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Weekly Contest #357
A human smells chicken soup. I smell a symphony — and underneath all of it, her. I can smell the onions softening in butter. The bird that waited three days in the cold before it gave itself to the pot, its bones now seeping their essence into the water. The hand that stirred — dish soap still clinging to it, unable to suppress the sharp smell of minced garlic. It is her soup. Always. I lift my head and breathe her in. My eyes close. My nose knows her better than my eyes ever could. Home lives in her hands — soil and green and the damp of ea...
Weekly Contest #356
Their yurt shimmered on the slope of the green valley, caught in golden light. Beyond it stretched an endless panorama: mountain rock rising from three to seven thousand meters, the air cool and crisp even in summer, fog lingering where the sun could not quite reach. Aigul cooked at the kazan by the fire. The wind carried smoke low across the ground, and the iron held its slow steady heat. The smell of cooked meat and the sound of it sizzling brought seven-year old Erkin circling close, stomach growling beyond what he could bear.Ibek stood s...
Weekly Contest #355
This story depicts war, civilian death, grief, PTSD, and alcoholism. One line references passive suicidal ideation. Based on real events. Names changed. Sirens claimed the air. Every day—several times an hour—the piercing wail rose from a low mechanical hum into a single, unwavering tone. In apartment building 38, on Ivan Franko Street, the sound had become ritual. Life bent around it. Children did homework under it. Old men cursed beneath it. Each impact brought the same thought: not here. For now, they remained alive. Tonight was not that...
Weekly Contest #354
“Why does a cosmonaut need a gun, Papa?” The corner of his father’s mouth rose. He followed Pavel’s gaze back through the museum doors to the display case holding the survival pistol.“How old are you now—eight?” he said playfully.“Eight,” Pavel said with glowing accomplishment.“But why do they need one?”"Ah—I can tell you the real story about why every Soyuz spacecraft has one. Come on, it's beginning to snow."Pavel tilted his face into the snow for a moment, then sneezed. "It tickles my nose," he said, wiping his face on his sleeve. Yosif s...
Weekly Contest #353
Vera had been cataloging the death of things for eleven years. She never used that word in her reports. She wrote things like photosynthetic decline, premature senescence, biosphere instability, or vegetation regime shift—language that kept the data at a distance, language her colleagues and her funding committee in Novosibirsk required. But in the field, alone in the Siberian taiga with her instruments and her notebooks, she allowed herself the accurate word. Death. Her babushka had called this forest Lesovik’s country. The spirit of the ta...
Weekly Contest #352
The pledge took forty‑five seconds. Elias had timed it. He knew this because timing the pledge was the only thought he was permitted to have during it—his mouth moved through the words without choice or consideration: “I commit my perception to the Harmonized Society. I surrender distortion. I embrace dynamic equilibrium. Through clarity, we are one.”Then the screen flickered on. The President had been dead for nineteen years. Elias knew this too, though no one had ever said it aloud. The footage was always the same one minute and forty-thre...
Weekly Contest #351
For Mr. Wiggins, a story’s last line always came first. Everything else had to earn its way toward it.He always wore formal attire, no matter the occasion—even when carrying out his daily garbage—the same rigid formality he brought to his writing, where he finished every story as if it were a moral obligation.He needed to know where things were going before he allowed them to begin. That was the paradigm through which he saw everything.Yet one story, long forgotten and never completed, had been waiting for him all these years.He blew the dus...
Weekly Contest #350
“It’s 5:05 a.m., and I have to pee.” In Skadarlija—the cobbled, bohemian quarter of Belgrade where the air carried food from kitchens and music from open doors, most of it better than anything he had at home—lived an old man named Petar Knežević, who had reached the age where even his boredom had routines.Yes—this is what happens when a man lives long enough, he thought, groaning as his knees and wrists offered their special good‑morning greeting. He sat up with effort. He had every intention of sleeping in, yet his body had other plans. Chi...
Weekly Contest #348
My name is Victor. I repeat it as if it’s the one thing that proves I am still human—that I am still here.Breath still moved through me. I could hear sounds, though they reached me in a water-muffled, distorted type of way. Slowly over an unknown stretch of time—minutes or hours, I could not tell—these senses began to swim back into focus.My mind remained lucid, but my body no longer obeyed. I feel like a hollow ghost sealed inside a concrete shell; the only proof my body is still attached to my brain is the sweat-soaked mattress beneath me....
Weekly Contest #341
Some days, opening his eyes was the hardest thing about life. Dmitry Kaprovitch knew that he was in the winter of his life. Though his body was weak, his mind was thriving and sharp. Lately, he had a hard time reflecting back on his life. His soul had become clouded with remorse. Every time he shut his eyes, he would instantly see his son’s face. As soon as these images popped into his mind, it felt like his heart had been stabbed. That morning, it happened again. Dmitry sighed deeply and looked outside his window. Through that half-broken a...
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