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“Center your story around someone who has been working for years toward something others have stopped believing in.”

Posted in Character on Jun 5, 2026

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✍️ 36 stories

The Martini Effect

Weekly Contest #358

Several times a year, divers go missing trying to visit the underwater Megalithic complex in Yonaguni Island. Dr Nobuo Kimura, however, was unfazed by the risk: he has been diving these waters since the ancient structure was first discovered in the mid-eighties. He painstakingly mapped the pyramid-like monolith entirely from memory before any resistivity imaging scanner was even invented. The only aspect of the submerged ruin left to discover was its deep subterranean chambers, below the foundation… Well, at least Dr Kimura was the only one ...

32 likes 19 comments 19
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A Record-Breaking Winter

Shortlisted for Contest #358 ⭐️

“Did you see this week’s weather report, Don?”Don kept his head down as he wiped off the bar, knowing only one person in town would sound that chipper at the promise of freezing temperatures. He sighed and silently cursed winter for coming earlier every year.“I sure did, Ronnie.”Don looked up as Ronnie took his place atop a barstool with a schoolboy grin stretched across his chapped lips. Don placed Ronnie’s beer down in front of him and looked at the door, wishing for another patron to walk in and become the new target of Ronnie’s rantings....

21 likes 14 comments 14
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The Road that Keeps Us

Weekly Contest #358

The recorder button engaged with a metallic click. The cassette reel began to spin, pulling the magnetic tape beneath the device’s red light. Road dust drifted through the window cracks and settled over my notebooks, coating the phonetic transcriptions. Esther coughed. The dry sound scraped her throat and echoed through the room, blending with the steady rattle of wind against the corrugated zinc roof. She raised the aluminum mug to her lips, took a sip of water, and resumed her story.Cold water—that’s how I would log the entry later in my f...

18 likes 13 comments 13
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The Repair

Weekly Contest #358

The violin had survived three countries, two oceans, and twenty years. It did not survive falling off a chair. Mateo stood very still and looked at the two pieces of it on the concrete floor of the maintenance room, and for a moment he could not make his mind do anything at all. A jagged crack had split the body nearly in half. One of the f-holes had torn. The bridge lay a few feet away, where it had skidded. Tomorrow was the competition. Tomorrow was the thing that wasn't supposed to be possible for someone like him — the reason he had spen...

13 likes 4 comments 4
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Herb Garden

Weekly Contest #358

I have been trying to grow my own herbs, but they keep dying. Everyone says it’s so easy to grow herbs, but not for me. Sometimes they make it for a little while, tiny leaves reaching for the sky, but soon they dry out and fold over, exasperated by their short lives. I’ve tried everything, I’ve read everything. All the books and the blogs and the apps. I tried different climates, different soils. But nothing works, as if they are insisting not to live. It all started because I went to a friend’s house upstate, and was intoxicated by the smel...

12 likes 4 comments 4
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Of Monsters and Men

Weekly Contest #358

“I’m telling you, Marsha!” the old man spluttered, pushing his walker across the hardwood floors. “I’ve dedicated my life to searching for answers and they all point me in the same direction!” The small orderly walking behind him smiled softly, taking care to pull the IV pole closer with each step he took. “And just what would that be, sir?” “They’re real,” he ground out, shuffling along the side of his bed before dropping down onto the plush mattress. “And just who might they be?” Marsha teased lightly. The elderly Mr Richards grunted softl...

11 likes 0 comments 0
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My grandfather from the east.

Weekly Contest #358

There are moments in life when a stranger says something so simple, so unguarded, that it rearranges your understanding of yourself. I have worked with charitable organizations for many years. Through that work, I have met people from different countries, different faiths, different languages — yet all carrying the same invisible weight: the need to belong somewhere safe. No matter our race, nationality, or religion, we remain fragile creatures beneath our practiced strength. However independent we appear, we survive through one another. One...

10 likes 4 comments 4
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Midnight Oil

Weekly Contest #358

A holoscreen shed a pale light on Kori’s eyes, burning the edges. She rubbed tears away and concentrated, but the image still buzzed. She stood and her legs went stiff, so she walked out of her cubicle to retain feeling. Most of the lights were off, a neon billboard shading the space pink. Kori lifted a bowl of ramen from her desk, sipping the flavor. It was her only companion on these long nights. She kept a stash beneath her desk, a little secret. She walked to the windows, rain blurring the color of the night. A roar sounded...

10 likes 4 comments 4
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Project Persephone

Weekly Contest #358

By all accounts, the suite of Clarity Shawn's high rise building is…decadent.It would have to be, given its status as one of the nicest luxury apartments in New York City. Lavish, clean, well maintained, with all new appliances, every amenity, and the city at her fingertips.Its everything she ever wanted - her own space, her freedom. Luxury and style.And yet…it was so very far from what it was on paper.Currently, the space looked as if it was inhabited by a couple, if that couple happened to be comprised of a strung-out rock-star and a dooms...

10 likes 1 comment 1
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Macarena 2.0

Weekly Contest #358

On the morning of my fiftieth birthday, I woke up believing I was about to change the world.Not the whole world.I am not insane.Just the world of group dancing.Which, depending on the wedding, cruise ship, bar mitzvah, office holiday party, or minor league baseball seventh-inning stretch, is still a considerable portion of the world.I sat at my kitchen table in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, drinking coffee from a mug my daughter had bought me that said "WORLD'S OKAYEST DAD," and reviewing the final notes for Macarena 2.0.Rachel gave me the mug wh...

10 likes 2 comments 2
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The Half-Life of Certainty

Weekly Contest #358

The document was a shipping manifest, and Maren Lowe had been staring at it for eleven minutes.She knew because the clock on the break room microwave had a stuck second hand that still showed minutes, and she had developed the habit of glancing at it whenever she surfaced from something. Eleven minutes on a shipping manifest. Her paralegal, Jillian, had slid it under her office door three days ago with a Post-it reading might be nothing in Jillian's apologetic cursive, which meant Jillian thought it was something.Maren pulled the paper close...

10 likes 0 comments 0
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Star Flower

Weekly Contest #358

Luana bent over the latest row, feeling the arid wind strip away the moisture from the protectant gel on her exposed skin. Sighing, she dug her hands into the gray soil, gently making a bowl large enough to transplant the newest star flower. As with previous plantings, the flower is just past the sprout stage with a fresh bud beginning to form - ready to grow strong roots into the dying soil. Once the remaining five flowers are planted carefully by hand, Luana heads over to the hover cart bobbing gently nearby, waiting to be pulled back to t...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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What Stars Know

Weekly Contest #358

It’s a clear and quiet night when Margaret steps onto the deck in her slippers. Quiet is, of course, the modus operandi of Pleasant Ridge Neighbourhood Development and Conservation Area, thanks to the HOA’s quick intervention into such nuisances as barking dogs, and children, and talking, and whispering, as noise might disrupt someone’s outdoor floor meditation or game of golf. But not tonight, where there is only soft wind through suburban corridors of new builds and streetlights. Margaret walks straight through their gleam on her way acros...

9 likes 0 comments 0
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Not Just a Birthday Text

Weekly Contest #358

Happy birthday, Sara <3 Happy birthday, Sara! Happy birthday! Happy birthday! Happy birthday! As I type her name into my phone, five years of unanswered texts stare back at me. Am I really doing this again? How many years can a person send birthday wishes to an estranged cousin before it gets pathetic? The first year, I didn’t really expect a response. Tensions were running high then, and I was away at college, outside of it all. But by year three, I started to feel the pang of humiliation. I questioned my own judgment. I wanted to...

9 likes 5 comments 5
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Get Bent: A Story in Glass

Weekly Contest #358

The light flickers over the tubes of glass strewn all over the work bench, each tube a different length and curvature. Sox was so close to solving it, so close they could feel it. With each attempt the curves had become more pronounced, the glass taking on a strength that gave them hope. Pouring over their notes, analyzing each equation. “I must be missing something, there must be some small error that I can’t find!” A knock at the door breaks Sox’s concentration. Opening the door, Tibby comes through the door. “Sox, what are doing? You were...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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