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

Posted in Short Story on Apr 4, 2025

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✍️ 94 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...

120 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...

60 likes 62 comments 62
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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...

30 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...

28 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...

26 likes 23 comments 23
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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...

24 likes 18 comments 18
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12.01 a.m.

Weekly Contest #297

A sandy-haired twelve-year-old boy named Crispin Taylor stares in dismay at the dilapidated house. His parents divorced five years ago, and Crispin and his mother now live in a small flat in Guildford, England. His mother, Susan, recently inherited the house from her aunt on the outskirts of town. Her aunt’s father made his fortune manufacturing men’s haberdashery. Susan told Crispin that his great aunt’s name was Beatrice Baines. She never had children, so she would invite Susan, several other cousins, and a few of the neighbor’s child...

20 likes 3 comments 3
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Tuesday, 2:27 PM

Weekly Contest #297

The cursor blinked. And blinked. And blinked again.Nothing came out.It was 2:27 PM.Josh leaned back slightly. The chair creaked in the same way it always did – that dry, tired groan of something that had supported him for too long. It was one of those office chairs he’d bought from Ikea’s website during a week of aggressive discounts. The product name said satin graphite finish, which sounded serious, grown-up. A chair a successful man might sit in. At least, that’s what he liked to believe.Barefoot, he wore a pair of grey sweatpants, baggy ...

19 likes 9 comments 9
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~ Time As We Know It ~

Weekly Contest #297

~ Time As We Know It ~Two armed and Human looking Hybrid mercenaries from Deep Creek ran through the darkness of a tunnel deep under the Earth’s crust. An unusual sight in the Bloworld, as most called it. Massive shouldered Cap’n Dick moved effortlessly in spite of his stout limbs and rotund belly. His fit, hard, Grandson Jimmy, ran alongside carrying their crippled Drachonian guide piggybacked, a Lizard Man named Glocken of the Corca Achte Clan.Surface dwellers with their imperialistic convictions, hegemonic caste systems and penchant for w...

16 likes 2 comments 2
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Thirteen

Weekly Contest #297

[TW-this story discusses psychological manipulation by a trusted source] The Amazing Dr. M Dr. Mieczyslawski, or Dr. M. as he was generally called, was deep in his own thoughts when he bumped into Nurse Bailey as he rounded a corner on the hospital floor. He was early for his shift, but had wanted to stop in and see how Angelinamarie Carter was doing before he had office hours. Technically, she wasn’t his patient anymore. But he still made time to check up on her progress. When she was first admitted, there was nary a day that went by that...

16 likes 8 comments 8
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10:45 am or The Time that Thing I feared to Happen Finally Happened

Weekly Contest #297

I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s every teacher’s biggest fear…well, after school shootings and such. For 21 years, I managed to avoid it though I knew it was only a matter of time. What are the odds that it never happened? There had been a couple of close calls, but each time a student had covered for me. For that, I will forever be grateful.I was thirty when I started teaching. Older than most new teachers but still youngish and fresh. I was much more slender and cared more about my appearance. I wore makeup daily and would’ve bee...

14 likes 3 comments 3
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4 Minutes to Say Goodbye

Weekly Contest #297

1st MinuteI hear the slow hum of the machines before I see you.Your hand is colder than I remember. But I hold it anyway, because it still feels like home.I don’t know how I made it into this room without falling apart. Maybe I already did—in the hallway, when the nurse quietly said, “You’ll have four minutes. Take your time.”Four minutes.I sit beside you, even though you don’t move. Your chest rises only because the machine says so. Tubes run across your face, stealing away the warmth I once knew like the back of my hand.“Noah,” I whisper, ...

13 likes 0 comments 0
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Dawn Rises at Midnight

Weekly Contest #297

As the midnight of their lives closed in on Harry and his high school buddies at their 50th reunion they mapped out a plan to come up to the plate one more time in a stick ball game like those that had highlighted almost every afternoon in their teens. Harry recalled how he used to step menacingly up to the manhole cover with his converted wooden broom handle waiting for Joey or one of his other pals to wind up and let loose with the perfect pitch. Then he would get a real piece of it and send the rubber ball flying down the ...

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22:13

Weekly Contest #297

They were all there. Debbie’s mother was there, Debbie’s sister was there, Debbie’s uncles and aunts were there. They were all having a celebration of some sort, when just like that they were gone, and Debbie found herself back at the office, doing the menial work of stuffing envelopes with foreclosure notices. It was never a choice of hers to work there, but until something good came along, she needed to keep herself afloat.She was snacking away at some Durian chips and staring at a giant pile of letters that seemed to never end, when her c...

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Three Days

Weekly Contest #297

I walked into the bathroom and saw his toothbrush standing in the glass by the side of the sink. I had bought it for him on the third day and left it there waiting for him. He had never used it. It mocked me with its newness, its immaculate bristles, its untouched purple handle. But I did not move it. I just left it there, alone and idle, in the glass by the side of the sink. It had all been so fast, so bewilderingly odd, and I was still counting days. The day we met, the day we touched, the day we said goodbye. I didn’t want to think...

11 likes 2 comments 2
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