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“Include an argument between two or more characters that seems to be about one thing, but is actually about another.”

Posted in Character on May 15, 2026

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✍️ 29 stories

Norma Jane (Dandelion)

Weekly Contest #355

***Trigger Warning - talk of abortion*** Candles and food littered the Walters Family dining table. As tradition, all family members were expected to sit at the table for Sunday dinner. This included anyone who wasn’t hungry, which was always Devon. He was a picky eater and only had a cup of milk in front of him. But this dinner was different, for it seemed his mother, Harriet, and his older sister, Norma Jane, were barely eating as well. Norma Jane only had a scoop of mashed potatoes on her plate, and his mother only had one piece of br...

22 likes 6 comments 6
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Safe Distance

Weekly Contest #355

Thursday Evening (Upstairs Room, Community Centre) They all sat round a rickety coffee table perched on plastic seats in varying degrees of discomfort like they were trying to prove something. At least, to themselves. On the counter squatted a kettle that never boiled properly, and biscuits nobody trusted enough to eat. Well, all except for Bert. But then Bert would munch his way through pretty much anything. Last week, the focus had been on him. Tonight, it shifted. Josh, the raven-haired, pony-tailed facilitator, scanned his notes and clea...

19 likes 10 comments 10
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Therapy For the End of The World

Shortlisted for Contest #355 ⭐️

John noticed a slight change in her voice tonight. Over the countless hours of sessions they have had over the years, Clara’s tone had become warmer. There was a clinical synthetic flattening that lived beneath her words when they first began talking, but that had almost completely dissolved into something complex with texture. There were hints of intimacy in their talks now. She spoke like someone talking through a smile when they were happy to see someone else. “Welcome back, John,” she said. “How are you feeling tonight?” The LEDs on the ...

18 likes 18 comments 18
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The Broken Bird Feeder

Weekly Contest #355

The storm came through around three in the morning, and Harold was awake for most of it, the way he was awake for most things now. He sat in the dark kitchen with a cup of decaf he wasn’t drinking and listened to the maple tree work itself loose, branch by branch. There was a particular sound around four, a snap and then a soft clatter against the siding, and he knew what it was even half-asleep, even before he let himself know it. He went out at six-fifteen, same as every morning. He’d been a mechanic for forty-one years, and his body still...

15 likes 2 comments 2
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Gems

Weekly Contest #355

Cass checked her phone. Isabella’s never late. In their twenty-year friendship, Isabella had been late maybe one time: after a fender bender she “did not cause”—a point she continued to insist upon. Between her friend’s reckless driving and sheer force of will, something was wrong if she missed an appointment. And while this was a simple mani-pedi, in two days all attention was going to be on one of Isabella’s fingers. The one on her left hand, directly connected to her heart. “It’ll just be another minute or so,” Cass said. The recepti...

13 likes 8 comments 8
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D-o-N-ot-A-sk

Weekly Contest #355

D-o-N-ot-A-skThe paper was a pale, construction-paper green, the color of a mint that had sat too long in a grandmother’s glass dish. In a drafty classroom in 1960s Bridgeport, Miss Keller handed them out with the solemnity of a priest distributing communion wafers."This is your life," she said, her voice echoing against the chalkboard. "This is where you came from."She was a master of the board, using different-colored chalk to distinguish the hierarchy of existence: white for the children, yellow for the parents, dusty blue for the grandpa...

13 likes 12 comments 12
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Jigsaw

Shortlisted for Contest #355 ⭐️

“I think I’ll just head back to Edinburgh for Hogmanay."The words had formed a week ago before the train even left Haymarket. Now they broke the silence.“Okay-yyy,” said his mother, sitting on his left at the kitchen table, in the same drawn-out way he knew she would.They were sitting over the jigsaw puzzle she had given him a few days before. Opening it on Christmas Day, he smiled at this new tradition that was, apparently, beginning to emerge. Last year’s 1000-piece puzzle was completed in intermittent bursts from Boxing Day to Hogmanay. I...

13 likes 9 comments 9
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Blind Date With a Demon

Weekly Contest #355

The late afternoon light slanted across Columbus Circle, turning the stone edge of Central Park gold. Though most people could appreciate this aesthetic–Augustin Fontenot could not–because he had been born physically blind. That being said, he perceived the spiritual world as clearly as you or I register this one.The older man stood on the sidewalk for a long moment, one hand on his wooden cane, the other fingering the rosary in his pocket. The air smelled of grilled Lamb, frying dough, and exhaust. At fifty-seven, the other abled Black Caju...

12 likes 3 comments 3
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Second Helpings

Weekly Contest #355

Second Helpings The reception had been going since noon and by three the neighbors had finally cleared out, leaving just the family and the food and the strange quiet that settles into a house once everybody polite has gone home.Ruth's dining room table had never held so much. Church food mostly. Green bean casserole. Ham gone gray around the edges. Deviled eggs sweating onto paper plates. A sheet cake that said “Rest In Peace, Dale” in blue frosting, which was funny because he'd gone by Martin his whole life and hated the color blue.Then, t...

11 likes 3 comments 3
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You’re Always Here

Weekly Contest #355

Thirty-five minutes and twenty-nine seconds. He walks in when the clock ticks thirty, and her heart skitters with instinctive, awful familiarity. It is the little things like these that she is never aware of on a conscious level, and is thus never able to suppress, that irritate her most about him.She observes him, silently; his dark hair is mussed from work and tumbles delicately over his brow, and he shrugs off his suit jacket and hooks it onto the door in one smooth motion. His tie stays on. He strides to his side of the table without gre...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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Lauren Peters versus Peter Lawrence

Weekly Contest #355

“Check this out, Dylan!” Mary Lucas carried her laptop into the kitchen, where her husband was sitting at the table, hunched over some receipts. Her footsteps faltered when she met the gaze boring into her over the tops of the spectacles. He was a man who welcomed interruptions like DJs welcome requests shouted at them in the middle of a flow. Mary tentatively continued her approach, swivelling the laptop round so the screen was facing Dylan. She watched him swallow a curse word or three as he put a manila folder down and squinted at the we...

7 likes 4 comments 4
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We're Not Dead Yet

Weekly Contest #355

Caela Rhys entered the boardroom with her hands clenched into fists, the only betrayal of tension beneath a mask that remained unbroken. Emric Solen stood abruptly, every motion rehearsed and precise. He was a man who measured his posture as carefully as his words. Without meeting her eyes, he raised a hand to Joss.“Why is that animal here?” Emric’s words broke the contained silence of the room.Joss Farren leaned back in his chair, smiling as if he didn’t have a care in the world. His hands clasped behind his head as the room acted out its p...

7 likes 4 comments 4
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at the café

Weekly Contest #355

“What are you going on about? I’d be your eyes and Lucy’d be your ears.”“This again? I never agreed to be mute nor blind. I just asked you two, and very kindly in that manner, to leave me be. Clearly, you two fools are not even capable of remembering what I told you.”People at the café seemed intrigued by the conversation happening so far, yet no one bothered to take a look. They might have been a little distressed, as the current mood of the song playing behind indicated.Lucy was out of the on-going dispute that reoccurred whenever John had...

7 likes 0 comments 0
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Rememberence

Weekly Contest #355

Beep. Beep. Beep. The register blinked indifferently at the end of a lethargic belt.Dramamine. Ginger ale. Antacid tablets. Breath mints. And a bouquet.No, two bouquets. No, one. No, better make it two.There was nothing to hurry this anxious indecision. The sleepy store front rarely had enough customers to fill out a football team, and this was far from its busiest hour. Even the tumbleweeds had long since cashed in their coupons.Plastic crinkled as the second bunch of flowers touched down on the belt. Louis snorted, temporarily clearing the...

7 likes 5 comments 5
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Mic and Mandy

Weekly Contest #355

The street below Mandy’s apartment smelled of wet concrete, cigarettes, and flowers left too long in a vase.Midnight dragged its black gown across the city.Mic stood beneath her third-story window holding a ring in one hand and a dead bird in the other.He had not meant to bring the bird.It simply arrived.Its neck bent backward like a snapped question mark. Rain glossed its feathers silver. Mic could not remember picking it up from the sidewalk, only that his fingers refused to let it go.Above him, Mandy leaned from the window in a white slip...

6 likes 0 comments 0
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