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A.Dot Ram

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2020

Stories (36)
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1081 Followers
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36 Stories

4852 karma pts

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The Lucky Ones

Submitted to Contest #286

Tina’s shoes were too small. They were the wrong color, too, though that didn’t matter as much. Lauren could have coaxed her daughter back into the no-longer-sparkly pink Velcro shoes if not for her insistent cries of my toes huuurt.I should have paid more attention. Lauren reprimanded herself again as she pulled into the parking lot. Not that there had been much time to think. When the police knocked on her door last night, she’d had twenty minutes to gather up a few essentials and leave. She’d lugged the bulging red suitcase, its wheels cl...

12 likes 5 comments 5
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Wunderbar!

Submitted to Contest #123

I - SacramentoThe lights blared in Vivian’s eyes, distorting her reflection in the foil mirror. As she dabbed the empty make-up brush over her cheeks, already blushed backstage, she wondered if the audience could see the pallor beneath her mask of make-up. Would Conrad see it? He always saw right through her.She exaggerated her smile until her cheeks brushed the false lashes on her lower lids. It didn’t matter. The show must go on. She listened for the heavy stomp of Conrad's leather boots on the stage's wooden floorboards and ignored the wa...

30 likes 14 comments 14
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The Price of Love

Submitted to Contest #116

Los Angeles Preferred Parking District 13 was an impenetrable fortress overnight. During the day, it was permissible for visiting cars to linger along the curb for a couple of hours while their drivers browsed the quirky boutiques along Beverly Boulevard, or enjoyed a cup of coffee with a friend under the orange umbrellas of a sidewalk cafe. But after 6:00pm, those visitors had better clear out to make room for the residents of District 13 to pull directly to the curb in front of their hedge-lined Spanish houses, where they could unload thei...

35 likes 4 comments 4
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The Man of My Dreams

I would not have said anything. I would have kept walking across the street on my shaking knees, the world spinning around me like ripples in choppy water. I would have gently convinced myself it was a coincidence, that’s all. Some weird deja vu moment, maybe even a ripple in space or time. This kind of thing probably happens often enough that it’s not really a big deal.I would have walked away without a word to him, just a curious, lingering stare that I’d try to hide behind my sunglasses, and only for as long as it took the crosswalk signa...

23 likes 10 comments 10
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I Was Always Good at Taboo

Winner of Contest #106 🏆

CW: Strong languageI forgot the word lightbulb today. I was trying to tell Michael how the laundry room went dark. I think we need a new… do we have any of those...those things that make…It was like a dark spot in my brain. The word had been redacted from my vocabulary. I tried to listen for it, to hear the word in my voice. All I got was static, like the old televisions used to have. Would you change that thing in the ceiling?We used to play this game with the kids when they were young—Taboo—where every card had a forbidden word you ha...

276 likes 109 comments 109
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Self Care

Submitted to Contest #104

CW: Alcoholism“He fell in love with Drunk Maisey. That was the problem. When he met me, I was up on stage singing karaoke--some sloppy rendition of Just a Girl, too angry and not peppy enough to capture the layer of irony.”I look at the woman on my sofa. Maisey Brown. She’s in her late twenties with a petite frame and nondescript light brown hair. She could almost fade into the soft taupe sofa upholstery, but there’s something about her that draws me in. Her features are delicate and angular, and her face is smooth, save for a single worry l...

51 likes 11 comments 11
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God Bless the Child

Shortlisted for Contest #102 ⭐️

It started simply enough: I just wanted my Puppy Surprise, and if the school talent show could be my ticket, then I’d sing my heart out.As far as ten-year-old me was concerned, Puppy Surprise was the must-have toy of 1992. You got the momma dog in a pink cardboard box with a handle cut out in the shape of a bone, her little plastic face with big, painted-on eyes staring out at you. In her belly was a Velcro pouch, and hidden inside were her puppies, which you’d help her deliver after you brought her home and took her out. There could be thre...

56 likes 29 comments 29
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Turbulence

Submitted to Contest #99

It could have been romantic, flying west together into an eternal sunset. If only they were speaking to each other.Katrina gazed out the small portal window, silently absorbing the orange-drenched clouds from the confines of seat 37E, arms folded over her chest. If she let her eyes slip out of focus, her view could be a tranquil ocean, or a silent desert.“What?” Scott broke their silence from 37F, squaring his shoulder away from her and tilting his phone screen out of view.“What, what?” she asked back, doing nothing to soften the thorns in h...

48 likes 23 comments 23
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Painted Over

Submitted to Contest #98

They’ve made some questionable design choices. Not that Mom didn’t in her day. I smile as I look through Mr. and Mrs. Merkle, peering years into my past: the wood paneling on the walls, the blue-checkered wallpaper, the pink fixtures to match the roses in the guest bathroom. That’s all gone now, almost twenty years later. The walls are painted a shade of beige that’s so inoffensive it offends me. The Merkles have whitewashed the mottled oak kitchen cabinets and the red bricks around the fireplace. Just as well. Both oak and exposed bric...

36 likes 21 comments 21
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Moira's Day Off

Winner of Contest #95 🏆

“Sandwiches or Thai?” I ask aloud, out of habit. I can imagine Moira’s reply: You’re not on track with your calcium and folic acid targets today. Spinach is advised. Maybe a green curry?But today there’s no level, pleasant voice in my ear. Moira is, as they used to say, “in the shop” today for her annual updates and maintenance. I don’t know why they can’t just upload the stuff into them, but these maintenance days are a fact of life we all deal with. I guess even artificial intelligence is entitled to one vacation day a year.Most peopl...

405 likes 163 comments 163
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Bigger Than The Light

Shortlisted for Contest #92 ⭐️

The Isis Lounge has a real dressing room mirror—the kind outlined with a blaze of bare bulbs. That’s one of the things I like about it. To me, it just screams professionalism with 1500 watts. It shows respect for the performers. It doesn’t matter so much that here backstage we have fans heaving through summer nights, trying to breathe some fresh air into the old building, or that, in the fall, shimmering termite wings dust the vanity when I arrive. The place smells like vodka and old pan stick and even older sheet music—sixty years of nightt...

95 likes 49 comments 49
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The Kissing Tree

Shortlisted for Contest #90 ⭐️

Content warning: racist abuse, homophobia Dale + Eva, 1969   We heard them before we saw them—loud boots over the stones and their rowdy hee-hawing. We knew they were trouble based on that alone.    Dale dropped his hand from my waist and took a small step backward. I hated how that was his instinct.    I closed my eyes and willed the low-hanging branches to hide us, wished for them to pass by.   They did not. I recognized Lucian Hardy as he poked his tow-head through the leaves into our sanctuary. Lucian and hi...

87 likes 51 comments 51
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Even Princesses Need Haircuts

Shortlisted for Contest #88 ⭐️

Once upon a time, a princess lived trapped in a tower, where her hair grew very, very long. Only, not the stylish kind of long—the flowing, wavy mermaid tresses—but quadruple-split ends that crackled like dead flower stems when you touched them, because that’s really what happens when someone lives trapped in a tower without a haircut. The longer the princess stayed in the tower, the longer her hair grew. The distance between her good hair days also grew. It was either too frizzy or too oily, so that the princess started to feel more like a ...

111 likes 69 comments 69
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All the Colors of Visible Light

Submitted to Contest #86

Hazia remembered light. It was the brightest thing she’d ever seen. If she’d had words, she might have compared it to being a snow-feathered dove sitting in the middle of an almond orchard, perched amid an explosion of white blossoms, bits of hesitant white sky piercing through petals—white on white on white. But she experienced that light without a name, or any words at all. It was the most fully present Hazia had ever been in her life, lying on what she later found out was the recovery table, a thin blanket draped over her body, comin...

44 likes 20 comments 20
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Butterflies

Submitted to Contest #84

My dining room table bears the scars of our pandemic year. There are the blond chips in its espresso finish, piebald streaks in the grain like gray hairs creeping into a middle-aged head. The surface is mottled with sparkly violet nail polish, flecks of green tempera paint that would probably wash off with that good scrubbing I never find time to give it, an ever-present smattering of glitter, and cloudy cataracts of heat stains from coffee cups that betrayed me. My dining room table has experienced more love this year, and more abuse—s...

46 likes 31 comments 31
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