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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2019
Submitted to Contest #79
“Wherever you want to go,” the man in the sport jacket said. He had an athletic build, and the white shirt he was wearing looked like it was just pulled out of the packaging. Blinding white. No one in Bend dressed like that. D was dressed in his regular school clothes, joggers and a long-sleeved T-shirt. He towered over the man in the sport jacket. “How about Ruby’s?” D said. ...
Submitted to Contest #71
“Fine, you’re on.” I could feel the hot blood pulsing through my fingers, and at that point, I was willing to say anything just to get him to be quiet, and that was what ended up coming out. When a woman says “fine,” it never means fine. It usually means terrible, horrible, worse than can be imagined, or go take a long walk off a short pier, or some sort of expletive equivalent, and this case was no different. &...
Submitted to Contest #70
It was she who contacted me at the outset. I didn’t find it weird at the time. People still remember me as a one-time hopeful for the U.S. Alpine team, so, even in a somewhat obscure sport like Alpine skiing, from time to time, people approach me. It’s flattering, especially now that I’ve gotten older and slower. At my best, I lived, ate, and breathed skiing until the sport held no pleasure for me anymore. I became a machine, spending hours visualizing ...
Submitted to Contest #69
The red and white striped bikini went back into the drawer, to be buried by a small mountain of black socks. She grabbed two pairs of the socks and squeezed them into a corner underneath the turtleneck sweater and a pair of jeans. It was the flip flops that made her cry. There was something about replacing them with the chunky, old “I mean business” kind of snow boots that she’d learned to value over any fashion footwear while growing up in Vermont. She...
Submitted to Contest #63
March I come into the world screaming. The sky is pewter and the air is damp and cold. I have only a dim memory of the dark warmth that insulated me just hours ago. The icy air bites my feathers, which are cold and stick to me, a wet, heavy cloak I cannot remove. My body quakes involuntarily and I want the warmth of tears as I squeeze my eyes closed. They will not come. I lift my head to the heavens and shriek for help. There are only shrieks and screec...
Submitted to Contest #62
It started when the sponsors started referring to us as Twinsies. It was a joke, really. Tina Chen was from China; I was from sunny California. But we were a matched set, it seemed. Tina with her porcelain, delicate skin and long hair tied up in a high ponytail. I was tan from running in the sun, hair bleached blond. But we had the same dimensions, both five feet, four inches, and both small, barely topping a hundred pounds. We’d traded first and second in each race, bringing drama to the sport of marathon, an event so lacking in excit...
Submitted to Contest #61
Ben adjusted his glasses and held the letter closer, then further away from his eyes. “This is ridiculous. You read it to me.” He playfully grabbed me around the hip and pulled me closer to him. The day was sunny, one of those late summer days when the grass still feels moist and the sun spills like champagne through leaves that had just begun to turn. I grabbed the envelope. Ben was three years older...
Submitted to Contest #60
“Uh, I think I know what’s real and what’s not, and this is definitely not.” We were eating popcorn, and Chiara was challenging the claim that movie theatre popcorn was made with real butter. “It says made with real butter flavoring, so that doesn’t mean that it’s all butter. Some of it could be palm oil,” Chase countered. “Maybe it’s made with butter for flavoring, and the rest is like, that stuff that...
Submitted to Contest #59
Handsome Billy. He was always handsome, even when we were only twelve. Running through the cornfields of Indiana, holding my hand, we raced the rolling black clouds, the harbingers of copious water that drenched the fields. An hour later the sun would arrive with a mist that rose off the ground, and we would eat nothing but the late summer corn and tomatoes on white bread, slathered with mayo, salt and pepper. Billy looked up at me under the mop of his auburn hair, turned gold with the late summer sun, and I knew that he wouldn’t stay in Ind...
Submitted to Contest #58
The IT department had been uncooperative. She’d called for an explanation as to why they couldn’t make the programming change that was needed, and they’d first said that they couldn’t. They simply couldn’t. It was impossible. And by the way, did she think that they just snapped their fingers and things magically happened? They didn’t, they were busy, and the message was hard coded into the computer. So it couldn’t be done. None of this was useful for purposes of explaining it...
Submitted to Contest #57
My hands were trembling again, I noticed with despair. I wanted to be sitting on the porch, or at Theresa’s party, but instead I was glued to the computer, a large white rectangle before me waiting to be filled with words. It had gotten worse over the past week, and I was now on the equivalent of academic probation. I had been invited to a writer’s retreat, an escape from my tiny hometown of Glastonbury. I was living in a tiny but pleasant little house with a white picket fence and a field of daisies behind it. I should hav...
Submitted to Contest #56
Circling around and around and getting nowhere. That was the ice in my glass, and the way I'd felt my life was going. I was now past middle-aged, and I'd been persuaded by my friend Beth to attend a "networking" event in the city. I was nursing a gin and tonic, and resisting the urge to check the time again. I felt a tug at my elbow. It was Chipper Beth, wanting me to meet someone new. She was always doing this. Usually I found it kind of charming. It was nice that she was always looking out for me, wanting to set me up. Now I found it...
Submitted to Contest #55
"Can you keep a secret?" We were walking back to the dorms from Chem. The day was bright and beautiful, with stripes cut into the lush, green grass from where it had been freshly mowed. I hated conversations like this. I didn't want to be saddled with a secret. They always seemed to be either burdensome, because the information given was grave, or, more likely, something perfectly mundane. In the case of the latter, I always had to hide how pathetic I thought that it was that the information given would be interpreted as dramatic. I d...
Submitted to Contest #53
"It's not everlasting. Nothing is everlasting," he said. "Fine, just Gobstopper then," I replied. "I was just calling it by its proper name, the Everlasting Gobstopper." "Mine's still at a tart stage. I haven't gotten to sweet yet. But let's compare anyway." We both pulled them out of our mouths and held them up. Mine was robin's egg blue, and slightly larger than his, which had morphed into a sunny yellow. We had grown up summers together, played freeze tag when we were small, and read books together on his grandfather's bed. That was befor...
Submitted to Contest #52
The sheets are damp again. And that little tendril of a curl on the right side of my temple that starts to coil when I sweat had started to form. Coffee, I thought. I need to get a cup of coffee and just gather my thoughts. It was the third night in a row of the dream, the same terrifying dream that I'd had since I'd heard the news that I had been chosen for the space launch. My flight instructor had literally laughed when I told him about it. Chuckled and smiled. I was mesmerized as his chuckle developed into a chortle and then a guff...
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