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Write about someone who returns as an adult to a place they last visited as a child.

Posted in Adults on Oct 26, 2022

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✍️ 83 stories

The Tree

Winner of Contest #11 🏆

It’s a Monday morning and they’re cutting down the tree in the park by my house. It’s a sturdy oak, younger but taller than all the other trees around it. There was a storm last night, a storm worse than any in my memory. I guess the tree was struck by lightning. It’s split straight down the middle, the half farther from my view cleaved away, the half closer to my house still stretching towards the sun. *** I met you when we were five years old. I was running around in the park by my house when I tripped and fell. My knee was scraped and hur...

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The Dolphin held by Chains

Submitted to Contest #11

“Happy birthday,” chuckled Katy with her usual grin, only a million times wider.“So, your eleven! Oh darling…” Mama cried, tears in her eyes.“Good old days,” commented dear Aunt Beth.The little girl stumbled towards her presents, dizzy from all the excitement, and eager for what was up ahead…“Happy birthday,” whispered Miria to herself. She traced over the long-forgotten words that had been carved onto the old oak tree.Miria trembled, and felt uneasy. The place was different now. The table which all the presents had once stood grandly on, th...

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Metal, darkness and blood

Submitted to Contest #11

Rolling my shoulders painfully whilst the tension cracked like popcorn in a pan. The pressure was on. I needed to make it to the end, or I’d just be a sore loser, I needed to beat him to stand out. I wanted fame‘n’publicity; I craved for it. My thoughts bounced back as if it were a tennis play out, with 0-5. The grip I had on the metal bar was penetrable and understanding. Being tied down was not the best of options but I had to grab his fist and haul him over with enough strength to please the judges. This is my big break. With a sharp hiss...

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Santa Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Submitted to Contest #11

Everyone has a special place that defined their childhood--a place of many happy memories.Anyone who grew up in Rochester NY from the 60's to the 90's knows about Midtown Plaza. It was the first indoor mall in the U.S. Many children growing up in Rochester have been to Midtown at Christmas time to Santa on Magic Mountain and ride the Monorail--a miniature train that was suspended from a track that circled the second floor of the mall. The mall had an open layout. Most of the restaurants were on the second floor. There weren't many and it did...

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Lila

Submitted to Contest #11

“Hurry up, mommy! We gotta find that beach!”“Why should we hurry, my dear? We’ve got the whole day!” I hear myself laughing."Yeah, but we need to spend the whole day there instead of wasting our time on finding it."  I so truly and deeply admire my daughter for being such an ambitious and unbending young lady. She reminds me of Lila.We half–walk, half–run, through the maze of trees and rocks in the Big Mountain. The last time I was here, there was no forest at all. A wildfire had destroyed the whole ecosystem. But I remember how Mr...

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A trip to the beach

Submitted to Contest #11

The sky was grey, the choppy ocean waves a mirror. The man sat, staring longingly out at that blanket of chaos wishing with all his heart to be feeling the salt on his skin, the caress of the foam and the sand between his toes. Beside him the boy fidgeted, unimpressed by the scene and eager to move on. Two pairs of eyes, grey as the stormy sky and crashing waves glimpsed the magnificence of nature for a shared instant before the younger’s pair dropped to his phone screen.“Why have you dragged us down here dad?” asked the boy. The sigh that c...

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Even Princesses Wear Black

Submitted to Contest #11

Hazel waits patiently on her small princess bed, having already chosen a book for her parents to read to her. She can only understand a few of the words in the title considering the fact that she’s just in Kindergarten. But the little girl, based off the book cover, knows for sure that it’ll be a fairy tale, her all time favorite type of story.As she looks around her room, wiggling her toes underneath her pink blanket, the time on her castle clock catches her eye. It reads 8:30 P.M, making Hazel furrow her eyebrows. Her parents are never lat...

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This Battered Room

Submitted to Contest #11

It is weird being back here, after so many years. And on the other side of it, as it were. Not that there are supposed to be sides in family counselling, but there always are aren’t there? After all these years, sitting back in this room brings home how utterly badly I failed. The only promise I’d made to myself as a kid was to never be like my parents, and here I was inflicting the exact same traumas on my own child. The councillor walks in, and I have to remind myself that I’m not a child this time. “Mr Peters,” the woman says as she puts ...

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Perspective of Age

Submitted to Contest #11

Visiting my old grammar school neighborhood recently, caused me to puzzle again about why I got the treatment and taunting from my friends that I endured. As I slowly drove past the well preserved and remodeled homes, some looked the same as I remembered from sixty-five years ago. Some houses were gone and replaced with million-dollar mansions. My old home looked smaller than I remembered. The perspective of age, I suppose. It was my fourth or fifth-grade year that has pained me for so long as to why. Why would my friends treat me like that?...

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Lost

Submitted to Contest #11

Home. Yes. That is what I had once called this place, the place I now call Hong Kong. The buildings are all too familiar, that comforting, warm, and humid air settling over me like a blanket. Everything is the same. Yet so different. The streets are full of children, with markets scattered everywhere. Clothing stores and food markets cover every inch of the sidewalk. The motorcycles speed past me, as the honking cars rush in front of me, just barely missing my face. The environment, the liveliness, I was once a part of it. I was once a puzzl...

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Grandma's fence

Submitted to Contest #11

Receiving news of a death in the family can be the most paralysing thing ever to be experienced by anyone in this lifetime. When they called my cell phone to inform me of grandma’s passing, I literally hung up on them twice. It probably was the sudden shock to the body. She was my superhero. She gave the biggest bear hugs. She often would cover me in prayer. Till today,  I owe some of my victories to her. In her presence, I knew I could get away with almost anything. The truth is, I was spoilt rotten. Before sending me off to school, sh...

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Return to Silversea

Submitted to Contest #11

RETURN TO SILVERSEAI have returned to Silversea, after twenty years. I’m tempted to call it a whim, but it’s a whim that’s been germinating for years, and I knew in the end I’d do it. It’s easy to say it’s some trip down Memory Lane before I go to live abroad, but at the moment, at least, the job in France is only temporary and even if it turns out otherwise it’s hardly a million miles away and I’ll be coming home to visit, so it’s not the last chance in my life I’ll have to come back to Silversea. But it perhaps was...

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The Things They Take

Submitted to Contest #11

The door was unlocked when I reached it, behind the tall grass and tangled vines. Well… Unlocked isn’t the word. It was hanging open. The storm door was gone altogether. I stepped through it into the kitchen. The ceiling tiles had started coming down. That figures. They had been stained from a leak even when I lived here. Good God… I Lived here. It was a lifetime ago. At least one man’s life. I sighed into the empty air. There was no one with me. No one to speak to. No one to grieve to. No one to care. The refrigerator we hadn...

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The Waterfall

Submitted to Contest #11

It was June and my kids had just taken a vacation from school.  We were going through a very hot month in California, it was the warmest in recent years. I saw a lot of news about people who were very sick with the heat wave that hit the West Coast of the United States. I still had to work in the office but I was still worried about such a heat wave that was hurting everyone. I was appalled at how hot heat could make people sick. We have sickened the planet and now we...

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Pale grey dot

Submitted to Contest #11

“I never thought I’d see this,” Eric said as the grey, pockmarked surface drew nearer.Nell focused on the panel in front of her. “Mission control, this is Muninn. Our altitude is seventeen hundred and thirteen metres. Confirm descent trajectory.”“Trajectory confirmed.” Lena’s voice was loud and clear over the com system. “What’s the view like?”Five high-resolution cameras were mounted on the outside of the Muninn module. The images were displayed on small screens inside, and no doubt on dozens of full-size ones at mission control. Still, the...

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