Glory Story is a free-to-enter monthly writing contest. Each month sets a prompt -- a phrase, a situation, a constraint -- and writers submit short stories built around it. The best are collected into a booklet. There is a winner's prize each month. Entry costs nothing.
I entered Booklet 2's contest with a dark fable. The prompt was the inclusion of a specific line of dialogue:
The prompt
"I didn't hear a thing."
The line suggested concealment, complicity, wilful ignorance. I set my story in a Victorian milieu and built it around a woman whose charity was a mask for something considerably less charitable.
Mistress Grimshaw's Purse
A cursed purse punishes greed and cruelty. Mistress Grimshaw's manipulative charity is exposed as a tool for her own gain, and the purse's curse reveals her sins by forcing her to face her past deeds through a cycle of shame and retribution. A dark fable in the tradition of supernatural justice.
The story was selected for the booklet. It sits alongside the other entries in a collection that is available both as a physical paperback and as a PDF download from Lulu.