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Begin your story with “It was the hottest day of the year...”

Posted in Short Story on Aug 1, 2025

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✍️ 8 stories

Into the Daylight

Submitted to Contest #314

It was the hottest day of the year, approximately six days after Sua passed her fourteenth Sun celebration. Her mentor, Nieve, the last oracle left in their tiny, insulated village, informed her to prepare for this day the night before. The hottest day of the year marked the day Sua would travel to the spirit realm alone and journey back while disrupting the spirits there as little as possible, a trial all apprentice oracles faced before their abilities would fully blossom. After years of training and meditative rituals, Sua knew exactly how...

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Going Home

Submitted to Contest #314

Going Home“It is the hottest day of this year of August 2019”, the radio announcer said before I got out of my car. The temperature showed 114 degrees.I stepped out of the car and was standing where I once played with my sisters and brothers. I stood in my old play yard in front of the house where I was raised. The blaring sun did not affect me while I stood still in the heat with my big, broad, brimmed sun hat, water bottle in my hand, wearing polarized sunglasses, covered in SPF 30 lotion smeared on my bare skin. Even if I was not decke...

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What Slips Through

Submitted to Contest #314

It was the hottest day of the year.Even the wind had given up. Cicadas droned from somewhere deep in the trees, rising and falling like the breath of something ancient and exhausted. Everything shimmered. The asphalt outside looked liquid. My skin stuck to the wood-paneled walls of my grandmother’s living room. And the air, somehow, smelled like metal.I was lying on the hardwood floor with my cheek pressed to the boards, hoping the cool would seep into my bones. It didn’t. Nothing helped. Not the lukewarm iced tea, not the ancient ceiling fa...

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Do Not Engage the Man with the Clipboard

Submitted to Contest #314

It was the hottest day of the year.This fact was confirmed via five push notifications, two flashing news tickers, a chalk sign outside the post office that simply read “HOT AS SIN,” and an orange government flyer dropped through every letterbox: ⚠ STAY INDOORS. STAY HYDRATED. AVOID COMPLICATED EMOTIONS. ⚠At 10:17 a.m., Colin Turner (semi-retired, patio obsessive, widely considered to be the spiritual leader of Hightree Gardens) burned his palm on the front door handle and accused the sun of “a targeted psychological campaign.”He spent twent...

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Just Pray

Submitted to Contest #314

1.It was the hottest day of the year... if you could call it that.The door hissed open, and Elton stepped out. He waited for the steam to clear, revealing the thermometer: –3 degrees.He wasn’t sweating, but it beat the alternative.Ten years underground. Ten grueling years.Locked away from temperatures cold enough to wipe out a third of the population.Elton was what they called Groundhogs—glorified meteorologists.The only ones allowed above the surface. Once a day, they checked—waited—observed the Earth’s skin.The underworld called them heroe...

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Her Biggest Fan

Submitted to Contest #314

It was the hottest day of the year, by Maine standards in those days anyway. Ninety five. And humid, too. Fran recalled her best friend as she wrapped her collection in newspaper. Peggy was long gone, thirty years now. Peggy had called early on an August day when both their teen boys were working at their summer jobs in the local grocery. As always, Peggy was suggesting an adventure. Fran knew it the second the phone rang. "Great day for the flea market, Fran!" she had said. And she even had the nerve to suggest the place built in an old far...

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The Last Day Before Junior High

Submitted to Contest #314

It was the hottest day of the year, and I was stretched out in the lush green grass of our yard, soaking up every last drop of the glorious summer sun before school started the next day. I grabbed my phone to refresh my email one more time. Our homeroom assignments were supposed to come out that day, and I was anxious to see who I'd end up with. This year, we were starting Junior High, and my best friend Allie and I had been willing ourselves to be in the same homeroom as each other all summer long. The homeroom class you're in sets the tone...

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Diary of Emmeline Grace Carter

Submitted to Contest #314

July 14th, 1923It is the hottest day of the year…Mama says the heat makes people act strangely — says it sours the milk and curdles good sense. But I don’t think it’s the sun that’s gone to my head. I think it’s him.The morning started like a sigh. Heavy and slow, like the air itself was stuck between breaths. The kind of heat that makes your skin feel tight, like the sky’s leaning in too close. Even the bees seem drowsy, bobbing through the garden like they can’t be bothered. I hear a cicada start up just after breakfast, and the sound buzz...

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