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#297 Tick-Tock

Many of you have probably noticed the clocks changing, marking the start of daylight savings — an annual practice that brings both disorientation and renewal. While we lose an hour of sleep, we also gain longer days filled with more and more light.

This week, let’s write some stories inspired by time and its unpredictable nature. What do we do when time stands still, or when we’re suddenly faced with how quickly it passes?

🥇 Winner

A Quiet Way To Spend Ten Years

Winner of Weekly Contest #297 🏆

On a cool, clear day in late September, I went out for my final cup of tea. There was a place I liked downtown. Yemeni. The girls who worked there wore sleek headscarves printed with bright, abstracted patterns. Sunny spirals that went on for years.Handing them my last ten dollars, I took my tea out for a walk beneath the elms. Joggers raced their dogs into the evening gloom, in a park-turned-arboretum that I remembered from my college days. Tracing the path back to a familiar bench I slung my backpack down and sat. I poured my tea into a th...

121 likes 58 comments 58
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⭐️ Shortlisted

17:33

Shortlisted for Contest #297 ⭐️

Annemarie For the last fifteen years, our town has held a 5K every fall in memory of Marianne Van Cotter, a forty-five-year-old woman who drowned in her own bathtub. It’s ridiculous, really - a grown woman drowning in a bathtub. She bragged about that brand-new luxury tub for a week before it happened, had her husband Silas install it and then paraded her friends upstairs to show it off. Served her right, slipping on the soapy floor on her way into the tub and drowning beneath a sea of lavendar-scented bubbles. But that’s not charitable of m...

29 likes 11 comments 11
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At the Edge of Everything, We Skip Rocks

Shortlisted for Contest #297 ⭐️

Jack listened to his rock skip once, twice, across the lake before sinking into black water—and felt something of himself sink with it.The freezing bite of the water swirling around his bare ankles could almost distract him from Scott beside him, using the torch in his mouth to see by as he sought out smooth rocks. 'Something with a groove,' he always liked to proselytise, 'Y'need that notch for leverage.'There was a pitched, muffled 'ha!' of satisfaction at his left as Scott spotted something suitable. Jack's eyes caught the torch shifting ...

24 likes 15 comments 15
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This week's prompts

Write a story with a number or time in the title.

– 93 stories

Set your story just before midnight or dawn.

– 71 stories

Write a story where someone must make a split-second decision.

– 38 stories

Set your story over the course of a few minutes.

– 61 stories

Write a story that includes the line “What time is it?”

– 69 stories

Stories

A Quiet Way To Spend Ten Years

Winner of Weekly Contest #297 🏆

On a cool, clear day in late September, I went out for my final cup of tea. There was a place I liked downtown. Yemeni. The girls who worked there wore sleek headscarves printed with bright, abstracted patterns. Sunny spirals that went on for years.Handing them my last ten dollars, I took my tea out for a walk beneath the elms. Joggers raced their dogs into the evening gloom, in a park-turned-arboretum that I remembered from my college days. Tracing the path back to a familiar bench I slung my backpack down and sat. I poured my tea into a th...

121 likes 58 comments 58
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Midnight Pretenders

Weekly Contest #297

CW: Allusions to sexAbel, because of you, my favourite time of Saturdays is now midnight. Just a thought of that glorious moment where the clock’s hands stretch to the heavens we’ll both get lost in and the stars twinkling like crystals on ebony silk, and I float through the loop of the work calendar.As if it were written on an agenda, it all unfolds to the most precise of milliseconds. At six o’clock on Fridays, I would race to my room, swipe a perfect winged liner on my lids, and apply scarlet on my lips. An hour later, you would rapt a dr...

63 likes 62 comments 62
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The Cruelest Month

Weekly Contest #297

After the explosion, time ceased to be linear. It collapsed on itself, pulling and forcing everything into a shifting nothingness. The acceptance of time in its original, primordial flow was never questioned. The laid-out sequence, the logical plan of that forward momentum, was an unconscious choice, but perhaps choices are driven by force.Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.There was comfort in its predictability, one that no longer exists. I hunker down in the past only leaving the confines of my bedroom when it is necessary, when it becomes an absolut...

50 likes 31 comments 31
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The last day

Weekly Contest #297

The clock on the wall read 5:10 AM. The dark sky, once a deep navy, gradually lightened, signaling the approach of dawn. Alexander had spent most of his working life as a bus driver, typically starting his shifts before sunrise, especially during the colder months when the days were shorter. He favoured the sunrise over the sunset, probably because it leads into the day instead of the night. However, everything changed when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, which ultimately compelled him to stop working and focus on his treatment. After end...

48 likes 31 comments 31
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The Last Minute

Weekly Contest #297

The clock on the wall had a dead man’s heartbeat—slow, deliberate, and utterly indifferent to the man walking toward it. Victor Laine felt each tick reverberate through his bones, as if the mechanical hands were plucking at the strings of his remaining moments.“Forward,” commanded the guard to his right, voice muffled behind the silver mask that reflected Victor’s own distorted face—eyes too wide, skin too pale, a stranger wearing his features.The corridor stretched before them, pristine white and humming with that peculiar static that seeme...

38 likes 15 comments 15
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Lonely death

Weekly Contest #297

Warning (includes death) I’m lying on my deathbed. The nurse informed me seconds ago. My family isn’t huddled around me, tears soaking their faces. My family isn’t here. They left this earth years ago. You know the saying: your life flashes before your eyes when you're about to die? I always thought it only happened when death was sudden, but my life flashes before my eyes in a way I never expected. It’s like I’m rolling back a tape, to my very first memory, I was three then. I waddle about the room. My parents are out of the house; they lef...

36 likes 14 comments 14
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Dinner for Five

Weekly Contest #297

The steaming kettle whistled on the stovetop and Mallory shuttered, jumping at the sudden sound breaking the noise barrier in her kitchen.Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.The large wall clock clanged back and forth amongst the silence in her apartment, the anxiety in her chest beating with each sounding. It felt as if the ticks and tocks were inside of her heart. However, what was truly in her heart was something much deeper. A secret.Mallory was pregnant.She didn't understand: how could something that so many people find exciting become her own trage...

31 likes 14 comments 14
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Puffle

Weekly Contest #297

A bird must learn to spread its wings, or it will fall like a pebble. Unless it’s a puffin. In which case it might land in a comical heap on the ground or end up in a classic belly flop on the waves. Such antics, combined with a plumage designed for attracting a mate during the Spring months, may be why this colourful auk is sometimes called “the clown of the sea.”Just before midnight, a pair of red-ringed brown eyes peep from a burrow opening set high on an Atlantic clifftop. Belonging to a fledgling puffin named Puffle, they are mesmerised...

31 likes 14 comments 14
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17:33

Shortlisted for Contest #297 ⭐️

Annemarie For the last fifteen years, our town has held a 5K every fall in memory of Marianne Van Cotter, a forty-five-year-old woman who drowned in her own bathtub. It’s ridiculous, really - a grown woman drowning in a bathtub. She bragged about that brand-new luxury tub for a week before it happened, had her husband Silas install it and then paraded her friends upstairs to show it off. Served her right, slipping on the soapy floor on her way into the tub and drowning beneath a sea of lavendar-scented bubbles. But that’s not charitable of m...

29 likes 11 comments 11
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1918

Weekly Contest #297

TW: Contains death1918Bitter, blustery, brutal. The billowy snow never let up all of January and February. Drifts up to the eaves. Wiggly white tunnels burrowed to the outhouses, the hog pens, the chicken coups. Homemade snowshoes were woven to navigate to the neighbors milking barn once the mule couldn't pull the sled through the winter wonderland. The record setting cold cut through the sheepskin coats and crusted the breath on whiskers, eyebrows and hair. Toes tingled in spite of woolen stockings layered in leather boots. Fingers faltered...

27 likes 23 comments 23
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I Am Come Hither to Die

Weekly Contest #297

8am, 17th May 1536The queen’s view was obstructed on all sides by the curtain walls of the White Tower. On the day they executed her brother, she could only hear the teeming crowds, and snippets of speeches, nobly delivered, from the black scaffold.To distract, Mary Z had suggested a game of piquet, a card game for two, which, although popular in France, was little known to England. But the queen’s first card had been the Queen of Swords, and although it hardly served as a prophesy, the game was abandoned without words.‘How long have we been...

27 likes 26 comments 26
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Beggar's Choice

Weekly Contest #297

I’m not supposed to play you this record. You don’t have school tomorrow, but that’s not why. My mother would come into my room on Friday’s before midnight and she’d tell me to go get the record player. I had to set it on the floor, and plug it in. I had to look at the record. She’d make me stare at it. Memorize it. Until I could see the tiny dots that made up the letters. The illustration on the front would move from side to side and I’d think it was going to come to life. I’d imagine the tiger turning real and swallowing me up. When I coul...

27 likes 13 comments 13
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The Wind Reader's Gifts - World Voyages of the Destiny's Dreams

Weekly Contest #297

Anya spoke to the sea and sky. "Sister Dawn, I hear your whisper and I see you getting closer. Will you bring us wind today?""We have been here a long time in these hot days, with the ship' sails waiting for the wind. We are desperate."Anya was the Storyteller of the Blue Lantern, on the wooden sailing ship called Destiny's Dreams, voyaging over the seas in the 1800s.She was born deep in the wilderness, a child of the South American jungles and mountains. There ancient stories passed down by word of mouth carried wisdom and history for her p...

26 likes 21 comments 21
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Just Before Midnight

Weekly Contest #297

The first thing I feel is the weight of the air pressing down on my chest. Not pain - pressure. Like the night itself sat down on me and refused to budge. I open my eyes to the ceiling, waiting to remember who I am, where I am, and why the hell I can't breathe.Then I heard the pipes gurgling. The roof whispering. The walls stretching like old skin. And I know...Ah. Home sweet fucking hell.I must’ve fallen asleep at some point. Could’ve been an hour ago or yesterday morning for all I know. Time is a goddamn riddle in this house. Days blur int...

26 likes 33 comments 33
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A Visit from Time

Weekly Contest #297

Mrs. Snippet slid the porch door open and inhaled the cucumber-cool freshness. Birds sang joyously as the eastern sky shone with the white light of dawn. High above her, the last stars faded. She grasped the railing, and admired her daffodils against the house, nodding with the heavy wetness of dew. How long she had waited for spring!She looked over the field beyond her yard to where a male turkey gobbled, fanning its tail, and strutting its stuff. “Sure sign it’s April,” she said to her dachshund, Rosy, as it nosed around her skirt hem.Over...

25 likes 18 comments 18
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