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Weekly Contest #294
My father was angry that we had to leave all his napkins behind. Two miles past Quincy with half a tank and no money to get us any further than Burlington, his most pressing concern was going to be what happened to all the napkins he left in the cupboard above the kitchen sink. All hoarders have a worthless item they prefer above all other items--worthless or otherwise. My father’s favorite was a napkin. Any kind of napkin. He collected them the way kids my age at the time collected Pokemon cards. The strange thing about a fixation like this...
Weekly Contest #293
She was telling Sheila all about the divorce. The Goodes and their Bad Divorce. She was pleased with herself. Something had always seemed to Carol to be off about the Goodes. They were all smiles, all laughter, but Carol knew that kind of marriage had its dark side. She and Tony weren’t like that. They didn’t smile or laugh, but they loved each other, and Carol took umbrage with couples who pretended like what they had was so precious when secretly they were dying to get the hell away from each other. That’s why Carol was friends with Sheila...
Weekly Contest #292
I knew it was my mother forging my signature because she signed it in lavender ink. She never failed to have anything useful in her purse the way other mothers did. No band-aids, no snacks, no wet wipes to clean the face of a child who’s just eaten ice cream. Instead, she had little notepads. Six or seven of them filled with ideas written out in illegible handwriting. Long were the nights when she would sit at the kitchen table under a dusty bulb and curse herself for her own sloppy penmanship. Alongside the notepads were lavender pens that ...
Weekly Contest #291
We only have about ten minutes to get him to Everett. Awake, the ride takes forty-five minutes, but we don’t need that long if he’s asleep. I once trained a guy who quit on the third night, because he didn’t like the pliability of it all. The way time wasn’t the only flat circle, but everything. Nothing but circles. Speech, behavior, and emotion--all could bend if you knew which way to pull and how hard. I can get anybody to Everett in twenty, but sometimes you have less than twenty, and that’s when it gets complicated. I showed up at around...
Weekly Contest #290
The first thing I noticed was the improper knot on his tie. He chose a large knot. It doesn’t fit. Every other man at the reception has gone with a small knot, which is appropriate for a lean tie. This tells me that the Best Man has never attended a proper wedding. He has never been to a wedding held by the sea. Where the ocean is in the background as the couple exchange vows. Where the women will wrap shawls around themselves as they make their way inside the very nice hotel for the reception. Where hors d’oeuvres will have cost more than e...
Weekly Contest #289
My father went to work everyday. Every day. Seven days a week. Even on holidays sometimes. Sometimes my mother would yell at him. Sometimes she didn’t bother. He’d ask her if she liked our house. Our nice house in a nice neighborhood on a beautiful island. A paradise. Even if in the winter it felt like a hollowed out stuffed animal. Still fun to look at, but not much to hold. Safety and good schools. I took French lessons. Really, I did. French lessons. Back then, that was all middle class. It didn’t mean you were rich. I never thought we we...
Weekly Contest #288
He sets up the camera on top of a trash can. The lighting is questionable, but he can’t worry about that right now. He knows he can fix certain things with adjustment apps, but bad lighting is more difficult to repair than one might think. These are things he would probably know more about if he was a real photographer, but he’s not. He’s just a guy with a phone and a nice suit that he wants to document. There’s nobody around, because it’s so cold, but the cold is also creating a small window of time to snap the photo. He’s willing to suffer...
Weekly Contest #287
His number one concern was convincing his daughter to quit her job and move back home. His second concern was keeping his dog from passing out, but Scottie was resilient. The terrier insisted on sitting outside even in the winter, but luckily for Mark, there was an unexpected heatwave in the middle of January. It was nearly sixty degrees, and he could comfortably sit at one of the metal tables outside Empire Tea and Coffee in his spring jacket. Scottie was almost sixteen, which meant he was a geriatric canine, and he had a habit of fainting....
Weekly Contest #286
There wasn’t much time to pack. She remembered her mother saying to throw the hamper into a suitcase and that would do. You can wash it when you get there. For the first time in my life, however, she was looking at an empty hamper. She had just done laundry the day before the sirens went off. They would sometimes get a day’s warning before the hurricanes arrive, but not always. This time it was only two hours, and then mandatory evacuation. Standard procedure was to go to the community center up in the hills near the new Price Condominiums, ...
Weekly Contest #285
Inez was hoping to avoid herself for the afternoon. She had only just decided on the baby’s name, and the inner deliberation was more tumultuous than she had anticipated. It was a Sunday, and there was still a soft sheet of snow over most of the town. Inez’s second big decision of the day was to treat herself to a tour of one of the mansions. Like most people who lived in a town that tourists love, she had always promised to do the things that sightseers do, and then never did. One of them was to see the cluster of mansions that were scatter...
Weekly Contest #284
There was a way to love a moving man. Kate couldn’t say she’d ever learned what that way was, but she knew there had to be a technique. After living in New York for most of her twenties, she thought the one bright spot about moving back to her small hometown might be the lack of coming and going. People loved New York, but all the upwardly mobile men she met had their sights set on settling in Europe or Dubai. It wasn’t rare for a guy to take her out, buy her a disgusting drink, and then tell her “New York is over.” She wanted to meet someon...
Weekly Contest #283
I told them that I’d had enough. I am all done being trapped inside a ball as it plummets to the ground all to celebrate some mindless construction of time. I understand the value of ritual. I get the nature of tradition. My family has been involved in New Year’s Eve since the very first celebration. The Windells are, in some ways, the First Family of New Year’s Eve. We were given the burden of sacrificing a little bit of ourselves every year, because when the calendar as we know it was created, we were the ones who thought to make a big dea...
Weekly Contest #282
He shaved on Monday, but never on a Tuesday. If he didn’t shave on Monday, he’d have to wait until the following Monday to pick up the razor. He was a creature of habit. If the habit was disturbed, he punished himself by never rescheduling. Tuesday's tasks were never moved to Wednesday. That was how he trained himself. If he missed, he missed. His hair grew remarkably fast. That meant, if he waited a week, he’d have a beard by the time he could finally shave again. That was why he never missed a Sunday. On Monday, May 13th, Michael shaved a ...
Weekly Contest #281
The gull saw the husband explaining why he didn’t know how to change a tire. He had told his wife on their first date seven years ago that he knew how to change a tire. He crowed about it over linguine at Nino’s Bistro. Somehow, in all those years, neither he nor his wife had ever gotten a flat tire. Now, they were on their way to her mother’s house for a holiday dinner, and the passenger’s side tire was a goner. There was a spare, but the husband didn’t know how to put it on, nor did he have the proper tools. He could have used the tools as...
Weekly Contest #280
“Do I look nice?”She pulls down the front of her dress. When she purchased it, it fit like a dream. Those changing rooms seemed to exist in another universe. Everything was perfect, and then, once home, defects appeared. Love wasn’t trying to show too much cleavage, but she also didn’t want to look like a cloistered nun. Carter was laying on the bed, not dressed yet, on his phone like always. She walked over and pulled the dress down again hoping to catch his attention.“Carter?”“Mmm?”“Your girlfriend is asking you if she looks nice.”He peere...
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