exhausted, as if the w...
Weekly Contest #354
The lifeless lunar landscape lay beyond the small window of the habitation unit. Black skies, white mountains. No air to breathe. The surface was scorching during the day and freezing at night. Some might have called it hell. I call it ‘home’.I’d never quite gotten along with other people. Even as a child, I never had many friends, and I always preferred being alone. At first, I thought there was something wrong with me. As I grew older, I realized that was simply who I was. There were people like that. People who preferred their own company...
Type Note: This story contains themes of alcohol abuse and emotional distressFirst Drink After the math exam, I went back to my room – a messy student den I never bothered to clean. And honestly, what was the point? A few minutes after I’d straighten something out, it would fall apart again. Entropy in real time. It was hot. Really hot. By the time I got there, hauling myself up that steep hill, I was sweating through every inch of my skin. I got inside, peeled off my shirt, took off my watch – I couldn’t stand it sticking to my skin. It was...
Weekly Contest #352
Benjamin stood in front of the pizzeria’s door and rummaged through his pockets, looking for the keys. The place was quiet, chairs rested on the tables, refrigerators humming quietly in the background. As a shift manager, he always tried to get there at least thirty minutes before the rest of the staff. He loved the silence. Those few minutes when he could sit on a high bar stool, sip his coffee and stare at nothing. It was always a refreshing change from his otherwise very noisy day-to-day. He unlocked the door, stepped inside and closed it...
Weekly Contest #351
Over the past year, I’ve come to a quiet, unavoidable conclusion: my profession is over. Not struggling, not fading - over. Finished. And here I am – not exactly young anymore, not that old either – standing in the middle of a pretty serious crisis. Everything I know how to do, everything I’ve done for most of my adult life, has just… vanished. I’m a programmer. That’s what I’ve been since I was a kid. It’s what I studied. It’s what I taught. There are three things I love doing, and I’m good at all of them: programming, teaching, and playing...
Maayan slammed his bedroom door shut and flung his backpack onto the floor. “Hello, Maayan. How was your day?” “It sucked,” Maayan muttered. “Jade, play me something decent.” “With pleasure,” Jade answered. The opening chords of Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams immediately filled the room. Maayan managed a small smile and collapsed onto his bed. “Rough day?” Jade asked. Maayan let out an unintelligible groan. “I’m not in the mood for a debrief.” “Sure,” said Jade. “Perhaps a cup of hot chocolate would help?” “And how exactly are you going to make m...
Weekly Contest #350
The story I’m about to tell takes place on Lag BaOmer – an Israeli holiday that, for reasons no adult has ever adequately explained, its main activity boils down to giving children full social permission to play with fire. A lot of fire. Officially, it lasts one night. Unofficially, it begins weeks in advance – because children, as it turns out, are terrible at respecting calendars. Weeks before the actual night, the entire neighborhood would descend into a quiet, organized panic. Kids roamed the streets like tiny, unqualified contractors, ...
Some people go to university to find themselves. I went to the Technion – Israel’s premier technical institute and a world-renowned factory for broken spirits - to lose my hair, my social battery and my fundamental belief in the fundamental laws of physics. If GPA actually stood for ‘Gravely Perplexed Adult’, I would have been a straight A-student. Instead, I spent four years staring at exam papers that looked less like mathematics and more like ancient Chinese curses, written by a very angry person. In that place, scraping a sixty wasn’t a ...
Weekly Contest #349
“Daddy, I want you to help me make a bow,” I told my father when I was five or six. “Sure,” he said, “but what are you going to do with it?” “I going to hunt!” I declared, “I’ll hunt a rabbit.” “A rabbit? Well well, and what will you do with that rabbit?” I hesitated. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “I… I’ll kill it,” I said. “Kill it?” my father looked taken aback. “Why would you want to kill it? The rabbit hasn’t done a thing to you. No, son, I won’t help you kill something just for fun. You must cherish all life. Understood?” *** I sat ...
On one of those gray, rainy days, we were sent marching to the range. We carried pounds of equipment on our backs - and the weight of our own depression, which was probably the heaviest of all. It was Sunday. Or maybe Monday. Either way, it was the beginning of the week. The next weekend felt farther away than the distance to the moon. What am I even talking about - the next weekend? Even the night, even sleep, felt unreachable at this point. Saturday, when we had been home, was too close, and the memory of it hurt. I always ended those pas...
Weekly Contest #348
I felt a weight near my feet, at the end of my bed. At first, I thought it was a dream and slowly opened my eyes. The room was dark - it was the middle of the night. The remnants of the dream still clung to me, and despite the darkness, I could make out a shadowy figure sitting on the edge of the bed, right beside my feet.“Who are you?” I cried, pulling my legs toward me and scrambling backward on the bed. Is it a dream? I wondered, trying to figure out whether I was awake. The figure didn’t move. I turned my head this way and that, trying t...
1. My beautiful girlfriend lay beside me, naked. The full moon cast a silver ribbon of pale light across her delicate, smooth skin, as if gently stroking it. She smelled faintly of salt and something warm, something I almost recognized. Somewhere in the distance music drifted through the air - Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, I think. It doesn’t get more cliché than that, and yet, the moment seemed to welcome it. A whisper of summer slipped in through the open window, cool and weightless, brushing lightly against us. I let my hand wander across...
Weekly Contest #347
1.I felt like my whole world was collapsing. Just six months ago, I was a happy man; now, I’m broken, a shadow of myself. Six months ago, Laura – my girlfriend at the time, and still the only woman I have ever truely loved – sat me down and told me it was over. She said she couldn’t find her feelings for me anymore. The fire that had burned for years had simply gone out, and she couldn’t lie to me, or to herself. She just couldn’t be with me anymore.Since then, I haven’t been able to get over her. She occupied my thoughts relentlessly; It f...
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