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“Your character makes a life-changing decision. What happens next?”

Posted in Character on Jul 31, 2026

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✍️ 34 stories

Purgatory

Weekly Contest #366

IAnthony McKenzie returned from the past expecting the world to fracture. He had changed something enormous—something history should have screamed about. Instead, the present greeted him with the same traffic and the same indifferent sky. It was as if time had watched him interfere, considered the alteration, and quietly declined to acknowledge it.Anthony sat in his parked car long after the engine died, staring at the intersection — gray asphalt, cracked crosswalk, the bakery on the corner with its red awning — like it was a riddle he’d fai...

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The Price of Keeping Things Running

Weekly Contest #366

In January of 1990, the pipes froze in the wall behind Daniel Harper’s office.He knew it before Ralph did.There was a certain silence to frozen plumbing, a missing hum beneath the ordinary sounds of the building. Daniel could hear the difference between a transmission slipping and a torque converter failing before most mechanics had finished describing the problem. He recognized trouble by absence.He shut off the water before the pipe burst.Ralph stood in the doorway wearing an army surplus coat and holding a foam cup of coffee.“You ...

19 likes 6 comments 6
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KICKS

Weekly Contest #366

KICKS!Daniel sat in the corner booth of Frankie’s Diner, a spot chosen because it offered a clear line of sight to both the door and the kitchen. Cracks spiderwebbed across the vinyl, which smelled of spilled coffee and stale grease. It felt comforting in a predictable way. He wore his favorite flannel—a faded green hand-me-down from an uncle he’d only met twice. The fabric felt soft, and the sleeves hung long enough to shroud his hands and the weight of cold metal in his pockets.He gripped a heavy ceramic mug. The coffee inside tasted black...

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Surviving Sunday

Weekly Contest #366

Home was warm, smelling of green tea with honey and ginger.Our Sunday morning family study was winding down. My husband, Nephets, closed his Bible as our three boys scattered, debating who got the last muffin while the dark sky outside promised a historic blizzard."Clear off the table, boys," I said, checking the cabinets. "I'm making a quick run to Midwest Fresh before the roads lock up. Just basic storm supplies—milk, bread, peanut butter.""Get the marshmallow cereal!" the oldest yelled."And Pop-Tarts!" the middle one added."I’m not stocki...

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Coming Down

Weekly Contest #366

There are many ways you can punish yourself to win the favour of God. The Anchorites withdraw to caves and cells under churches and rock on their heels in the dark. On Mount Athos men gather, black robed and silver bearded, in a monastery that threatens to spill from the cliffs into the sea. Some prostrate, some flagellate, some raise limbs to the sky until they wither. We have each settled on our own tastes in abstinence and poverty. We are each keeping a secret book on who is suffering the most. My method is that I stand on a pillar and st...

11 likes 1 comment 1
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Purple Hair

Weekly Contest #366

“Purple?” Her daughter, Melony, didn’t seem convinced by the choice. “Just highlights, not the whole thing.” Rachel huffed. She ran her fingers through her fine graying brown hair. “It’s just that.” Melony swiped through the pictures Rachel saved on Instagram. “I love you with brown hair; what about doing some darker shade?” Rachel snatched her phone back, wondering whether the images she had saved were of real people or AI, and whether her daughter was right: purple would look tacky. “Just say it, you think I’m too old for purple hair.” ...

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Cab Water

Weekly Contest #366

My old friend Mika called me up one night and I cut my thumb on my cracked phone screen trying to answer him.  ‘I’m going to become a cab driver,’ he said.  ‘Oh, really?’ I mumbled. I studied my thumb. It was bleeding slightly. The rain watered it down to a thin, suspicious substance. A few wet droplets of my blood formed under Mika’s name on my screen. He was always telling me about strange ideas he’d had since he graduated from university unemployed. Last time, he was dead set on becoming a journalist, but he struggled to compreh...

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The Autonomy of the Present: Safeguarding Cognitive Momentum

Weekly Contest #366

The grey stone tower inside Julian’s consciousness was constructed from three winters of defensive geometry. It did not exist in the physical world of timber and mortar, yet its weight pressed against his ribs with a density more real than the cedar shingles of his cabin. Every evening, as the light drained from the mountain crevices, the copper bells of his memory chimed. They rang out with the precise timbres of old schoolmasters who had predicted his ruin, former business partners who had tallied his deficits, and the low-valley neighbors...

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Gone

Weekly Contest #366

Gone I don’t know how I’m writing this. I did it. Sold the beach cottage. I’ll miss sitting on my sunlit porch drinking my morning coffee and listening to the surf. I remember when we first heard the telephone pole speakers in town announce “This is a test of the Coastal Outside Warning System - COWS” and the mooing sound started, blaring, repeating, stampeding through the streets as it called us to join the herd and escape a tsunami. So much more creative than the old air raid siren test. Shit, I loved seeing the look on tourist fa...

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Visiting Hours

Weekly Contest #366

She reached for it… But she had one final thing to say first… “Darling, I know that this is probably the absolute worst moment to end things with a speech, but the doctors say that you will not remember this tomorrow, and I have so much that I still want to tell you before I leave. So…let’s start at the very beginning… “I’m still so happy we grew up on the same block as kids. My parents moved to that neighbourhood when I was very young, but I still remember that your family was the kindest one to us. You were a little older than me and I mus...

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Ember

Weekly Contest #366

The final chapter has been read, the many moments of joy, the many moments of sadness. These characters went through a lot in the span of three-hundred pages. The choices they made, and the final decision that led to it all to be their destiny. It’s a book that made Sammy feel things once again that weren't from just smoking. To end the book’s moment, he closes it, puts it down, finishes off the last of the cigarette, and flicks it into the grass of his backyard. He’s done that many times before, even during the summer when his yard was brow...

8 likes 1 comment 1
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The Death of the Immortals

Weekly Contest #366

Your time is coming soon, Arkyn, he had said. His visit was strange. Unannounced, unwelcome, and the first of its kind. I laughed, and who could blame me? After passing millenia in the blink of an eye while the mortals in the growing, glowing, bright cities built of man-made stone and glass could hardly last a century. Death’s domain was in those cities, not in our heavenly home.  Your ignorance, he had said when I laughed, is the beginning of your end, Arkyn. Your time is coming soon. By the time I finished laughing and asked what he h...

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Uh-oh

Weekly Contest #366

For a moment, I thought his head might actually begin to spin. He was propped against the headboard, his broken foot elevated on a lopsided stack of pillows, a law school textbook spread open across his lap. The room was quiet except for the low hum of the air conditioner. I had only come in to tell him that my mother and sisters were driving up for a visit. He said he needed the apartment quiet so he could study. I told him we were going out and wouldn’t be staying there. They were coming anyway. That was all it took. His face changed so qu...

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Nine at Ledger Street

Weekly Contest #366

The first person Nera Vale put in her household was a man whose surname she had misspelled for eleven years. Egan Terne, the Palace Cinema’s former projectionist, had slept behind its torn screen since the projector fire, but sleeping somewhere and residing there were different conditions in the relocation manual. Nera restored the final e in his surname, ticked RESIDENT, and watched the number beside UNPLACED fall from eight to seven. Outside the registry windows, people were carrying taped suitcases uphill to the ferry road. The island aut...

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A Desire for a Life Change

Weekly Contest #366

          A Desire for a Life Change I looked into the shaving mirror, staring at the initial reflection of my face. I turned sideways to examine my profile. Yes, I thought, I do have a slightly effeminate look.I had an older sister, and I always imagined she lived in a world considerably more appealing than mine. She could continually change her appearance. At her disposal were different makeups, false eyelashes, a whole battery of wigs with textures and colors that brightened the day, and—I...

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