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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

#196: In Another Life

Recently, I’ve been reflecting on the way making a single decision, big or small, can cause your life to fork off in an entirely new direction. There are the obvious crossroads, the big life choices, and then there are the tiny ones; ones we fail to notice are taking place every single day. Waiting at the crosswalk instead of jaywalking, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, spending an extra 10 minutes scrolling through social media — even these non-events can make the difference between a life-altering incident happening, or not happening.


But what if we could access those paths we didn’t take? Would we go back and choose a different route for our lives? What if we could sense those “sliding doors” moments as they happened? This week's prompts are inspired by this classic sci-fi dilemma, and by the coulda, shoulda, woulda’s we all live with every day.

This week's prompts

Write about a character unknowingly experiencing a “sliding doors” moment. Write your story in two halves; what could have been, and what actually happened.

Dramatic – 62 stories

Write a story that includes the phrase “Maybe in another life.”

Dialogue – 74 stories

You’re walking down the street, when you spot a familiar figure. It’s another you. And they’ve come from an alternate reality to warn you about something.

Thriller and Suspense – 32 stories

Write a story involving a portal into a parallel universe.

Science Fiction – 61 stories

Set your story in a world where time travel has been perfected, and people can use it to hop between alternate timelines — but at a cost.

Dystopian – 50 stories

Stories

“Future Gazing” by William Richards

Submitted to Contest #196

“Thank you for coming, please take a seat,” the interviewer said without looking up. I wondered how many people she’d seen today. It was a game of numbers after all. Finding the perfect candidate. You just had to look into enough futures and eventually you get a great match. I sat on the rigid white chair beside her silver desk. She looked at a tablet, shook her head, and dropped it in a hole marked ‘reject'. She grabbed a new one and looked at me for the first time. Her eyes were intense and blue. It felt like she was assessing me alr...

2 comments 2
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“The Winking Man” by Derrick M Domican

Submitted to Contest #196

*Features suggestion of child abduction.* The smart-looking centrepiece of the Pink Bougainvillaea Resort rose high into the cloud-filled night beyond a tidy block of white stucco villas. It was a five-storey, hundred room building with, as its name implied, an embracing multitude of pink bougainvillaea vines clinging to its brilliant, white-washed walls.   From where I crouched, hidden in the shadows at the edge of a glade of palm trees amongst short, spiky Aloe Vera shrubs, I could see over the terracotta-tiled rooftops of t...

8 comments 8
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“Breaking Up is Hard to Do” by Audrey Lewis

Submitted to Contest #196

I took my final sip of coffee as the morning sun finally passed the horizon. It shone like a  spotlight in the sky that glistened across the Pacific ocean and the assortment of white boats standing at the dock. I inhaled deeply, taking in the balcony view I’d known for the last three years, and walked through the thick sliding glass door. I rinsed my mug in the sink and looked out over the living room. It was a skeleton of itself. The black leather couch we’d gotten from Facebook Marketplace and the glass coffee table I’d found at Goo...

8 comments 8
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“Droun” by Beth Kubala

Submitted to Contest #196

When I was ten, Uncle Droun gave me my first telescope. My parents were obviously pleased for me but also somewhat embarrassed by his generosity. “Droun, you didn’t have to give Andrew anything,” declared my mother, shaking her head. Uncle Droun was not really my uncle, he was an out-of-town friend of my father’s whom he had met at a conference a few years ago and brought home to meet the family. About ten years younger than my parents in many ways he treated me more like a big brother. Droun was an astrophysicist and my father’s field was...

5 comments 5
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“Little Choices” by John Werner

Submitted to Contest #196

Little Choices The alarm.  The groan of the day's first effort.  The shuffling scrape of bare feet against the hardwood floor.  The flush of the toilet.  The washing of hands.  The brushing of teeth. This was the easy part. The routine. These small comforting steps I take towards motivation. When I say motivation, I mean coffee. But there is a lot to do between this and coffee. The squeal of the sliding closet door upon its old and dry paint clogged tracks comes to the predictable thumping halt as I push it har...

10 comments 10
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“Passing Trains” by August Norton

Submitted to Contest #196

Beep beep beep I open one eye just enough to hit “snooze” on my phone before falling back asleep, hoping that I could stay in my dream. I was sitting on fluffy green grass while elevator music played around me. Sitting across from me was Thayer, the boy with the beautiful hazel eyes, the boy I had loved for a decade, the boy who broke my heart. It’s pathetic how often I still dream about him, sometimes I feel like my brain is trying to sabotage me. Even though we are only sitting a few feet away from each other I can’t hear what he is saying...

1 comment 1
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“The Perfect Present” by Ian James

Submitted to Contest #196

Johan drew a long, satisfying breath and savoured the moment he'd laboured for seven interminable years. The path to this juncture had been paved with dedication, experimentation, and an unwavering determination. Now, he stood before a resplendent silver contraption that bore an uncanny resemblance to the cockpit of a helicopter. Johan knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this apparatus would inaugurate a new era and transform the course of human history forevermore.But his journey hadn't been without its trials and tribulations. The great...

4 comments 4
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“If at first, you don’t succeed… ” by Scott Taylor

Submitted to Contest #196

Big Ben had just struck noon. I had been asked to come out of retirement for a special mission. The Queen had asked me to investigate a person of interest who left for the States on the 11:15 flight from Heathrow. They had bought into the idea that this person knew something about a mysterious flying object seen over a military base. It had been years since I had been in the States. Opting to arrive hours before they did, the Concord was my best bet. If all went to plan, I could greet them at the gate. The goal was to interrogate them a...

4 comments 4
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“A Lover's Paradox” by Brandon Breeze

Submitted to Contest #196

Evan Barnes was stunned to the point of bewilderment. Mere seconds ago, he had been sitting in his parked car in the driveway of his Cedar Point, Connecticut home. Now, although still sitting in his car, he was over a thousand miles away in Palm Hill, Florida, and twenty five years in the past.He sat struggling to wrap his brain around the leap through time and space. He looked around at the unmistakable Palm Hill skyline. It looked exactly the way he remembered. Even the old Grand Hotel, which Evan saw with his own eyes get torn down to mak...

11 comments 11
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“Relive Again Agency” by Daniel Rogers

Submitted to Contest #196

Time travel is easy. It’s paying for it that’s hard. Most people can only dream about it. Even the wealthy have to think twice about it. It takes millions of Global Credits to time travel. The longer you want to stay in the past the more it costs. The companies that provide time travel, justify their price because the time splitters cost billions. So as of right now, only the wealthy can even entertain the thought of time travel. A wealthy man in his old age, planned a five year trip. He lost his wife a year ago and couldn’t stand living w...

3 comments 3
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“Red Letter” by Julie Duque

Submitted to Contest #196

We were understaffed, overworked, and underpaid… just like every other wage slave in America. Difference is, about a hundred years ago some doof in New York thought it would be a bright idea to slap the phrase “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” on the front of the main office. It's not even our official motto, but people still got the idea that we were supposed to be dependable, even as our budget gets slashed and our systems are overloaded.You tol...

1 comment 1
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“Back at Work” by Joe Smallwood

Submitted to Contest #196

My parachute   My parachute?opened.Sailing!                        Plummeting! Gathering spot.        Splat?Dinner.                        Done here?Met a dish!               &nbsp...

3 comments 3
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“We Try Again” by Ben Battles

Submitted to Contest #196

Beneath the maintenance entrance lay a craggy patch of dirt. Originally intended to become extra storage, when the stadium’s construction went a million dollars over budget anything that wasn’t front and center to the patrons was moved to the bottom of the to-do list; this unsightly remnant of heavy handed bulldozers and artless excavators was the last place the cameras swarming the stadium would want to be on this historic championship night. So they would have assumed. If an intrepid reporter had been there they might have seen something t...

2 comments 2
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“The Time Travelers Club” by Josephine Harris

Submitted to Contest #196

I’d travelled through time before with no ill effects, but this was different. My lungs ached as I followed the others to the ‘Time Travelers Club proudly welcomes you. Wait here.’ signpost. All these terminus towns used signs in both languages, but it seemed odd to see the yellow smiley face. Surely they could have come up with something new after two decades.I set down my luggage and took a long breath. Nothing too unusual so far. Of course I saw no alien lifeforms; it was still humans throughout this solar system give or take a few m...

10 comments 10
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“Lucky Penny” by Kathleen Kralowec

Submitted to Contest #196

Gabriel bent down to take the penny off the street, ignoring the old warnings in his mind. “You don’t know where it’s been,” came the voices of his teachers, discouraging kids from picking up coins, feathers, shiny things from the ground. But there was something about this penny, how it sparkled on the cement, that overrode all these voices, and he bento to pick it up. Tthat was the moment everything changed, though Gabriel didn't know it. Not ten minutes before this, Gabriel was walking down the street, complaining to his friend Char...

1 comment 1
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$250

Prize money

279

Contest entries

149

Stories

Ended on 23:59 - May 05, 2023 EST

Won by Delbert Griffith 🏆

Title: The Bullet that Esther Stopped

Submissions must be between 1,000 - 3,000 words and will be approved and published on Reedsy Prompts within 7 days of the contest closing.

Read the full terms & conditions or check out the FAQ if you have any questions!

Prompts | Big Blue Hand | 2024-11

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