Lee Disco

“Graduation, Dreams, and Ospreys” by Lee Disco

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #201

TW: LanguageThe living room smells of smoke, cloying ash lodging into my sinuses. The misty heat from outside wafts down the chimney and creates a palpable shift in the temperature around the fireplace—I sit in front of it and press my hands against the wooden floors, noting how the humidity seems to make them dip under my fingertips, makes them soft and waxy.The heat eases the shiver under my skin, cold from the drenched suit, the source of the dripping that rings into the quiet, empty home. I tap a pattern out on the floor, but with my wan...

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“The Wizard of Washington Square” by Lee Disco

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #181

There is a wizard in Washington Square. He wears a billowing cloak, bundled in a pile on his shoulders; he is a tall creature, and with the ebony fabric wrapped up to his ears, he looks even larger. The rest of the cloak drapes down his legs, swaying in fraying threads at his ankles. His jeans—black, too—are too short for him, yielding to gray ankles and ragged shoes. He is pale all over, with skin dead blue pale like a corpse. His hair is like pale wheat in need of a glinting scythe. For all his magic, he must cut it in the dim reflection o...

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“Cold Men” by Lee Disco

Submitted to Contest #177

Today, the mountains were pristine. The snow sat calmly, the white fuzz thinning where the sun struck hot on stone. Many didn’t hike the trails this early in the season—thick ice warded hikers off the treacherous hikes—but that thought drew Silas in even more. The paths would be empty; that meant peace, that he could revel in the quiet the snow offered up on his lonesome. Even the thermos, hanging from a clip on the side of his bag, sounded muted as it softly clanked with each step.  He navigated the path with practiced ease. His eyes s...

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“The Chandelier” by Lee Disco

🏆 Winner of Contest #160

There were gems in the chandelier right past the door of my home. I wasn’t supposed to touch the glimmering stones as they hung, but I would push up a chair and scramble on the rickety wood to brush them with my fingers anyway. It was addictive to paint the lines of my fingerprints along the surface. I would flick on the lights and watch them sway, imagining my mother on the dance floor, conjuring images of date nights when Mama walked out of the house with a black cocktail dress and her best pearls along with the smokey scent of her expensi...

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“Savannah Blues” by Lee Disco

The Talmadge bridge hung halfway between the river and the sky; it sat over the licking waves that carried the larger-than-life steamers into the port, fresh from their oceanic expeditions. Savannah was a city that felt all too big around me, dwarfing my frame as I sat with my knees between my arms on the concrete of the parking lot, leaning against my SUV. It was a creature that glimmered in the heat of August, inhaled hopes and dreams, and exhaled them in a breath that stank of shrimp and motor oil. With each pulse of my heart, it thrummed...

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“The Cove” by Lee Disco

Submitted to Contest #151

McCann had pulled me aside from the cab I had been trying to call. There's something I want to show you, he had said. I had heard the other crew gossiping about him behind his back, eyes mean through folds of cigar smoke. On occasion, raunchy laughter sliced through their hushed voices. They thought he was crazy, with his endless bouts of silence spent staring at the horizon, poking at the wet, dull rope with the knife he always carried with him. And the muttering—he would mutter and moan in the cabin, rocking in his hammock, curled in a b...

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“The Ravine” by Lee Disco

Submitted to Contest #149

It was a cloudy day— the duvet of stratus clouds was so dark and so low that it was like a beast gliding, slow as molasses, over a little town in Iowa. There was a ravine at the edge of it. It stretched and twisted as if groaning with its endless silence, pulling taut whenever a wanderer pulled close enough to see the bottom. And each time, they stumbled back, as if they had seen something beyond ordinary life, beyond the reaches of God. There were no wanderers today. If there were, they might have seen something different than wretched, l...

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“Time to Let Go” by Lee Disco

Submitted to Contest #148

“Why do you still go back there?” “Don’t I pay you to tell me that?” “No. You pay me to listen.” The key slides into the lock with a soft clink, metal hands latching, the warm copper brushing against the cold of the body, hot from where it had been pressed in his hand. Jack sighs as he twists it and shuffles inside. He doesn’t lock the door behind him; he’ll be leaving soon. Inside, the wide window panes hold back the heat of a Manhattan summer, the smell of old rainstorms and wet concrete and slick steel all wrapped up i...

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“Moon and star—two halves of one whole” by Lee Disco

Submitted to Contest #97

Shattered glass litters the floor like light on a dance floor; weeds burst through the concrete of my skin to soak up the light from the gaping holes in my walls. The metal beams of the ceiling are bent and crooked and paint from hundreds of different cans and artists coat every inch of the place, laid on in thick layers overlapping in different pigments and shades and designs.  I have stood in this lot for a long time. Watched as humanity flowed by like salmon swimming upstream in their little dirty jungle of a city, the slums like a ...

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“La Bibliothèque ” by Lee Disco

Submitted to Contest #96

There is a place that is significant to every person, a place that they know as home; For Jonathan’s mother it was her flower bed; she sewed her own comfort along with the seeds, tended to the bruising of her heart with the gentle drops of a copper watering can. For his father, it was his armchair, gaze distorted by the bottom of a brown beer bottle, washing his sorrows down with whatever alcohol he could get his greasy hands on. For his brother it was his car; his companion, his partner for running away from reality when Jonathan refused to...

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