“Green Shoots” • by Christopher Degni

They give us all false hope: tickets, with barely one in a hundred making the punch line. 

I focus on the screen flashing the winning numbers—I’ve already memorized my daughter’s and my own. The prize? A new life, away from here.

There! The afterimage lingers: my daughter’s number.

While I concentrated, she slipped away into the crowd. “Chloë!”

“Daddy!” She comes running. I take her ticket. That’s not right—

“My number was lucky. I traded with someone who needed it more.”

My heart chokes me. Then I see her shining eyes, and I’m reminded of what true hope is.

 

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Christopher Degni is a 2019 graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. He writes about the magic and the horror that lurk just under the surface of everyday life. He lives south of Boston with his wife (and his demons, though we don't talk about those). He was part of the editorial team for the anthologies Playlist of the Damned and the Stoker-award nominated Mother: Tales of Love and Terror. You can find more of his work in NewMyths.com, Sherlock Holmes and the Occult Detectives, 99 Tiny Terrors, 99 Fleeting Fantasies, and of course, here on Stupefying Stories.

Christopher has been a frequent contributor here in recent years. If you enjoyed this story, you might also want to read “Upgrade,” “The Infinite and the Infinitesimal,” “Life and Jacq and the Giant and Death,” or one of our personal favorites, “A 125-Word Story About Writer’s Block in the Style of Italo Calvino.”

 

The Pete Wood Challenge is an informal ad hoc story-writing competition. Once a month Pete Wood spots writers the idea for a story, usually in the form of a phrase or a few key words, along with some restrictions on what can be submitted, usually in terms of length. Pete then collects the resulting entries, determines who has best met the challenge, and sends the winners over to Bruce Bethke, who arranges for them to be published on the Stupefying Stories web site.

You can find all the previous winners of the Pete Wood Challenge at this link.

This time the challenge was to write a flash fiction piece playing off key word: punchline.

More stories to come every day this week!