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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

Write about someone trying to atone for a mistake they’ll never be able to fix.

Posted in Angst on Oct 26, 2022

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✍️ 192 stories

“The Next Day” by James Morris

Submitted to Contest #70

Carol was woken up by the sound of her phone vibrating on the nightstand next to the bed. Her office was asking if she could bring two-dozen donuts in from the bakery on 1st Street. She responds with a simple yes and places the phone back where it was. Carol closes her eyes, hoping to get a few more minutes of sleep. “Who was that?” a voice said from the other side of the bed. Carol’s eyes opened wide, and her mind started to think back to the previous night. “Who is this?” she thought. “Someone is in my bed with me that I have no recoll...

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“this can't be the end” by Susannah Webster

Submitted to Contest #70

Oh. There she is. Standing face to face with Eric is a wide-eyed and snowy-faced girl, her shape hindered by a black graduation robe. He had been about to go looking for his girlfriend, to look all through the lawns and domineering building. Eric knew she didn’t want to be found, but that was exactly why he had to find her in the first place. If Callie hadn’t been avoiding him all week, he wouldn’t have had to do this now. But even with all of Eric’s preparation for this moment, rehearsing in the mirror and making sure his father wouldn’t...

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“The Confession Booth” by Joseph McGrory

Submitted to Contest #70

With an aggressive pneumatic hiss, the train entered the station. I heaved my suitcases off the train and caught my breath on the platform. I looked around and saw someone standing just by the entrance, a well dressed man wearing a tweed suit. As I approached he asked “Mr Johnson?”. I nodded breathlessly and he greeted me warmly, shaking my hand. We went straight to his car and he put my bags into the back. As we drove into the village, he chatted openly. “Its mighty good to meet you Mr Johnson, we’ve been waiting for quite a while for a n...

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“Heartburn, Insomnia, and the Byword for Recklessness” by Sarah Newton

Submitted to Contest #70

Dr Adam Able liked to think that, had his house-cum-hospital possessed a working EKG machine, then Nicolas Pfeiffer may have still been alive. The generous part of him acknowledged that, even if he did have access to the gold standard diagnostic tool for detecting myocardial infarctions, he wouldn’t have had the ability to provide definitive management of such pathology. After all, thanks to the post-apocalyptic world he now lived in, cardiac catheterization labs were as hard to find as the trained interventional cardiologists needed to...

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“A Ghastly Phone Call” by Ayesha Sana

Submitted to Contest #70

I was standing in the balcony of my flat doing my Sunday ritual. Holding a cup of coffee in my hand and watching children play in the park, while the morning breeze whirled through my blue tees and grey trousers which were as old as I could remember. With my eyes still struggling to open completely out of sleep, I started to plan my day. I will check the mails, clean the hall, and that’s enough for a single Sunday. I will cook, eat, sleep and repeat. I finished my coffee and entered the hall, kept the cup on the table and went to fetch my la...

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“"Every Day" by Rachel:)” by Rachel Kabamba

Submitted to Contest #70

trigger warning: mentions of suicide. There are days where I forget what I did, and I feel as if I'm just a normal guy. I feel like I have no responsibilities, happiness, and freedom. But how could I have that, how could I deserve that if I killed her?  Every day I think about the accident and how things could have gone if I wasn't irresponsible if I knew my limits If I hadn't killed her. It was 5 years ago December 19, 2014, when I took her life and I still think about it every day. I was a stupid teen that liked to party; she was j...

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“Solace From my Pen” by Charity Emmanuel

Submitted to Contest #70

We had just finished with family meeting and had started to share the ‘little something’ when Papa showed up. We knew it was him when we heard Mama talk angrily in a loud voice, outside. I hurried out. “If you really want to hear about what happened in there, the first thing you’ll probably do is to stop the time!” She grabbed a popcorn bag roughly from the table in front of her and threw some into her mouth impatiently. “Uhum? You don’t have to chew the popcorns so hard as if they offended you.” Mama couldn’t believe her ears, she squinted,...

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“Love to be meet at heaven” by Jacky Jade

Submitted to Contest #70

Touch of the breeze of the city of Edinburgh can calm and give energy to anyone who feels down. Walking in the Princess garden and feel the comfort of the cold breeze is the best way to recall the old memories of Hanna, who used to be a student at the University of Edinburgh.  Hanna comes from an average family who lives in Nepal. During her university days, she was a bright and very cheerful character, who always wanted to be the best out of the best. She had four girls around her, who always made her life even more beautiful. They w...

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“Where the Fire Dies” by M Nieto

Submitted to Contest #70

When he looked his wife in the face, James wanted nothing more than to settle into her warmth. Her name was Lucille, a name she told him she had adopted shortly before they met. She was dark-haired, brown-skinned, and she had the most beautiful eyes James had ever seen. They were the shade of rain-kissed hickory, so nearly black that he swore the moon reflected off of them, the stars and the planets, too. She was of the Abenaki, she told him, and James told her that he had been born in Ireland, that he had technically been Northern Irish f...

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“The Modern Sisyphus” by Sienna Baker

Submitted to Contest #70

Now This is how it goes. I begin again. I loved her, this much is true, and people will say I didn’t, but I did. Who are they to say that, though, anyway? Everyone defines love how they’ve experienced it. Some definitions are tender, and some are violent, and neither is less worthy of the label. I walk around the dead city. The little rivers and moats which threaded through the walking routes like arteries of the human body; the water held in the modern architecture of the business district fell black under the darkness of night; lifele...

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“Remorse” by Brya Wallace

Submitted to Contest #70

Adrian bestrode atop her supple frame, his hand entangled in her silky ebony hair and he thrust into her. He stared deeply into her sickly green eyes, infected with the look of betrayal, and awash with tears. She bit her bottom lip in an attempt to stop them from flowing freely down her cheeks as she silently pleaded with him to stop. He wanted to, but he didn’t feel in control of his faculties. As he moved to pull away, he instead dislocated himself from his body; floating above and watched his own sweaty, muscular body defile her smaller f...

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“pluto” by Harps Mclean

Submitted to Contest #70

pluto Back then, nobody knew it but every couple of years I would  try to speak.  Only when no one is around-- just to see if I could still shape sounds from the sidewalk chalk outline of my larynx.   But no matter what I would try to say, every inflection was just a garbled question.   I didn't do it well.  It's not like the voices I would hear or the words I read.    There was sound, but I didn't recognize the language.  It was more like a low fidelity recording of a cat's chirrup pawing...

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“Pride, Justice, and Revenge” by Artur Fernandes

Submitted to Contest #70

It was just as she thought. As soon as she became a “prisoner of war”, she knew that her enemy, hiding behind a misplaced sense of “honor” (or perhaps just out of a heavy conscience that he’d never admit), would treat her well and fairly – and so it was. The place she now found herself in wasn’t exactly a luxury inn, but it wasn’t a stereotypical prison cell either, where her best company would surely be common rats. Plus, it wasn’t all that bad being alone – it was remarkably easy for her to just lose herself in her own thoughts, and he...

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“Worth It” by Kathryn Allen

Submitted to Contest #70

      “She needs a liver transplant if she’s going to survive,” Dr. March said, clutching her clipboard to her chest. She wore a worried expression as she delivered the post-op report in the small hospital room. “Mr. and Mrs. Summers, it is extremely unlikely that your daughter will find a donor in time, given the extensive blunt trauma to her liver.”            Kayla Summers heard all this from where she sat at the foot of her sister’s hospital bed. She wat...

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“Curtain fall” by Arjun Prasannan

Submitted to Contest #70

It all began at the age of 18 when I received the first prize for a short story writing competition at Rendezvous, the annual cultural festival of IIT Delhi. I was in my first year of Mechanical Engineering at Delhi Technological University (DTU) then. Being the only female student of my branch, I was noticed by everyone, often by the name of “Mech Queen”. This recognition gave me the additional tag of a writer, and some of them proclaimed I would go places. Yes, they were right. That was the only beginning; the journey from the “M...

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