Scroll No More

Imagine that every smartphone in the world suddenly stops working. Write about what happens next.

Dead Air

Write a horror story about a broadcast, recording, phone call, or transmission that should not exist.

No One Remembers It That Way

Write about a memory that you and someone else remember completely differently.

Steal From Yourself

Return to something you wrote years ago and use one idea, image, character, or line from it to create something entirely new.

Not on the Menu

Write about something memorable you ate that you'd never find on a restaurant menu.

Grand Prize Winner in October Challenge

Andres Valdes

Follow The Black Cat

Pint-sized panther paw pats Pink Ladies; prizes plummet: piloerection  Apple orchard tizzy  Salem's look-alike swats premature grounders with her tail  Eastern grey squirrel bounces across golden brown leaves  Omen crouches, clicking her teeth  Placing each paw carefully on mid-autumn's blanket  Whoooosh  Indian Ladder Farm gates swing wide  Distant murmuring, chatterbox children  Approaching underfoot crunching, rolling wagon's creaking moan  Tenderage handclaps— twig SNAPS  9-lifer skedaddles, curling up in an old Maple trunk hollow  Plop, plonk; apple pickers rattle baskets  Off-target Evercrisps thud, roll, settling next to windfalls  Mulch made boozy, new grounders make potent comrades  Wafting intoxication triggers wiggles; in-limbed licorace's nose  Trailing human feet, twin emeralds GLINT  Jean jacket moms hand out plastic bags; tiny hands stretch  Thwack-Thwack-Thwack  One flaps away atop a hard-to-reach branch  Bat out of hell, shadow floof BOLTS



Poets

Winner in October Challenge

Greg Rosenke

October Is A Carry-Out

March is the viewing room in the funeral home

the scent of white lily sprays and regret waft along chestnut walls.

Hovering over saints on prayer cards,



Grand Prize Winner in You Are Here Challenge

The movie and the smoke 

You focus on your eyelashes in the mirror while you apply mascara. It’s a summer day, and you have plans to go watch THE movie of the summer with Mari. She got the tickets because she knows someone who works at the best movie theater in the city. You get your makeup done and change, but you don’t have enough cash to pay Mari.



Fiction

Winner in You Are Here Challenge

Tory Bishop

The Other

You learned the news of Charles’s death on Thursday afternoon. His secretary delivered the blow with the expected indifference you’ve come to know and understand from her. She was the mule that shouldered your weight. The only person in his compact little world he trusted enough to know what you meant to him. You suppose that after she hung up the phone, she reared back in her chair and kicked her little feet like a giddy child to be rid of you. Her indifference wasn’t what bothered you, of course, it was the abruptness of it all. The great finale of his heart as he walked with a to-go club sandwich from Loeb Boathouse through Central Park. She said  she thought you would want to know , and then there you were—left to digest this in the middle of your immaculate living room in the midday sun. You gnawed at a fresh manicure and tried to imagine a man as robust as Charles in a lifeless state, but you couldn’t.



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