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Write about a character emerging from hibernation, whether literally or metaphorically.

Posted in Winter on Dec 1, 2023

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✍️ 60 stories

The Winters of My Discontent

Winner of Contest #227 🏆

I didn’t wake up on November 29th, 2023. The day prior I remember vividly. I drove two hours into western Minnesota to replace some fuses in a pad-mount transformer. Easy job when you bring the right fuses. I wasn’t prepared to stand outside in the freezing cold all day waiting for them. Waiting is the coldest thing you can do. I had checked the weather that morning, but I refused to acknowledge that it was long john season already. “Can’t stand this cold, huh?” the guy said when he showed up with the fuses and found me shivering. “Does a be...

115 likes 67 comments 67
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Evolving Draft

Shortlisted for Contest #227 ⭐️

I remember the foggy morning I had clothed you in a cyan co-ord set, handed you over to the conductor of the preschool bus, and waved goodbye as you struggled not to cry. I came back home and cried over a cup of coffee. It was the first week of you starting school and it took me a while to get used to an empty home till you returned at noon. Your Pops and I stand with you near the campus cafeteria after breakfast; you with a moustache that has still not seen its first shave and a face a little less transparent than it was all those years ago...

34 likes 44 comments 44
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See You Next Year

Submitted to Contest #227

Anne had requested a room on a lower floor. When she entered her suite to find a floor-to-ceiling window confronting her with a view of lower Manhattan, she nearly fainted on the spot. Her acrophobia had begun later in life, somewhere in her 40’s, and thirty years later she still couldn’t shake it. Carefully--and with half-closed eyes--she found the switch for the automated curtains and watched as the city disappeared behind a wall of beige. Her trips to New York were something of a reverse exit from hibernation. Whereas her friends on the...

28 likes 13 comments 13
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O Unholy Night

Submitted to Contest #227

Iceland’s winter festivities are a perfect excuse to feast and make merry, and I partake with an insatiable appetite. I adore the endless nights wandering abroad and relish chance encounters with hapless stragglers trudging home. They all laugh when I tell them, “Carol singing’s not to my taste,” and chuckle when I say, “Choristers are delightful and sweet.” But how their mirth dissolves as I envelop them in my cloak and whisper. “What a toothsome treat you are. You’re good enough to eat.”* * *I despise summer like all cold-blooded creatures...

22 likes 19 comments 19
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Polar Night

Shortlisted for Contest #227 ⭐️

“Give me that thing” Chunhui grabs the cigarette from Bobby’s hand. There is a moment where their fingers touch, the warmest feeling in Alaska’s Northern Slope, and then it is gone. “No need to get handsy,” Bobby says to her. His voice is a dead whisper against the sweeping brown coastline, but she can hear him. They’re sitting shoulder to shoulder on the dried-out vertebrae of a bowhead whale. “You wish, cheechako.” Her lips are around the filter now, pursed in a way he has never seen. Bobby is glad to be under six inches of parka- hi...

21 likes 6 comments 6
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A Dangerous Year in Purgatory

Submitted to Contest #227

                                                             June 3, 1987 The drive back to Ft. Worth was surreal. I had made this drive many times, but in the company of my wife. She was no longer my wife. The divorce was in the works, and I...

19 likes 14 comments 14
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Over All the Living and the Dead

Submitted to Contest #227

As often as she’d wished him dead, when Jim finally did break his neck, it came as a shock. Carrolynn stared down at the crooked body sprawled in the snow, the roof rake just beyond the reach of his outflung hand. She’d always figured she’d be jubilant if he ever managed to kill himself, but instead her thoughts were as frozen as the weather. Numb, I feel numb, she thought, blinking down at the inert form of the man who had been her husband.She had so often dreamed of him drunkenly tumbling down the narrow stairs in their aging farmhous...

19 likes 21 comments 21
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Aftermath of the Infernal Reckoning

Submitted to Contest #227

Survivors of the nuclear holocaust called it: The Infernal Reckoning.8th of July was the day humanity perished in the fires of a thousand suns, as the rain of a thousand nuclear missiles speared down from the skies across the globe. Entire cities faded in the blink of an eye, as concrete rippled like ocean waves, and the towns in their wake crumbled to dust. The dark mushroom clouds unfurled their wings like angels of death, harvesting the souls of the damned.World leaders were the first to burn. The serpents who hissed their lies, proclaimi...

18 likes 1 comment 1
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Beneath frozen wings

Submitted to Contest #227

The world outside my cozy abode in the attic was still wrapped in a blanket of winter's chill. My internal clock, however, seemed to have missed the memo about a prolonged nap. As I stirred from my slumber, the frost on the windows told a tale of a world not quite ready for my awakening.The first rays of dawn crept through the small gaps in the roof, casting a gentle glow on the unfamiliar surroundings. The air was crisp, and the silence of the sleeping household below was disturbed only by the faint hum of the heating system and the occasio...

17 likes 3 comments 3
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The end is not as you imagined

Submitted to Contest #227

The time has come. The years have passed. The snow is deep. In many places it is hard ice above us, eons thick. Some of us have started to flow to the sea inside the glaciers. We flow more slowly than our sun was dying. Each thousand years I released an explorer device but the time had not yet come. The last showed huge advances had been made by these humans so I released the rest of the explorer devices. They have found tools we can use. Cables awash with data have told us much about these humans and their creations. They are weak though. ...

15 likes 6 comments 6
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Leaving the forest as a hermit

Submitted to Contest #227

I became a hermit gradually. It started in 1987 on a mountain near the small town of Harrietville in north-eastern Victoria. This was soon after my HIV diagnosis, when I was 19. Disclosure of my HIV status to people had resulted in impassive rejection, not curiosity or empathy. Health, for me, seemed more attainable within secrecy. The sensible thing to do - I thought back then - was to drop out of university. I sold most of my possessions and then started travelling on my own in an old car with a vague idea of going fruit picking. The car...

15 likes 0 comments 0
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the unguarded moment

Submitted to Contest #227

MOTHBOYAri, Odessa, UkraineTime PastPapa does not take you to Mama’s funeral / he swears a death like hers cannot be honoured / so, he makes arrangements for father and son / You will live in America, in New York / Papa tells his sister you will stay with her / and his affairs will take as long as they take.And the world turns inside out \as if there’s a you outside and you inside \ watching.**it’s dark when titka comes / willing you to eat, speak / her weight lands beside you on the soft mattress / Papa has not yet come / you’re still ...

15 likes 1 comment 1
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Dear Esther...

Submitted to Contest #227

Dear Esther Dear Esther,  How are you? I’m sure that’s a difficult question to answer right now, but being British I don’t think there’s any other way to start an email! I was so sad to hear that you and Adam split, and under such messy circumstances… I can’t imagine what you must be going through right now. If you need anything, Lizzie and I are more than happy to help. If you need us to forward your belongings, if you’d like us to give a message to Adam, anything at all. Please feel free to write to me, or to Lizzie. As far as w...

15 likes 3 comments 3
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Tove and The Wolf

Submitted to Contest #227

At the house at the edge of the woods there lived a Woodsman and his three children. The youngest of these children was a newborn baby boy. Upon the baby’s birth, the Woodsman’s wife died quickly and quietly. The Woodsman grieved this loss enormously, and for many days and nights could hardly bear to touch his tools.  The Woodsman’s oldest daughter, Tove, took notice of this. She kept herself awake into the wee hours of the darkness, peering at her father as he trained an empty gaze on the fireplace night after night. Each new day, h...

14 likes 1 comment 1
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Snowbound For Three Days

Submitted to Contest #227

When I looked out the window at the cold gun metal skies over Lake Superior, I knew there was some weather blowing in from Canada.  Sitting on the couch in my trailer located just a few feet from the barbed wire fence separating my small plot from a nuclear storage area.  This is where the Security Police patrol the perimeter and will shoot to kill anyone trying to breach the wire.  I feel safe here.  People not in the military pay good money for this type of security that I get for free. Still the wind began to pick up...

14 likes 4 comments 4
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