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#176 Magic in the Air

Do you feel that? That almost imperceptible shift you can’t quite place?


Maybe it’s magic. Forces at work right under our noses. Powers we just don’t have the senses to detect — outside what scientists call our “umwelt,” or the slice of the world we’re able to see, hear, and feel.


This week, let your stories be guided by this question: what if, alongside things like electrical fields and infrared waves, there are magical forces in the world that we just can’t perceive?

🥇 Winner

I Knew Better

Winner of Weekly Contest #176 🏆

As a child, I would hide in the coat closet, taking advantage of the door that wouldn’t close, as I watched my mother command the items around the house to do her bidding with the smallest gesture. The moment she heard a sound, the items would set themselves down as if they hadn’t been acting of their own accord just moments earlier. My father would come home and rant and rave about more and more witches being discovered in town. My mother would nod her head politely in agreement, but I knew her secret.  Whenever the ladies in town wou...

229 likes 103 comments 103
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⭐️ Shortlisted

A Letter From Mosby

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

To Whom It May Concern,My name is Mosby and I’m a dog—or more specifically—I am a miniature schnauzer and I need your help. I’ve never written a letter before. In fact, I don’t know if any dog has ever written a letter before, but you see, this is very important so I hope you'll understand.Before I go into specifics, I guess I should tell you a little about myself. I was born in 2011, two days before Halloween, on a farm in central Virginia. I don’t remember much about the farm because that was a long time ago and I was really young at the t...

63 likes 52 comments 52
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Beyond Words

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

A bell chimes above her as Katy pushes open the old wooden door that leads into Silo’s Books and Curios. She had finally found the small, almost invisible, shop tucked in between a craft store to its right and a health food store to its left. It would have been easy to walk by had you not been expressly looking for it, as Katy had been.  Ding, Ding. Katy looks up at the sound, surprised to see not a brass shopkeeper’s bell, but two silver bells that look as though they have just been cut from Santa’s sleigh. The crystal-clear ringin...

49 likes 32 comments 32
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Opening Geraldine's

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

Carla inserted her skeleton key into the keyhole, turned it, and heard the unlocking of the bookshop’s door. When she pushed it open, the bell on the other side of it jingled its welcome tune into the stillness of Geraldine’s Books and Bits Bookshop.Carla inhaled the shop’s sleepy aroma, a mixture of must and ambrosia, her mascaraed eyes gleaming excitedly through her bright red cat-eye-framed glasses. “Hello, my dears! Good morning, good morning!” she sang her dark crimson lips into a wide smile. “How was your weekend?”A quiet creak weakly ...

38 likes 50 comments 50
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Buyer's Remorse

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

A good magician never reveals their secrets. But, today as I lie in my deathbed, I am prepared to tell you mine.             As a child, I took things more literally than most. My mother once asked me if the man in the moon stole a shoe I lost at a friend’s house. I peered at the full moon that night, searching for this unknown “man”. Never found him. When I was five years old, I heard my uncle tell my mother that it was “raining cats and dogs”. I wanted a puppy so bad that I ran ou...

25 likes 25 comments 25
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Suffer to Sip

S N

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

Of course, it would be painful. My mother has often said that life is not a playground of fairness, and this has served to ground me at every turn. If I have ever wanted anything, especially as much as I want this, it has come at a cost. Discomfort is a fact of life. Watching the girl across from me, hand in bowl and inattentive to the small pink cup next to her, I wait as her pudgy hands plunge in for another hollow round. Will this torture ever end? Just as I think she is about to pull out and slowly devour her last sweet smelling, pea siz...

19 likes 16 comments 16
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With Care

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

You treat me with such care. When you’re on the stage, you’re nothing short of magical. A miracle worker with a smart suit and astronomic cape. By your side, a bar table and suitcase, caked with assorted gimmicks and uncanny knickknacks. Within your pockets, decks of cards and technicolour handkerchiefs all knotted together into a centipede of fantastical origin. Atop of you, tucked snugly beneath and within your patented top hat, sits your humble assistant. I’m quite small. I usually have good balance. I don’t have fingers or claws or...

18 likes 20 comments 20
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May My Wing Send You Free

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

I know he can always sense me nearby. If that was the last remaining work of Longwei or simply the fact that Ung had always been a little too smart for his own good, I did not know. I can say, though, that when he walks home from school alone and the ripples in the pond nearby shiver, he knows that I am flying fast, and I can say that when the branches shake above his head, he knows that I am flying free. And so what matters most is that Ung knows he is not lost because I am his echo. I am what comes after. I am the wind. I am his birdcall. ...

18 likes 9 comments 9
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This week's prompts

Write a story involving a magical potion — which may or may not work.

– 58 stories

Start your story with someone witnessing magic from a hiding place.

– 50 stories

Cast a magician (a real one, or a party entertainer) as your story’s protagonist.

– 24 stories

Write a story told from the point of view of an animal.

– 48 stories

Set your story in a magical bookshop.

– 45 stories

Stories

I Knew Better

Winner of Weekly Contest #176 🏆

As a child, I would hide in the coat closet, taking advantage of the door that wouldn’t close, as I watched my mother command the items around the house to do her bidding with the smallest gesture. The moment she heard a sound, the items would set themselves down as if they hadn’t been acting of their own accord just moments earlier. My father would come home and rant and rave about more and more witches being discovered in town. My mother would nod her head politely in agreement, but I knew her secret.  Whenever the ladies in town wou...

229 likes 103 comments 103
Read story

A Letter From Mosby

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

To Whom It May Concern,My name is Mosby and I’m a dog—or more specifically—I am a miniature schnauzer and I need your help. I’ve never written a letter before. In fact, I don’t know if any dog has ever written a letter before, but you see, this is very important so I hope you'll understand.Before I go into specifics, I guess I should tell you a little about myself. I was born in 2011, two days before Halloween, on a farm in central Virginia. I don’t remember much about the farm because that was a long time ago and I was really young at the t...

63 likes 52 comments 52
Read story

Beyond Words

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

A bell chimes above her as Katy pushes open the old wooden door that leads into Silo’s Books and Curios. She had finally found the small, almost invisible, shop tucked in between a craft store to its right and a health food store to its left. It would have been easy to walk by had you not been expressly looking for it, as Katy had been.  Ding, Ding. Katy looks up at the sound, surprised to see not a brass shopkeeper’s bell, but two silver bells that look as though they have just been cut from Santa’s sleigh. The crystal-clear ringin...

49 likes 32 comments 32
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The Essence

Weekly Contest #176

Birth Moon reared its head over Black Mountain. It waxed nearly full as pale light spilled down the steep ridges, creeping among the dark forest. Wan light managed to flash in the cat's eyes, like a beacon turning on and off. Fearing discovery, the animal darted into dense, blooming laurel covering the mountainside.The feline slunk down the slope toward the cabin. It took a shortcut through low, thick brambles, heavy with ripening blackberries, seeking further cover. A rabbit flitted from the tangled thicket, fleeing the cat's ominous p...

48 likes 49 comments 49
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Rural Route 12: Biblical Tarot for Dummies

Weekly Contest #176

SENSITIVITY WARNING: The odds of a lightning strike are -- and I cannot stress this enough -- astronomical due to the sacrilegious content of this story.~~~Buying myself a deck of “Biblical Tarot” cards this Christmas may have been a little tone-deaf, in retrospect: it turns out that the Bible thumpers hate the Tarot nutjobs, and vice-versa, thus making it near-impossible to find anyone who will agree to sit for a reading in order to help me practice the occult.Fortunately, my next-door neighbors have questionable morals, a lot of time on th...

41 likes 71 comments 71
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Blood of the Wolf

Weekly Contest #176

They followed Agatha into the woods, with the last light of summer warding them from the threat of September. Nina endlessly ran her tongue along her new braces, still unable to get used to their feel. Rick huffed as he shambled, balancing the awkward one-legged wooden table under one arm, and the big brass bowl under the other. Dennis frowned and kept glancing over his shoulder, certain he had heard rustling in the foliage. Katie hugged herself and shivered, even though it was still warm enough to be called a warm day.And Agatha marched wit...

40 likes 50 comments 50
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Opening Geraldine's

Shortlisted for Contest #176 ⭐️

Carla inserted her skeleton key into the keyhole, turned it, and heard the unlocking of the bookshop’s door. When she pushed it open, the bell on the other side of it jingled its welcome tune into the stillness of Geraldine’s Books and Bits Bookshop.Carla inhaled the shop’s sleepy aroma, a mixture of must and ambrosia, her mascaraed eyes gleaming excitedly through her bright red cat-eye-framed glasses. “Hello, my dears! Good morning, good morning!” she sang her dark crimson lips into a wide smile. “How was your weekend?”A quiet creak weakly ...

38 likes 50 comments 50
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Monsters of New Madrid: Event 149

Weekly Contest #176

[The Exhort's back story can be found at https://blog.reedsy.com/short-story/rohzpj/]On shore, it looked like an enormous, dirty gray tarp, discarded and collapsed onto itself. The muddy waters of the Mississippi lapped at its edges, stiffening them in the ice-cold January current and causing steam to rise from the unholy-looking flesh. Hiding behind a nearby pier, Cole Miles -- who knew what it was -- urgently whispered to his younger brother, Jarod, “Go get Mom. Hurry!”Upon arrival, Lily Miles surveyed the detritus that had washed ashore. ...

38 likes 42 comments 42
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My New Mom Has a Moustache

Weekly Contest #176

My new mom has a moustache. He calls me by my old name Charlie and feeds me out of purple-coloured pouches.I don’t want to relive the trip along with my brother in a cage to this new house. I just sleep on the upper edge of the sofa on my old mom’s t-shirt. The new sights, smells, and spaces are a bit overwhelming but I am trying to fit in. My brother who is hiding in one of the lofts right now could never fit in though. He made his escape within a week of arriving here and left my new mom in guilt-ridden grief. For a while.My new mom is a f...

34 likes 34 comments 34
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A King, His Brother, His Wife, A Potion, and An Evil Plan

Weekly Contest #176

Palace intrigue has always fascinated me, but ultimately, there's no way to verify the veracity of the stories. Did King Arthur really exist? Lancelot? We'll never know. But one summer, I learned of a story of palace intrigue that was as true and real as anything you have ever known. And far more morbid. I'm here to tell it to you… My family visited India for two weeks last summer. We stayed in one of the family houses, called Machli House. My parents spent their days visiting relatives, reliving their childhood memories,...

32 likes 11 comments 11
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Friday Dinner Date

Weekly Contest #176

My tail taps against the perfume bottles on the dresser as I watch Zaya’s latest conquest. In his business suit he looks out of place in our dimly lit apartment full of hip antique furniture. He’s perched on the edge of the bed. “You want me to give you ten thousand dollars?” he says, shaking his head. “I’ve worked weeks as a database administrator to save that much. I’ll have to cancel my trip to Austin.”“If you want to see me again, Luis.”“This is ridiculous,” he says, his eyes full of anger. They usually need to pass through this sta...

32 likes 34 comments 34
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The Rabbits of Burrow Mound

Weekly Contest #176

The blade felt lightly balanced as he held it firmly in his mouth. It had a sweet, airy taste to it. Kip saw the haunches of his opponent tense. He leaped to the left just as the flying ball of fur came towards him and flicked his blade out to the side. ‘Got you!’ grinned Kip as he spat out the piece of grass and rolled to a halt. One of his ears flopped over his eyes and then flipped back up, alert. ‘Two-nil, I win this time!’ A rabbit with mischievous eyes and large brown paws looked back at him. He was sitting on his rear-end and...

31 likes 27 comments 27
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The Emporium of Dreams

Weekly Contest #176

John Flounder woke with a start from the most amazing dream. Time was of the essence, he must record his recollections; there wasn’t a second to lose. Groping blindly in the dark, he reached over to the bedside table, knocking his phone onto the floor. With a groan, he leaned over the mattress and rooted through the pile of clothes which he’d discarded last night. No phone, it must have slid under the bed. A piece of paper then. If he was quick, he could hold onto the dream with the strange man and his bulbous eyes; the atmospheric setting, ...

30 likes 35 comments 35
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Anything You Can Imagine

Weekly Contest #176

"I know a magical place where you can see anything you imagine," Jenny stated matter of factly swinging her fire red pony tails from side to side.  "Hmph..." Cason the freckled face boy standing beside her in front of Jack D's Bayside Restaurant replied, "You do have a wild imagination just like everyone says." Cason, outdone with the annoying red haired, pig tailed girl, flipped around and began walking down the sidewalk.  "Where ya going?" Jenny ran to catch up and bounced beside him.  "As far away from you as possib...

30 likes 9 comments 9
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B+Z

Weekly Contest #176

It’s a fact—if you and your lover carve your names into the northern red oak tree behind the gas station on Fifth Avenue, your relationship will last forever. Most people don’t think to try. The few who do are mostly driven by either curiosity or superstition. Compared to the curious ones, the superstitious ones are the more dangerous of the two. They flock to the tree with their utility knives and unhealthy attachment styles, desperate to do whatever it takes to make the object of their obsession stay.Beth sees this happen one summer w...

30 likes 32 comments 32
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