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Weekly Contest #372
I had checked in the car, but the car was a sitting check. You could have everything where it belonged sitting down and then stand up and introduce a completely different set of circumstances. “Go on,” I told Ruth. “I'll be right there.” She looked at my hand. “Please,” she said. “I'm getting my phone.” “Your phone's on the dashboard.” Our daughter was already outside, holding the casserole her mother had insisted on bringing. There was no meal at the funeral home. I'd explained this twice. Ruth said somebody would eat it, which was how she ...
I was raised by women who had survived love. They told us this while feeding us, while cleaning the nursery, while removing bits of shell from the soft places beneath our jaws. My mother had survived it once. Grandmother had survived it four times and considered herself qualified to speak on almost anything. I used to lie awake beneath my mother's chin, watching her gills open. Between them and the dark I had a narrow strip of water to myself. If she rolled, I moved with her. She could do this without waking. One night I asked where my fathe...
Weekly Contest #366
I am Maxillaris the Third, by right of birth and ferocity Lord of the Eastern Gravel, Keeper of the Sunken Colonnade, and Sovereign of all waters within the Curved Glass. My ancestors swam in rivers I have never seen but remember in my blood. My fins are the imperial purple of a thousand generations of conquerors. When I unfurl them, the very light bends in deference. I tell you this so that you understand the magnitude of what I have lost. In the beginning—and I mean the beginning, the first cold memory of my reign—the world was simple and ...
Weekly Contest #364
Okay, so — sorry, one second, this door sticks something awful, you kind of have to hip-check it right at the bottom, there you go, see, I keep telling Facilities about it and they keep saying it's on the list, and I keep telling them the list has been the same length since I started, which, between you and me, has been a while. Come on in. Watch the step, there's a little lip there nobody ever fixed either. So! Welcome to Suite 665. I'm Lillian, I'll be your onboarding buddy for today, and probably for the next little while, honestly, unti...
Weekly Contest #323
TO: Julian Slate Investigations Desk The New York Times 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018 Dear Mr. Slate, You’ve been asking the right questions about the '80s. You sense that something was wrong, that the culture felt managed, that the dissent felt… safe. You’re right. My name doesn’t matter. I was a mid-level analyst in a program that officially never existed. My title was Emotional Modeler. My job was to help build a firebreak for a nation on the verge of burning down. We weren't politicians; we were engineers of the American spirit...
Weekly Contest #320
The network learned caution from the Great Scorch, a lesson written in ash by the Council of Hubris. In their pride, they used a great asset to fuel a spectacular bloom. The Harvesters saw their crimson city not as life, but as a weed to be sterilized with liquid fire, burning half the network to a sterile crust. The survivors learned a simple truth from the screams of their brothers: the surface is a ceiling, and some ceilings are best left unbroken. The ashes of that memory still season the substrate, a cautionary tale pulsing through th...
Weekly Contest #313
The knock was precise, insistent, yet strangely soft. It wasn’t the aggressive thud of a vacuum cleaner salesman, nor the tentative tap of a child selling cookies. This was the knock of quiet authority, of a man who knew he belonged on your porch, as if by invitation. Mrs. Henderson, a woman perpetually encased in her starched apron, her life a meticulous parade of predictable routines, peered through the peephole. A man stood there, impeccably dressed in a pristine white suit, a wide, beatific smile stretching across his face, radiating an ...
The sun dipped low over Harlem, casting long shadows against the boarded-up windows of the Collyer brownstone. Nobody had seen Langley or Homer in weeks, but that wasn’t unusual. The neighbors had learned to ignore the reclusive brothers years ago. What could you say about two men who lived in a house bursting at the seams with newspapers, broken appliances, and God only knew what else? Some whispered that the brothers were rich eccentrics; others thought they were mad. Everyone agreed on one thing: the house was as impenetrable as a fortres...
Weekly Contest #284
Cliff Daniels loved order. As a veteran IRS agent, his greatest joy was the smooth clicking of a calculator and the neat, satisfying rows of balanced accounts. He wasn’t popular at the office—“by-the-book Cliff” didn’t make friends easily—but that didn’t bother him. He believed in the system, in fairness, in everyone paying their share. So when Doris Thompson’s case landed on his desk, Cliff approached it with the same precision he applied to every audit. Doris, an eighty-year-old widow, had been making payments to the IRS for decades. The p...
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