How many times do you get up to pee in the night?
Even if it’s just once, you’ve seen them.
In the season twixt November and death, they hang on bathroom doors in the grayness.
An old crushed hat with shades of straw and brown. Your favorite aunt’s gossamer scarf with pink and lavender swirls. They seem familiar but not quite visible.
There’s no door hook where they hang. You know it. You’ve seen that door in sunlight. But tonight, your mind is off somewhere in dreamland.
Your inner alarm, that chill that senses leopards lurking in the black spaces, is off too.
Most times you walk by, not touching, but sometimes your gait is off and your shoulder brushes through one. The next day, the cream in your coffee is bad, or you miss the bus. The big presentation fails.
It’s the off season.
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 story of no more than
150 words in length that played off the key phrase:
“the offseason.”
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