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Set your story in a place where everything should be familiar to your character(s), but isn’t.

Posted in Dramatic on Jan 3, 2025

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✍️ 58 stories

My Mortal Memory

Submitted to Contest #284

I’ve never met Elisabeth Baker, yet I couldn’t help but stare at her cursive handwriting and hesitate at the frail, shaky letters scraping the tea-stained paper. She sounded sure of my acquaintance in the summer of ‘69. Liz—a moniker I supposedly gave her—wrote scandalous things; midnight excursions to an abandoned mine, diving in a moonlit lake, and shared cigs at the Apollo 11 Parade in New York. Unfortunately, her memories were as foreign to me as the twenty-first century. And I should know, I’ve lived in California since 1873. ...

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Jamais Vu

Submitted to Contest #284

`I woke to the blare of sirens. All I could do was lay there in pain. My head was throbbing and the pain in my arms seemed unbearable. I attempted to speak, but the brace around my neck wouldn't allow me to even whimper."Don't move!" I heard someone say. I felt myself being lifted off the ground. Every jolt and every move hurt. My whole body was throbbing."You've been in an accident." The paramedic spoke looking down at me as they attempted to lift my body onto a stretcher. I glanced over at the tangled wreckage that once was my car. It was ...

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Mirror Mirror

Submitted to Contest #284

The room was backward. It was like looking at a reversed photograph of the space. My head was still foggy and spinning but I was awake enough to know that something was wrong. I was in my house and yet, it was clearly not my house at all. Everything was familiar but it was all different. Even the sunlight seemed to be coming from the wrong side as if it rose in the west and was spiraling in the opposite direction around the earth.  “Hello?” I called out, stupidly. I wasn’t sure who I was expecting to answer me. I heard a small jingle an...

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Fitting In

Submitted to Contest #284

Susan managed to keep the tears at bay until the drive home from Thanksgiving. All weekend she’d held it in, hoping to turn her emotions around. She hated that Emma and Katie were in the car with her. She might actually have to put these complicated feelings into words and she just wasn’t ready yet.  It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Susan and her two younger daughters had driven to her oldest daughter’s college campus to pick her up for Thanksgiving. Then they’d driven another hour to her mom’s house for the weekend. Her older daughter, Tenley...

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(Familiar)ity

Submitted to Contest #284

 It’s too hot for it to be Christmas. The temperature has been in the steady sixties for the past two weeks, and the recent misty rain has set quite an oppressive mood. My son has done a rather good job of hanging up some multicolored string lights along the corners of the room. It is wonderful to see the joy and color return to his face after seeing his once brown, unkempt hair start losing its color. Between him consistently asking me everyday if I’ve taken my blood pressure pills and my Namza-whatsit, and his expecting wife, I'm surp...

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Forever Christmas

Submitted to Contest #284

“Rosco, get off. Get off me! Get off, you crazy pup!” My mangy mutt wakens me with a slobbery good morning before getting in a round of zoomies. I love him, but I’d also like to murder him. Before I do though, I should really brush his teeth I think as I wipe off the sticky goop on my cheek.  “Hey, hun, are you awake?” Lorraine, my wife, pops her head in the door, a festive robe tied around her. Wait, it’s Christmas! “Covered in dog slobber. You forget to shut the door?”, I chuckle.  “Oooops.” She smiles back, the same one I fell i...

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Skin Deep (Sensitive Content: Mental Health, Physical Violence, and Gore)

Submitted to Contest #284

I sit in my car, the engine cold and idle as I stare at the dashboard in a deep hypnosis—eyes glued to a series of writing-like scribbles etched into the glass. How long have I been sitting here? What time did I get home? My fingers frozen and numb, clawed firm around the steering wheel, my knuckles white. Darkness surrounds me as my eyes flick upwards with realization as I notice the windshield covered by a thick layer of snow. I unclench my fists, stretching stiff muscles as the winter air pierces my skin. Where the fuck is my coat? I’m f...

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Memories Lost to Gold

Submitted to Contest #284

The sun’s rays beamed over the black luxury limousine, sand stirring up near the wheels as it pursued through the boiling desert. Sounds of music rang through the large car–briskly followed by the buzz of the station changing.“Damnit, Scorcha!” Victoria snarls, her nails almost breaching the fabric of her gloves as she digs them into the steering wheel. She cocks her head towards her advisor, ignoring the landscape in front of her. “Flip the station one more time and see me change our route as quickly as you change those channels!”Scorcha ha...

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Our Hollywood Driveway

Submitted to Contest #284

I just learned that we had a "Hollywood Driveway," on that small lot of our 1955 tract house in Canoga Park. From the curb to the garage, the driveway strtetched straight probably one hundred feet, our pink stucco house on the left, and Muffy's rose bushes on the right. I remember having to weed and sweep that corridor often. Dad was a machinist, but he liked wood and nail projects, too. He built a gate two-thirds of the way up the Hollywood, the type with a wheel that allowed it to open to the space between the garage and the gate, a space ...

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Today's going to be a good day

Submitted to Contest #284

“Good morning. It is sixth January twenty-twenty-five. O-six-hundred hours. Weather forecasted to be sunny. Now for the news…” Tak! I hit the snooze button and stretch. Ow! I massage my neck. I must have slept in the wrong angle. I pat my pillow and it is flatter than usual. I open the blinds and like releasing a trapped ball the light bursts in, filling my apartment with a morning glow. Except it’s not enough to lighten the whole place up. I reach for the lights that turn on yellow. I swear I installed white ones. Doesn’t matter. I must no...

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Something To Hang On To

Submitted to Contest #284

“Thank you darlin’.” Old Upjohn took the pie handoff from a waitress wearing a starched, pink and white pinstriped nurses’ cap and matching diner waitress skirt and blouse. He watched her retreat, brought his attention back to the pie. “Place is closin’, Lamar.”“This place? You sure? It’s been around longer than you.”“Don’t I know it.”“Maybe,” Lamar blew on his spoon of Jambalaya, “it’s so old they can’t keep it up to code.”“Don’t know about no damn code, but I sure ‘nuff know it’s a cryin’ shame. People got their lives mixed up in this plac...

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Toy Store

Submitted to Contest #284

A hint of past violence A Torti cat ran out in front of Martha. She watched as kitty ran up the tree and crouched down on a branch. Kitty has done this before she thought. Kitty stared down. "I think I had a cat like that, once," Martha said to her husband. Kris and Martha were walking arm and arm along the tree lined street. "Yes. We have four cats," Kris said. "Hmm, I kind of remember," Martha replied. She looked around the street, the trees, parked cars, children running around. "Do you know where we are going," Kris ask...

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A Lost Human Woman and a Wholesome Minotaur Walk Into a Bar

Submitted to Contest #284

And she cried for him. My god, did she cry for him, the friend who never existed at all. Another lifetime wasted because she screwed it up again. Kody’s hollow shell stumbled to the bathroom where the tap turned on automatically and the lights were not lit from oil.  “Take me back,” her voice croaked. Her shaking arms were covered in soot and her tongue still tasted the inhaled smoke. She coughed up ash into the sink and rinsed it out with the readily available water. No well.  “After what you did? He would never,” the scarlet-eyed...

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Desiderium

Submitted to Contest #284

The things that should be familiar to me, are now ghosts in a haunting past. But these things were not always so estranged. The smell of a lavender whisps past me in my sleep, and I dream of you. I see a forest, fallen logs, overgrown with moss, not unlike your eyes and I see you, gazing into my soul. Your hand warmly squeezing my own and I feel you nearby. These things are strangers to me. Things I once swore I would grasp tightly and never let go. Yet, now that they are distant and nearly forgotten they have never been closer. As the memor...

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The Smell of the Coffee is Bad

Submitted to Contest #284

INT. SCHMID'S DINING ROOM - MORNINGALAN SCHMID(43) rubs his nose. There’s a smell here, and by golly, it’s ruining his bacon pancakes. He looks over to his daughter, JASMINE SCHMID(17), who’s sitting across from him. She’s on her phone scrolling through Instagram, her brunette hair pinned to the side in what she would call ‘retro seventies style-ish.’ She munches on her food, like a goat who has all the time in the world.Alan doesn’t mind it. He really doesn’t care. At the stove cooking up these fantastic bacon pancakes is GRETTA SCHMID(41)....

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