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Center your story around someone or something that undergoes a transformation.

Posted in Dramatic on Jun 13, 2025

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✍️ 108 stories

The Paperweight Library

Winner of Contest #307 🏆

Mavis was now in her second year of retirement. Most days, she found things to do, but to be honest, she felt bored. Money was tight; it always had been. For decades, she’d worked for a large cleaning company that serviced offices, shopping malls, and municipal buildings. The staffroom was always full of women, but they weren’t exceptionally social. They exchanged greetings, asked after each other’s families, then hurried home to husbands and children who needed feeding and fussing. After Clive’s early death, Mavis simply got on with it — to...

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Notes On A Summer Day at The Lake

Submitted to Contest #307

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.”Rumi June 11The boy waits, just this side of the goose shit. If not for the semi-sprung folding chair and tripod, I’m thinking one of the Lake’s more common species – black frayed cap, black logo tee, second-owner Nike cross-trainers. Cross-training on the art of the sociopath on the stray mallard or woodchuck by daylight and the way of the predator in the shadows of a degrading dusk. Anywhere between 16 and 25, stalking the weak to feed the beast.I slow. Zack trains a long lens into the thi...

34 likes 19 comments 19
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I Didn’t Survive to Be Silent

Submitted to Contest #307

I didn't claw my way out of morphine-soaked comas and sterile white rooms where machines beeped louder than voices just to smile politely and shrink myself into something people could swallow without choking. I didn't drag this stitched-up body through nightmares and nosy prayers just to smooth my edges. I didn't survive to be palatable. I survived to tell you what it feels like when your birthplace gets erased from the map, when borders are redrawn with blood and bureaucracy, and your name, once whispered over lullabies and birthday cakes, ...

31 likes 35 comments 35
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The Librarian’s Daughter

Shortlisted for Contest #307 ⭐️

When she was 14, she learned how to tie her shoes. She was not slow, nor disadvantaged. She had simply never had a need to wear a shoe. From the time she took her first steps, the Librarian’s daughter swept from place to place on socked feet that slid over the floors of the Library halls. When she went outside, she peeled off the socks and went barefoot through the man-made lawn or the bubbling courtyard pond.She had never met a fire ant, or a thorny bramble, or a rock with too sharp an edge. She had no need of shoes. At puberty—a bit on the...

28 likes 15 comments 15
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A Noble Action

Submitted to Contest #307

Professor Peter Ash stood near the projector screen at the front of his art history classroom. Behind him, an image of multiple horses and warrior-riders tangled in the throes of ferocious battle drew the class’s attention. In the mass of violent chaos, one could make out that the riders in the mural were fighting over a banner.“This work of art is the product of an artist named Peter Paul Rubens of the Flemish Baroque school, a man who worked extensively during the early 17th century as part of the Northern Renaissance.” Ash looked out over...

23 likes 18 comments 18
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The Amazing Super Nova

Submitted to Contest #307

It was almost the end of the school year, so it was to be expected the Masters of Mayhem would finally come around to bully Ames and his friends. On the good basketball court with Reid, Hudson, and Gideon, hundreds of kids swirled around them during the lunch recess, shouts, feet and balls bounced off the blacktop, walls and each other like so many spinning tops let loose onto the elementary playground. Ames dribbled twice, smooth and easy before leaping up to launch the ball toward the hoop. Bouncing just like his loose brown curly hair, th...

19 likes 18 comments 18
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From ignorance, truth

Submitted to Contest #307

It’s a warm Monday morning in early August, and Kyle Deans is feeling stuffy and uncomfortable in the uniform of his new school. The navy woollen blazer itches and his tie feels as though it’s cutting off his airways. The trousers are tight around his middle, and the shoes, brown brogues, polished within an inch of their life, squeak with every hesitant step, rubbing the back of his ankles. Kyle’s usual attire, grey Nike tracksuit, Air Max trainers and hoodie, is now hidden away in a locked black box, along with his phone, earbuds, and his i...

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Ossa

Submitted to Contest #307

My father’s ghost assured me I wouldn’t fail the test.Sitting next to a girl who liked to cheat by writing things on her tampon package, I wondered if I should feel more or less guilty than her. She was making an effort to do the wrong thing, whereas I had no say over whether or not my dead father appeared to me during an exam.The girl’s name was Chima, but everyone called her Chi Chi. She lived in the next dorm room over from me, and for most of the previous spring semester, she had been sleeping with my roommate until she decided that she ...

18 likes 10 comments 10
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Jack and the Brain-stalk

Submitted to Contest #307

Being trapped in an MRI machine during a major earthquake may be worse than the possibility of a brain tumor. Jack could not believe his misfortune. One minute he was playing Minecraft and the next thing he knew, a neurologist was handing him a prescription to an imaging center: RO: Medulloblastoma. Rule out cancer combined with an earthquake seemed like divine punishment overkill. It started nearly a month ago with a headache. At first, a hangover was suspect, but the dull, persistent throb at the base of his skull, was unrelenting for week...

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The Mountain Woman....

Submitted to Contest #307

So, there they had it. The Tree Change. Finally. Gordon was tall, greying, plump, affable, genial, newly retired, 64 years old. He still loved Raelene, his bride of nearly forty years. She was shorter, fatter, grey, and had taken a large early retirement package from her managerial position. The couple had decided, many years prior, never to have children. All their married life, they had been 'double income, no kids' or 'DINKS'. Total sybarites. The Tree Change. Finally. Gordon put his arm around Raelene when they stood on the front veranda...

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The Apotheosis of Suffering

Submitted to Contest #307

In those twilight hours when Port Havens’ great machine of commerce and corruption ground to its nightly halt, when the last clerk had shuttered his ledger and the final merchant had counted his coin, there moved through the city's arteries a creature whose very existence was testament to the axiom that evil, like all things of true sophistication, must evolve or perish.Nylliveth had walked these streets for nearly three centuries, witness to the rise and fall of dynasties, the birth and death of empires, yet never had she felt the peculiar ...

16 likes 9 comments 9
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The Porcelain Scholar

Submitted to Contest #307

Under the fluorescents my skin shone like kiln-fired china, and the professor finally noticed me. The archive basement hummed with climate control systems. Three in the morning, and I sat alone among temperature-regulated cases, cradling a bleu-fleur teacup that had survived two centuries. The porcelain felt warm against my palms, as if it still held echoes of the Qing courtesan who once sipped jasmine tea from its rim. Hairline fractures mapped its surface like tiny rivers—crazing, the conservators called it. Battle scars of time. My thesis...

15 likes 7 comments 7
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An Old Face in a Good Place

Submitted to Contest #307

A couple weeks ago I found myself ankle-deep in a rabbit hole, which wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t dived down it headfirst. I ignored several nudges from the algorithm to come back up for air, until a particular thumbnail grabbed my attention. The title was forgettable, but the face, though I hadn’t seen it for years, I recognised instantly.I clicked on the video and was treated to an episode of the I’m All Ears Podcast, hosted by Dane Watkins, a psychologist specialising in men’s mental health, which ended with Dane taking call-ins....

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The Silence Between Crashes

Submitted to Contest #307

Eryn didn’t realize how much of herself she’d given away until the silence started to feel like peace. For years, she had lived tethered to an invisible string, constantly anticipating the next yank, the next sharp correction. Her days were a series of calculated maneuvers, each word weighed, each action filtered through the unspoken question: How will Anthony react? The quiet she now inhabited was not the oppressive, heavy silence that followed Anthony’s scathing remarks, nor the hollow echo of unspoken grievances that permeated their share...

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Chayei Sarah

Submitted to Contest #307

Things were never quite the same between the world and Sarah. Someone well acquainted with the family told me that Sarah knew your mother had done this to her kid sister. Sarah knew it was like the stronger chick pushing the weakest sibling from the nest. Tormenting the weaker one, pecking its neck, sucking up all the nutrients of the regurgitated worms from her mother’s bill. Eventually the weak and tormented and friendless younger chick falls quietly from the nest and into the hungry mandibles of the predators on the turf below. Sarah knew...

13 likes 10 comments 10
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