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Situate your character in a hostile or dangerous environment.

Posted in Dramatic on Mar 28, 2025

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✍️ 81 stories

Carts

Submitted to Contest #296

The storm breaks. Day dawns. Visibility returns. I find myself secured to the prisoner before me, nestled up inside them, so close. Last night no other companion was pushed into me, but that is not the blessing it might seem. It means I am exposed. Vulnerable at the back of the line. Available to be taken by the first.Unsafe. Unprotected. Pristine.Pristine?Could that be what they think of me? The other Rollers. I have no way of communicating with my fellow slaves so I don’t know what they call me in their thoughts. Like they don’t know what ...

38 likes 35 comments 35
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The Girl They Used to Call "Bitch"

Submitted to Contest #296

The Girl They Used to Call ‘Bitch’One night after dark, my phone rings from an unknown caller. We are eating dinner around the family table, just me and the kids; my husband is working. New in the area and seeing it’s a local number, I take the call. An angry voice, a woman’s voice, is accusing my kids of meddling with her mailbox. It’s on speaker, and the kids hear the rancor. I look them each in the eye, eyebrows raised with apprehension. It just doesn’t seem like them, and they return my look, bewildered.The one-sided harangue continues f...

30 likes 19 comments 19
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Banquet of the Ashes

Submitted to Contest #296

Grey Scarum's whiskers twitched involuntarily with the excitable smell that drifted into his nostrils. He hadn’t eaten in a day and a half, and the pangs of early starvation were triggering his survival instinct. He approached the smell with the heightened sense of caution he’d developed since he’d been in the big shelter. The other mice had warned him of the dangers of exposing yourself in this place. Despite it being sheltered, dry and with no direct view of the sky or threat of swooping talons, other, larger creatures roamed during the da...

20 likes 10 comments 10
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A prickly situation

Submitted to Contest #296

Meeting the prisoner on death row caused my skin to prickle as if a porcupine had walked over me. ‘Take a deep breath. It doesn’t matter what horrendous crime has been committed and she now resides in this hideous jail. She is still a human being with a soul and deserves dignity as her death approaches.’ I told myself. At first her voice was shrill and as sharp as barbed wire; as we talked of ordinary things her tone became less prickly. She must have felt comfortable with me because she asked me to call her by her inmate nickname “Old Shazz...

19 likes 1 comment 1
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Dragons Aren't Real

Submitted to Contest #296

The forest sounded off with birds calling to each other, as I strolled along the path from the trail head to the waterfall. I could hear the falls rumbling as I grew closer. It was over a mile from the trail head to the falls and I had stopped about three times to catch my breath.The doctor had warned me about over exertion and today was an over exertion kind of day. My heart was pounding out a bass beat that would be the envy of most rock bands. I stopped once again and found a boulder that was perfect for a long rest.I dropped onto the bou...

19 likes 19 comments 19
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The Moscow Gamble

Submitted to Contest #296

"A man who counts only his losses has already lost everything worth counting." — O.B. Moscow, winter 1928. Four months had passed since Odessa's salt-tinged air had filled Ostap Bender's lungs. Now, the biting cold of Russia's capital snapped at his heels as he hurried down Tverskaya Street, collar pulled high against the wind. The Ottoman gold from the warehouse heist was long gone—some to Nadia, some to his crew, and the rest had slipped through his fingers like water, spent on train tickets, bribes, and enough vodka to briefly warm the ho...

16 likes 1 comment 1
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Search of identity

Submitted to Contest #296

Is was a dark and gloomy night, where nothing could be heard except the whistling wind from the windows echoing names—there I was. I saw them, but they never saw me. Loneliness showed no mercy when I heard them, but they never heard me. The feeling of someone calling my name and the brief, intense joy before realizing it wasn’t real—there I was, in the dark, cold night. The night had always felt like a second skin to me, wrapping around my existence like a cloak. There was a strange comfort in the silence, in the way the darkness embraced ev...

15 likes 3 comments 3
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Against the Current (Idaho Territory - 1885)

Submitted to Contest #296

The boy was nine and his father was dead. Abe found him by the rocks where the trail turned north, his face streaked with dried tears and dirt."Got a name?" Abe shifted the Sharpe's in the crook of his arm. He kept his distance, letting his voice do the reaching."Nick."Abe studied the lengthening shadows. The temperature would drop twenty degrees once the sun slipped behind the ridgeline. He could backtrack to Boise, maybe make Warren, but either way that was three weeks of walking, no way he would last. He just didn't have the strength. "I ...

14 likes 10 comments 10
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The Exiled Arises

Submitted to Contest #296

Temera didn't expect the war against the Hive to turn out like this. She had hoped that by fighting in this war that her honor would be restored, and she would be able to return as a redeemed warrior of the Narkelegen tribe that cast her out. She had lost in a battle against her twin sister, Ocura, a battle that decided the successor to the Nebulosa tribe's leader, their father Uropter. Now the war was ended not by victory from either the Empire or the Hive, but by the harbingers of the plague of the Morphians. Ghost-white mudskippers with t...

13 likes 0 comments 0
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~ Game Changer ~

Submitted to Contest #296

~ Game Changer ~It was, so far in my petty, pitiful life, the worst day yet. George Washington Carver Middle School let me out six days earlier. I finished the ninth grade somehow and was not looking forward to entering Menchville High School next year. If I could figure out how to survive my Dad’s reaction, I would just drop out. I know Middle School years work different now but this was back in 1978. Each afternoon since the so called graduation, I had spent waiting for the Mailman and rifling through his deliveries. Today I found what I w...

12 likes 6 comments 6
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2 months

Submitted to Contest #296

This story does have some offensive language in it. It might be triggering."It is the judgment of this court that the young male child be taken from the mother and sent to live with the uncle so that a he can have a strong, stable father figure."The words hit like a backhand across the face as young Eric tried to process what his mother was telling him. Tears stung at his eyes while he stood there in the school office while other children watched with a mixture of curiosity and fear.Eric could hear the trembling in his mother's voice on the ...

12 likes 2 comments 2
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Crossing the Threshold

Submitted to Contest #296

The scent of simmering curry hit me the moment I walked through the front door. My wife Emma always seemed to know when to remove the lid from the saucepan just before I opened the door. A wireless speaker played melancholy rock from a popular band in the 1990s, while my daughter Sarah sat the length of the sofa with her toes poking up on the other side as she sketched a dark and gritty version of a lasagna loving cat, transforming the cheerful cartoon into a brooding, almost menacing figure. I stopped at the coat rack to take off my hat and...

11 likes 4 comments 4
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Freedom’s Howl

Submitted to Contest #296

The Great Black Wolf moved silently through the shadows of the plains, his body lean from days without food. The once-abundant forests and mountains, teeming with life, now echoed with an eerie silence. His golden eyes, sharp as the edge of a blade, scanned the horizon for prey, but the land offered nothing. The hunt had been long, and his pack was weary.As the moon rose, bathing the land in silver light, the wolf came upon a figure cloaked in darkness. The man stood still, like a withered tree against the wind, his face hidden beneath the h...

11 likes 3 comments 3
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Camping Trip

Submitted to Contest #296

Caleb has never been camping until today. He wasn’t much of an outdoorsy kid. He found comfort on the couch with his controllers in his hands. He found train models soothing and knew every single dinosaur known to man. He wrote the story for his comic books, while his only two friends drew them. He wore prescription glasses and wore suspenders instead of belts because it made him think of his grandpa. His grandpa was a quiet but intelligent man. His work as a paleontologist intrigued Caleb and he was determined to follow in the man’s footste...

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to save a life.

Submitted to Contest #296

The door slammed open, shattering the apothecary’s peaceful silence. It swung wildly on its hinges, groaning in protest. Nephele straightened from hunching over a table of half prepared herbs she had been busy packing away, her plague doctor mask snapping towards the sudden sound.Two men stumbled in. One was barely standing, deathly pale, with dark blood oozing from a gash in his side. His head sagged, barely conscious as he leaned heavily against his companion, who was trembling with panic and near despair. The first man’s leg hung limp beh...

10 likes 4 comments 4
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