Winter 50 Word Contest
Welcome to our Winter 50 Word Contest. We run one of these every once in a while. You know how they go. This is a 50 word story contest, and the story can be about anything. It just has to be 50 words. The winner of the story will win $1000 in free ads on our site. You can promote anything writing related, your book, your magazine, whatever you like. It can’t be a casino though, or something shady and unwriting related. So here are the rules:
Story about anything
Story must be 50 words or under
Post the story in the comments
Best story wins $1000 in ads and an email blast
Dead line is March 20th (first day of sprint)
Use your real email to post the story (it will NOT be given out)
Enter as many times as you like
The winner will be announced one week after the deadline on March 27th. If you win we will contact you by email. Make sure that when you leave your story you use your real email to leave the comment. Good luck.
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- Comment Contest: Win Promotion for Your Writing! - May 14, 2025
Please post your story here. Do not email them to me.
The little boy with cancer catches turtles from our rocks by the lake. To pay the doctors, the boy’s father sells the turtles’ shells. But first, the dad removes the turtles’ bodies by dismembering them, then setting them in ant beds. Cosmic justice? Revenge? I can never quite decide.
When you enter your email you are NOT put on our mailing list. We will ONLY use that email to contact you if you win. Just wanted to make that clear.
Words like paranoia fly through my head. Your fingers are tapping against your glass desktop and it feels like Christmas because there are half a dozen Amazon boxes sprawled across the floor. Titles like Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs and Changing Worldviews of Circuitry decorate the carpet.
When the end of the world is near, the Lanes must adjust to a new world of hunger and immobility in their apartment. Mrs. Lane takes in Candice Miller when her parents perish in a tsunami. As food supplies diminish, the Lane girls learn more about their mother.
Juliette stood naked under the autumn stars, sacrificial blood drying on her body. Her hair was again deep black and full, her skin once more firm and smooth. She opened her arms to the breeze, knowing she would be content if only she could forget the screams of the children.
I knew the stupefying odds and walked out anyway. Ten steps. The baby is heavy and starting to cry. Hungry hiccups. “Looks to me like sleet.” Fallen sparrows. Winter is a clear incision. I never touched a truer jewel. Rutilant loneliness. We get in the car. Good tires. I drive.
I walk up the few steps to the podium and realize I made a mistake. The speech in my hand made no sense at all, like cuneiform or phonetic emojis, a yellowthroat’s print in sand. I spread my hands on the smooth wood and look out at the halcyon faces.
Pilgrim or exile, all men have names. All men have lost the power of entrance to this ochre-colored map of existence. I carry nothing, shoulders wrapped in a bright blue sweater from a last brother. I make my way north, the hard bone of my skull my only treasure chest.
He enters standing balanced on the back of a prancing pony. His muscles flex and relax in rhythm. The air bends around his body. The air echoes the hoof beats. Flesh on flesh, his every sinew strains. Thought and feeling expand exponentially. Then contract. The act ends without an encore.
Who said this place was like an old, latent fever, throbbing in the bones—tintinnabulation of skull, inexplicable silence after quinine dreams? Smell of frangipani, orange blossom, and cooking fires fringe the acute dilapidation of my senses. And it is always this place I return to in my waking dreams.
The blood was pooled cold and black on the sidewalk around the blonde. She lay face down on the sidewalk, her face inches from my shoes. I looked again at the folded paper I had taken from between her stiff fingers. It was all I needed. The game was over.
The street vendor stood behind his cart, his flowers arranged in bouquets and garlands. A businessman stopped and looked, his hand hovering over first one arrangement then another before selecting a single rose. He walked away with the boxed flower under his arm, thinking of his wife and her tulips.
Long ago I lay curled up tight, certain that every black and white movie monster had escaped its late night televised doom to lie in wait for me far down at the foot of my bed. But now, though I stretch full out, I long for black and white monsters.
Bob and Sarah followed the GPS directions to see where the “random” button would take them. They came to a line of abandoned cars, got out and walked as the GPS instructed them, their car’s headlights lighting their way. Eventually the car’s battery died, the lights dimmed and went out.
Two youngsters walked through a moonlit field. They dropped quickly to the ground when the younger stepped on a dry stalk that snapped under his foot. The older looked up to see women working while men with guns stood nervously by.
“Be quiet,” she whispered. “Or they could get away.”
Broken and alone he sits on the snow covered sidewalk with only a tattered backpack to keep him off the ground. The sounds of laugter and joy haunt him like a distant memory. His Christmas wish is for the cold to numb his pain and take his last breath.
She couldn’t write another word. Tears ran down her cheeks, dropping on the paper, smudging the words. Her head hurt, her eyes burned. Although the affair had been brief its intensity had left her drained. She put her pen down. She lifted the gun, feeling its weight in her hand.
This is not my story, but a reminder that you never announced the 2015 Summer 75 word contest on that page, unless you let the winner know privately in which case it is not I. Either way, you said you’d post it on that page. This is now 50 words.
Two people found dead in a burned-out mobile home–on the corner of 5th and Riverview. I scan the words and freeze. Leah’s place. I saw her yesterday at the art auction, selling the last two prints of me. “You are gone after this; I’ll need you to pose again!”
It was like being deep inside a mountain. The isolation overwhelming. Sounds came to his ears, but muffled, meaningless, inarticulate words from a foreign land far away. He floated weightless. This was his world. He felt secure here. Safe. He couldn’t imagine the traumas that awaited him from birth on.
She wasn’t even cut out to be a mother, but she filled a complete ocean of love, barely floating, striking sharks stinging garbage, stinking jellyfish out of her children’s way. Just when she had become nearly all fish, they began slowly swimming, swimming away.
He thought she was cotton candy, that he could compress her down to a hard core of sweetness. When he said Bitch he meant I thought you would be smooth on my tongue, your opinions would dissolve like sugar, and I could crush the paper cone and toss it aside.
All sound, and then nothing. She looked around for someone to help, the sides of the plane crushed like a gum wrapper, but no one moved or spoke or even let out a breath into the cold morning. Lamar was three rows up, his new sweater soft around her neck.
Every Saturday Catagain ambushed me as I returned from shopping. She would get under the car and leap out at me. The first time I was truly startled. She was so pleased with herself she rolled around on the sidewalk. We played this game for years, with me feigning surprise.
Cat crouched, nervously preparing to defend her territory. As hooman neared, she leaped, fangs and claws bared. Hooman recoiled in fear. It was but one victory in a long war. “Hooman not smart, must frighten again next week,” thought cat as she trotted beside hooman, “but now time to eat.”
Blonde hair carefully permed and held in place, the smile missed the woman’s eyes. “Foolish man. Flying always was his first love.”
A smiling, dark-haired pilot. WWII uniform. Smiling brothers in t-shirts: You bet your dupa I’m Polish!
Not true. He was only ever a fool for her.
The boy hurries on his way. The sun is warm, bright, but he does not linger.
The house, he notices, watches him. He ignores its eyes, the dark and curtain-less windows glaring out of the tired walls. He slips inside, its mouth enveloping him. Consuming him.
They are coming.
He always waits for her, watching from the window all afternoon lest he miss her. His heart seizes as the truck stops. The little door opens and closes; the truck goes. He runs outside, hurries back in, clutching letters and fliers that she’d brought, that she’d touched, that he’ll keep.
I can’t believe you love him. Fuckin’ dirty drunk.
So he reads, practices Buddhism. He listens to you. Fuck off. He’s a self-centered, egotistical, hypocritical scumbag. A waste of useless puke.
You turn to him instead of me? After all we’ve been through?
He’s just like me, twenty years ago.
Not by ones or twos, uncountable they came. Needles on a great conifer, prickly, sharp, vaguely menacing, falsely protective of the life force they attached themselves to. Their delicate scent filled the air, sweet and resinous. They insinuated themselves deep into his every memory. There they burst into uncontrollable flames.
Cold deep water beckons though snow covers sand I crunch upon. Frozen iced caked tundra tops Lake Michigan. Ragged dirty edges hide lovely depths of seasoned blue. Hard fought battles rise yet in the distance: crashing, splashing against it’s rigid world. It’s freedom’s ring I hear; ‘caz darker waters sing.
His leathery hands touch softer skin. She nestles closer. How can a man holding a woman fill a world of one time memory and moments? She breathes. He listens. The quiet soothes the tempest fray. Old and mellowing. When holding on is still the best that one can ever be.
Waves licked at the small body on the sandy shore, rocking it gently. A sleeping baby carried gently from a distant conflict, peaceful and calm. The water swaddled it lovingly in its soft folds of azure Mediterranean dreams. The muscles were relieved of all the tensions they had always carried.
Again in my chamber I totter
Rolling, pondering without squatter
Forevermore shall I flotter
Or arise as magma of this ominous slaughter
Vainly had this thought encumbered
A soul unprepared for deep slumber
And the still sad loathing of dry facade
Calls forth the beating of my terror heart
Wet before a velvet shadow, dawned with tedious words of flutter
Drenched with ghastly veins that mutter and vexed beyond the colossal human clutter
I woke with a vicious stutter-dismembering my beloved verbal utter
As I live the life of the vivified victor, well transcending a vindictive vandal
Hello again blank page,
I dwell on inspiration and stage-
Where I demonstrate a technique
So unique and obsolete
To a woman without emotion
That seeks commotion and motions-
A rough quest for hazardous potions,
Of lust, rage and joy
Made from tears of a pretty boy
While my shadow lingers on the bedroom wall
Comes a thought I would remember once more
Knocking, loudly at the door
A silent opinion of writing,
For a soul deemed as fighting-
A war for hunger, pain and despair
Of children, love and liars seemingly fair
Facades stable-and light as air
The glass shattered spraying sharp glittering diamond shards across the spectators’ faces. Eyes were nailed shut with glinting daggers of glass that penetrated the dermal eyelid and were left half-embedded in the jelly core of the superficially protected eyeball. Salvador was reminded of Andalusian dogs and chuckled softly to himself.
Deeper there exists a light. Listen for it, listen for the sudden spark the wheels do not make. The ignition of night is an affair fraught with soft waxen fractions. Spin tight. Revolve, refine, stretch the string with the whammy bar. Far away the skin is caught silken and hot.
When Charles swept into a room heads turned, people noticed. His bones wore the electorate’s flesh. As vampires evaporate in a mirror so Charles disappeared into the concerns of his constituency. He sucked them dry. With a smile. He understood the significance of an innocent reference to your lover’s health.
The cardiologist rushed into the operating theater. The patient was prepped. The poor bugger’s plumbing had fouled while trying to dislodge an impacted mass of congealed fat threaded with his wife’s long hair from a trap below their kitchen sink. Now he knew he should have invested in a snake.
Without much luck he turned the corner. Without a boner he wasn’t worth a fuck to the owner. Down he went on her without a whiff of a fiver. His liver hadn’t had a breather in longer than he could remember. Wrapped in black leather he now felt much better.
When he said he wanted to go to ninja training, I said u-huh and changed the subject. But good mom’s listen, eventually, and after a month of requests I caved. Turns out, having a five-year-old ninja in the family is more useful than I expected. Go, ninja, go!
The rocks told stories. As we walked along the path, we read the inscriptions of those who had come before us. “The trees have secrets.” “The wind sweeps away your fears.” “The mountains have no limits.” It was our turn to leave a story.
“Do you have the hammer and chisel?” I asked.
“Yes,” she replied, pulling the tools from her knapsack.
I pointed towards a light gray rock that stood straight up in the ground.
“This one’s perfect,” I said, smiling.
She nodded in agreement.
“What will we say?” she asked.
I stared at the rock.
Later, as we walked home hand in hand, she punched me in the shoulder.
“You dork!” she exclaimed, laughing.
“What?!” I replied, fending off her blows.
“Did you really chisel on the rock, “I grew from a pebble?!” she said.
I grinned. “Yup. Figured it would warp some minds.” I said.
Deleting Humans
She looks at death all around her, fighting and losing that herself. She struggles in her deleriously fevered mind to remember … She concludes that the dawn of computers was the fall of man. She coughs, as she laughs. Computers are deleting humans.
Great white birds flapped their wings wheeling indeterminately through the sky. The horizon was a line of purest slate blue below a dull orange decaying toward dirty brick. Every mammal on the planet had had its spine surgically removed, the inanimate flesh hanging on standards made of an inert material.
I awoke, bare feet scraping on wood.
It was pitch black, I could hardly move, I knew straight away where I was – 6 feet under.
Fear. Horror. Panic.
Between all these emotions, I just kept mumbling, “I can’t believe Helen would take it this far over a pair of shoes.”
He’s an idiot and I don’t like him.
He should be more careful when reassigning officers.
I’m no chef.
I’ve urinated, in varying doses, into his meals and drinks most evenings.
Tonight I’m taking it one step further and have a couple of grenades under my trolley.
Goodbye mein Führer.
“I told you what would happen.”
“You said something, but what did you actually do? Nothing.”
“I suggested shifting the plan of action. Discontinuing with what was happening.”
“You continued to let it happen.”
“You continued with the action.”
“I fought to achieve peace.”
Once twin depths of liquid black, they had held mischief still, icy, veined hands had grasped hers as they slowly faded to blue. Tears collected in a frozen stare, conceding, atop an endless red line, broken by the news, “we lost him, Mrs Anuh”, like she did not already know.
She never used her real name; her protagonists assailed her after dark that she often used the backdoor, and the mouse faced pygmy lighted jasmine scented candles to help drive them away, especially when soft music seeped out of the front room where the woodpecker chanted her nom de plume.
His blood glistened fresh and vivid in pools on the yellow tile. Gunpowder scented the air, pungent and burnt. In the aftermath of the gunshot silence prevailed. The still body signified nothing, just meat, inert. The murderer hesitant, but proud, lingering. Being dead was like a story without a plot.
We are extending the deadline until Friday 3/25/16
The report hit the chef’s desk with a resounding thud. Graphs, illustrations, photos and an extensive typescript of the proceedings. The report covered every aspect of the nearly forgotten trial, infamous as it had once been. Alice looked at Arlo with a grimace, then signaled surrender with two fingers upheld.
After the carnage, what? Harold hoped to instill fear. Fear of the status quo. Fear that acknowledged the failures of society. The fear that Harold felt in his bones. The fear that would cause his bones to splinter into needles, pricking consciences, forcing action. Life couldn’t go on like this.
He stood there, motionless. Making him a victim of the cold rain. His eyes broke their dams too, letting the sadness form into drops of water. There were times when he used to hide tears from her. He slowly kept the umbrella on her tomb. Once she had said she easily caught cold whenever she got out in rain.
We are still working over the entries. We will try to have an answer very soon.
Is that a drum roll I hear?
Winner comes tomorrow. March 5th….
When ,please, do you post winner( s)?
Has there been a winner selected,please?
We are waiting for responses from the winners of the contest. We would like to wait until they respond. Several times we have had winners NOT want to have their names given out. I don’t know why. I think sometimes people enter because they don’t think they will win and then they get freak out a little when they do. Either way, when we hear back we will let everyone know. So check your emails!