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Organised by
RogerDodger
Word limit
2000–8000
Prizes
The following prizes are courtesy of horizon and Trick Question:
- $25 USD to 1st place
- $15 USD to 2nd place
- $15 USD to 3rd place
- $20 USD to the top placing entrant who has never entered a Writeoff before
A complete detailing of the prizes on offer is here.
Home
There are homes here. Nice homes; not great, but nice. There are roads. They are all straight. Some go from North to South; others go from East to West. The streetlights are spaced a respectable distance apart. They are lighting the roads evenly. The view from a plane makes the community look like kitchen tiles. Or a one color quilt.
Everyone should be asleep now. It is, after all, 3:17AM. There are necessary activities to perform in the morning that require a full night’s rest. There are jobs with black-ink pens, and there are homes with cat hair in the curtains. There are children to pick up from after-school functions.
There is someone who is awake. You can see them, here, barely lit by the streetlight near the driveway. The hair is long, so it must be a woman. If it was daytime, you would see that the color of her robe would be baby blue. The ducklings patterned onto this robe would be bright yellow, with happy cartoon smiles. But it is currently 3:17AM, and the sky is dark, so the robe is black and the smiling ducks look strained.
A cigarette is glowing faintly between her fingers. She exhales strongly, pushing the smoke as far away as she can. The smoke can be seen for an instant, traveling upwards, passing the steady yellow gaze of the streetlamps, and then it vanishes into the night sky. She watches.
Her cigarette is flicked once, twice, and then hurled over the yard and into the road. It sparks brightly upon contact with the pavement, and then disappears. The woman shivers and crosses her arms. The air is warm though, and humid, and there is no wind.
The woman turns towards her residence. She opens her front door with care. She walks through her nice home. It’s not a great home, but it’s nice. In the first floor bathroom, she rinses her mouth with her favorite mouthwash. This brand does a good job masking the nicotine.
She holds her breath and climbs the stairs silently. There is a child behind each door in the hallway. Four doors, sans her own. Her bedroom door is opened with caution. She enters, and her husband is still asleep. She can breathe now.
She approaches her side of the bed. She carefully spreads her weight out across the mattress. The mattress is colder than she had expected.
The clock on her nightstand glows 3:52AM. She knows she won’t fall asleep but she’ll pretend. She’ll “wake up” at 7:05AM when the alarm clock rings and the mattress shifts and she hears her husband groan and swear. She’ll be there when he turns to his side and expects to find her lying on her side with her back facing him. And she will be. As always.
In seventeen days the woman will leave. She will not return home.
The day is Saturday. This particular Saturday afternoon is very pleasant. The air is a bit chilly, but the wind is still warm. It is a perfect day to engage in outdoor activities. Most everyone has chosen to do so, loading their children into their Ford minivans to drive to the playground in the park half a mile away near the elementary school.
There are two who are not spending the day outside. You can see them here, if you peek through the front window, talking to one another in the living room. Here is the woman who owns a patterned duckling robe, and the man who is more familiar with her shoulder blades than her face. But they are not really talking to one another, not really. They are talking around each other. This conversation is a verbal dance; one that increases in intensity the longer it goes on. The steps to this dance are very simple, and they become easier to perform over time. First, each partner grasps one another as viciously as one can grasp. Then together they spin and spin, faster and faster until they hit the walls and break each other’s arms. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
There are four here who are spending the day outside. Unlike the other children on their street, these have not been loaded into a Ford mini-van and shuttled off to the playground half a mile away. They are sitting in the pine tree in the corner of the backyard that they are not supposed to climb because it is dangerous to do so. The tree is an Eastern White Pine. The Iroquois who once used to live here called this a “tree of peace”. To the four, this tree is a foreign world.
Each child is on a different branch, the highest each could reach. There is a girl who is too short to reach the higher branches, much to her frustration, and is relegated to the lower boughs of the pine. She watches the other three with a thoughtful frown on her face. She belongs to the man and the woman. There is a boy and a girl further up the tree. The girl is examining an insect that had been caught in amber sap on the pine’s trunk. The boy is stretching his arms to capture a hanging pinecone for his collection. They are speaking softly to the other, each hoping that the wind won’t carry their words to their home. They both belong to the man. There is another boy, who has grown adept at climbing the tree. He is sitting on the highest branch that can hold his weight. He comes here to dream that he might grow a pair of wings when he gets older, and come to this tree, and jump, and fly until his wings have lost all of their feathers. He belongs to the woman, but definitely not to the man.
No matter how high they climb, each of them hears the sound of their parents dancing.
But for now, it seems this session has ended. It is time to leave the tree, before the man and the woman both catch their breath and realize they don’t know where their children have been for the past few hours, and especially before the man finds them in the forbidden tree.
In seven days the woman will leave.
It is Thursday. It rained a little this morning. The sun came out in the afternoon though, which dried up most of the water. It is evening now, and in the home of the man and the woman, it is quiet. The man who barely glimpses the woman’s face is not home, and is most likely right now commuting from work. This fact mostly contributes to the quiet within the home.
The woman has cooked dinner, and the four children are completing their homework assignments for tomorrow morning. They are working at the dining room table, which is slightly unusual, because at this time, the dining room table would be filled with plates and knives and Batman forks and chicken and green peas and apple juice instead of algebra and earth science and French phrases and times tables. But, the man is not home yet. Probably a lot of traffic on the highway. The woman is now covering the pots and pans of food to keep them from growing cold.
The sun is now much closer to the horizon, and the trickiest of times tables have been long solved. The children are growing bored and hungry. The man is still not home. The woman gives up on waiting and serves the chicken and green peas that have now gone cold. There are complaints from the table concerning the temperature of the food served, but the chef quickly silences these.
The man is still not home. Dinner is now finished.
The plates and knives and forks are placed within the kitchen sink, and the children are excused to do as they please. One of the boys has spread his rock collection along the living room floor, and is meticulously organizing them by geological classification. One of the girls is sitting on the living room floor as well, plugging in the Nintendo Wii she asked for a few Christmas’s ago. The other boy has already grabbed a controller, and is hopping up and down on the couch. The youngest girl doesn’t like video games because she never, ever wins at any video game, ever. She has elected to run loops around the backyard in the dying sunlight, squealing as she pretends to be chased by something in her imagination. The woman is now walking a line back and forth, from the automatic dishwasher in the kitchen to the head of the dining room table and back again.
The man has opened the front door. He has now returned home. The woman hears and walks to the front door where the man is taking off his shoes. It’s not a confrontation, it’s just a question. But even that is enough to begin the latest session. He does not answer her question. Naturally, this leads to more questions, which leads to more not-answers. Now the words are heated to a temperature that is much higher than what had been served at the table earlier. Each exchange sears and burns a little more than the last. The rock collection is organized a little more meticulously. The characters on the television screen try to laugh a little louder.
It’s inevitable. The verbal dance between the man and the woman begin. If only there was a competition to be held for this sort of display. The man and the woman would sweep away any other opponents with ease. This sort of dance is obviously well-practiced and intricate. Both subtle and stark jabs of pain, hints of betrayal and jealousy, and the holes in armor so skillfully pierced with personally crafted, god-awful phrases intended to maim.
At last, with a shout, the dance careens and tumbles into a jumbled silence. Though, this shout was more akin to a shriek than anything. Shouts usually have words. Shrieks are wordless exclamations of terror. Strangely enough, the shriek came from neither the man nor the woman, and originated from a source not within the house. Worryingly, the shriek sounded as though it came from someone who was younger than they. There are three children in the living room. There is one outside.
There she is. Right there, beneath the Eastern White Pine.
It is easier to grasp the situation from an outside perspective. The girl who was too short to reach the higher branches (who belongs to the man) had been told by her school teacher that she had grown a whole inch since last week. With this whole new inch at her disposal, she believed herself tall enough to conquer the branches above her usual lower boughs. She had been correct. She indeed reached those pesky branches and had proceeded to climb higher and higher, up to where she knew her siblings could climb to. This accomplishment excited her. In this giddy excitement, the child had misjudged a crucial factor in her climb: the branches of the tree were still slick from the morning rain and had not dried beneath the afternoon sun. A combination of youthful exuberance, naivety, and the pink rubber soles of her shoes slipping right off a slick pine branch sent her spiraling through the branches. This led to a very long, frightened shriek that ended immediately after her body impacted the ground.
Now, she is lying along the roots of a beautiful Eastern White Pine. Blood is slipping quickly from her head and into the damp ground. Now there is a man, and a woman. For once, they are screaming at something that is not directed towards each other. There are three children standing in the backyard. Most of what happens next passes too quickly for them to comprehend, and then the next image comes and passes right in front of their eyes.
The girl is hanging in the man’s arms. The woman is blubbering uncontrollably, clutching blindly for her child behind two wells of tears. There’s Mr. Canson, and Mrs. Adelaide, and there's Mr. and Mrs. Sikes, the neighbors, running through the backyard. There are different colored lights flashing across the house now. There is a shriek, replaying over and over and over in their minds.
In two days the woman will leave.
It is Friday. The children did not go to school today. Instead, they stayed at the hospital. The hospital smells like cleaning spray, and there are many people in light green aprons rushing through the hallway they’re sitting in. They are sitting in three chairs by a door which leads to where the man and the woman and the girl are. They have been waiting for a very long time.
Finally the man and the woman came out. The man was frowning. He turned to stare back through the doorway he had just passed through. The woman smiled a very strained smile. She leaned down and told the three children that everything would be okay. The woman succeeded in reassuring no one.
It was almost nice, the silence between them all. Grief was usually a great deal quieter than anger. There was nothing anybody needed to say. So the man said something.
Tomorrow he would have the Eastern White Pine cut down.
And of course, now, the children needed to say something too. This tree was a world away from home for the three. A wonderful escape. A place to dream and pretend. All three wholeheartedly disagreed with the man’s declaration.
The boy who belonged to the woman, but definitely not to the man, spoke first. He said no.
The man turned to the boy who was not his own. He repeated the word.
No?
For a long time, the man was a volcano. Yes, there were eruptions, and yes, they caused some damage. The damage wasn’t irreparable. But he was still an active volcano. There was something hot, burning deep within him. It burned all night and all day, simmering and bubbling. Something shifted. The man exploded.
He leaned down and grabbed the boy’s shoulders.
No? No? No?
The boy shook beneath him.
No? No? No?
The woman shouted at him, but the man shook harder.
No? No? No?
It shifted from a question to an exclamation. The man screamed as much as he could muster. His cries bounced through the hallways. They became louder, and longer. He let go of the boy and instead opted to lie on the ground, screaming as though his heart had been ripped away. The children and the woman moved away.
The woman will leave tomorrow.
It is Saturday, and today the Eastern White Pine will be cut down. They will all watch it die slowly. Each limb will be cut off cleanly. The trunk will then be severed in three controlled slices. The remains will be ground into wood chips.
A separation will be good for them now. That is what is best. The man and the woman both agreed. The woman will take her one child, and the man will take his two. There is nothing left between them anyways.
Everyone should be asleep now. It is, after all, 3:17AM. There are necessary activities to perform in the morning that require a full night’s rest. There are jobs with black-ink pens, and there are homes with cat hair in the curtains. There are children to pick up from after-school functions.
There is someone who is awake. You can see them, here, barely lit by the streetlight near the driveway. The hair is long, so it must be a woman. If it was daytime, you would see that the color of her robe would be baby blue. The ducklings patterned onto this robe would be bright yellow, with happy cartoon smiles. But it is currently 3:17AM, and the sky is dark, so the robe is black and the smiling ducks look strained.
A cigarette is glowing faintly between her fingers. She exhales strongly, pushing the smoke as far away as she can. The smoke can be seen for an instant, traveling upwards, passing the steady yellow gaze of the streetlamps, and then it vanishes into the night sky. She watches.
Her cigarette is flicked once, twice, and then hurled over the yard and into the road. It sparks brightly upon contact with the pavement, and then disappears. The woman shivers and crosses her arms. The air is warm though, and humid, and there is no wind.
The woman turns towards her residence. She opens her front door with care. She walks through her nice home. It’s not a great home, but it’s nice. In the first floor bathroom, she rinses her mouth with her favorite mouthwash. This brand does a good job masking the nicotine.
She holds her breath and climbs the stairs silently. There is a child behind each door in the hallway. Four doors, sans her own. Her bedroom door is opened with caution. She enters, and her husband is still asleep. She can breathe now.
She approaches her side of the bed. She carefully spreads her weight out across the mattress. The mattress is colder than she had expected.
The clock on her nightstand glows 3:52AM. She knows she won’t fall asleep but she’ll pretend. She’ll “wake up” at 7:05AM when the alarm clock rings and the mattress shifts and she hears her husband groan and swear. She’ll be there when he turns to his side and expects to find her lying on her side with her back facing him. And she will be. As always.
In seventeen days the woman will leave. She will not return home.
The day is Saturday. This particular Saturday afternoon is very pleasant. The air is a bit chilly, but the wind is still warm. It is a perfect day to engage in outdoor activities. Most everyone has chosen to do so, loading their children into their Ford minivans to drive to the playground in the park half a mile away near the elementary school.
There are two who are not spending the day outside. You can see them here, if you peek through the front window, talking to one another in the living room. Here is the woman who owns a patterned duckling robe, and the man who is more familiar with her shoulder blades than her face. But they are not really talking to one another, not really. They are talking around each other. This conversation is a verbal dance; one that increases in intensity the longer it goes on. The steps to this dance are very simple, and they become easier to perform over time. First, each partner grasps one another as viciously as one can grasp. Then together they spin and spin, faster and faster until they hit the walls and break each other’s arms. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
There are four here who are spending the day outside. Unlike the other children on their street, these have not been loaded into a Ford mini-van and shuttled off to the playground half a mile away. They are sitting in the pine tree in the corner of the backyard that they are not supposed to climb because it is dangerous to do so. The tree is an Eastern White Pine. The Iroquois who once used to live here called this a “tree of peace”. To the four, this tree is a foreign world.
Each child is on a different branch, the highest each could reach. There is a girl who is too short to reach the higher branches, much to her frustration, and is relegated to the lower boughs of the pine. She watches the other three with a thoughtful frown on her face. She belongs to the man and the woman. There is a boy and a girl further up the tree. The girl is examining an insect that had been caught in amber sap on the pine’s trunk. The boy is stretching his arms to capture a hanging pinecone for his collection. They are speaking softly to the other, each hoping that the wind won’t carry their words to their home. They both belong to the man. There is another boy, who has grown adept at climbing the tree. He is sitting on the highest branch that can hold his weight. He comes here to dream that he might grow a pair of wings when he gets older, and come to this tree, and jump, and fly until his wings have lost all of their feathers. He belongs to the woman, but definitely not to the man.
No matter how high they climb, each of them hears the sound of their parents dancing.
But for now, it seems this session has ended. It is time to leave the tree, before the man and the woman both catch their breath and realize they don’t know where their children have been for the past few hours, and especially before the man finds them in the forbidden tree.
In seven days the woman will leave.
It is Thursday. It rained a little this morning. The sun came out in the afternoon though, which dried up most of the water. It is evening now, and in the home of the man and the woman, it is quiet. The man who barely glimpses the woman’s face is not home, and is most likely right now commuting from work. This fact mostly contributes to the quiet within the home.
The woman has cooked dinner, and the four children are completing their homework assignments for tomorrow morning. They are working at the dining room table, which is slightly unusual, because at this time, the dining room table would be filled with plates and knives and Batman forks and chicken and green peas and apple juice instead of algebra and earth science and French phrases and times tables. But, the man is not home yet. Probably a lot of traffic on the highway. The woman is now covering the pots and pans of food to keep them from growing cold.
The sun is now much closer to the horizon, and the trickiest of times tables have been long solved. The children are growing bored and hungry. The man is still not home. The woman gives up on waiting and serves the chicken and green peas that have now gone cold. There are complaints from the table concerning the temperature of the food served, but the chef quickly silences these.
The man is still not home. Dinner is now finished.
The plates and knives and forks are placed within the kitchen sink, and the children are excused to do as they please. One of the boys has spread his rock collection along the living room floor, and is meticulously organizing them by geological classification. One of the girls is sitting on the living room floor as well, plugging in the Nintendo Wii she asked for a few Christmas’s ago. The other boy has already grabbed a controller, and is hopping up and down on the couch. The youngest girl doesn’t like video games because she never, ever wins at any video game, ever. She has elected to run loops around the backyard in the dying sunlight, squealing as she pretends to be chased by something in her imagination. The woman is now walking a line back and forth, from the automatic dishwasher in the kitchen to the head of the dining room table and back again.
The man has opened the front door. He has now returned home. The woman hears and walks to the front door where the man is taking off his shoes. It’s not a confrontation, it’s just a question. But even that is enough to begin the latest session. He does not answer her question. Naturally, this leads to more questions, which leads to more not-answers. Now the words are heated to a temperature that is much higher than what had been served at the table earlier. Each exchange sears and burns a little more than the last. The rock collection is organized a little more meticulously. The characters on the television screen try to laugh a little louder.
It’s inevitable. The verbal dance between the man and the woman begin. If only there was a competition to be held for this sort of display. The man and the woman would sweep away any other opponents with ease. This sort of dance is obviously well-practiced and intricate. Both subtle and stark jabs of pain, hints of betrayal and jealousy, and the holes in armor so skillfully pierced with personally crafted, god-awful phrases intended to maim.
At last, with a shout, the dance careens and tumbles into a jumbled silence. Though, this shout was more akin to a shriek than anything. Shouts usually have words. Shrieks are wordless exclamations of terror. Strangely enough, the shriek came from neither the man nor the woman, and originated from a source not within the house. Worryingly, the shriek sounded as though it came from someone who was younger than they. There are three children in the living room. There is one outside.
There she is. Right there, beneath the Eastern White Pine.
It is easier to grasp the situation from an outside perspective. The girl who was too short to reach the higher branches (who belongs to the man) had been told by her school teacher that she had grown a whole inch since last week. With this whole new inch at her disposal, she believed herself tall enough to conquer the branches above her usual lower boughs. She had been correct. She indeed reached those pesky branches and had proceeded to climb higher and higher, up to where she knew her siblings could climb to. This accomplishment excited her. In this giddy excitement, the child had misjudged a crucial factor in her climb: the branches of the tree were still slick from the morning rain and had not dried beneath the afternoon sun. A combination of youthful exuberance, naivety, and the pink rubber soles of her shoes slipping right off a slick pine branch sent her spiraling through the branches. This led to a very long, frightened shriek that ended immediately after her body impacted the ground.
Now, she is lying along the roots of a beautiful Eastern White Pine. Blood is slipping quickly from her head and into the damp ground. Now there is a man, and a woman. For once, they are screaming at something that is not directed towards each other. There are three children standing in the backyard. Most of what happens next passes too quickly for them to comprehend, and then the next image comes and passes right in front of their eyes.
The girl is hanging in the man’s arms. The woman is blubbering uncontrollably, clutching blindly for her child behind two wells of tears. There’s Mr. Canson, and Mrs. Adelaide, and there's Mr. and Mrs. Sikes, the neighbors, running through the backyard. There are different colored lights flashing across the house now. There is a shriek, replaying over and over and over in their minds.
In two days the woman will leave.
It is Friday. The children did not go to school today. Instead, they stayed at the hospital. The hospital smells like cleaning spray, and there are many people in light green aprons rushing through the hallway they’re sitting in. They are sitting in three chairs by a door which leads to where the man and the woman and the girl are. They have been waiting for a very long time.
Finally the man and the woman came out. The man was frowning. He turned to stare back through the doorway he had just passed through. The woman smiled a very strained smile. She leaned down and told the three children that everything would be okay. The woman succeeded in reassuring no one.
It was almost nice, the silence between them all. Grief was usually a great deal quieter than anger. There was nothing anybody needed to say. So the man said something.
Tomorrow he would have the Eastern White Pine cut down.
And of course, now, the children needed to say something too. This tree was a world away from home for the three. A wonderful escape. A place to dream and pretend. All three wholeheartedly disagreed with the man’s declaration.
The boy who belonged to the woman, but definitely not to the man, spoke first. He said no.
The man turned to the boy who was not his own. He repeated the word.
No?
For a long time, the man was a volcano. Yes, there were eruptions, and yes, they caused some damage. The damage wasn’t irreparable. But he was still an active volcano. There was something hot, burning deep within him. It burned all night and all day, simmering and bubbling. Something shifted. The man exploded.
He leaned down and grabbed the boy’s shoulders.
No? No? No?
The boy shook beneath him.
No? No? No?
The woman shouted at him, but the man shook harder.
No? No? No?
It shifted from a question to an exclamation. The man screamed as much as he could muster. His cries bounced through the hallways. They became louder, and longer. He let go of the boy and instead opted to lie on the ground, screaming as though his heart had been ripped away. The children and the woman moved away.
The woman will leave tomorrow.
It is Saturday, and today the Eastern White Pine will be cut down. They will all watch it die slowly. Each limb will be cut off cleanly. The trunk will then be severed in three controlled slices. The remains will be ground into wood chips.
A separation will be good for them now. That is what is best. The man and the woman both agreed. The woman will take her one child, and the man will take his two. There is nothing left between them anyways.