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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2019
Submitted to Contest #50
It started with the blue-green slime. She told him it was disgusting. Would he want a glob of what was in someone's mouth on his dinner plate, she wanted to know? This was a toothpaste glob in the sink, right where she brushed her own teeth. It was nauseating. It was on par with putting a glob of food on someone else's dinner plate. She pushed a wet tendril of hair out of her face. It was 95 degrees, and the air conditioning repair man was still not done. The banging and clanking from the basement was almost too much to bear. He couldn't see...
Submitted to Contest #49
He never had any respect for what hung in the balance. The day had started off with such promise. The sun shone, glittering on the snowbanks and she had packed a perfect picnic lunch, roast beef on a hard french roll, hard-boiled eggs, a thermos of thick mocha and a sleeve of chocolate sandwich cookies. It had been one of those February days when spring tiptoed to the front door and stuck his nose out, while the sun was still high in the winter sky. She was always the one to attend to the details, she thought. She'd suggested the weekend, bo...
Submitted to Contest #47
The birds bickered with one another as you drove home from work today. Late summer, windows down, you could even hear them over your station. You know the one. Used to be cool. Now your music is featured on Adult Rock or Oldies. Even the rap music the kids refer to as "Old School." It's "Love in an Elevator," by Aerosmith. Your mind wanders for a moment. You are transported briefly to the time that you and your sister and your brother and your sister's friend went to the concert. You had a jean jacket, a Calvin Klein, that you spent all you...
Submitted to Contest #42
"Come, come on an adventure. Won't you see what you are made of? There is another mountain to climb. . . " I'd been watching those words crawl across the ceiling of the train car for at least the past three weeks. The accompanying picture was what had drawn me in, though. There was a path, and in the foreground, an athletic, handsome man, holding his arm out, as though beckoning. I couldn't place his nationality, his open shirt was too generic and features too exotic. Behind him was a path that started wide but narrowed as it climbed a...
Submitted to Contest #41
I was taken from my mother when I was just a baby. Little did I know at the time that it was part of the great plan and that there was much more to my destiny than just being a little suckling pig on a little farm in the country. My first memory is of waking up warm, with my brothers and sisters, all nestled underneath my mother's arm. We pushed and prodded our way to get to her milk. It was warm and creamy, sweet, and it smelled just like my mother. I loved her. She was large and soft, and warm and protective. But that memory is a short one...
Submitted to Contest #40
They met every Wednesday outside of Ronson's Juicebar. Katie was the dark one, tall and thin, she carried low. Meg was tiny. Hers had been the toughest so far, with relentless morning sickness. Her gag reflex had finally calmed enough that she could nurse a thin white tea, a drip of honey. Bella was the furthest along and the happiest. She'd fretted for two years when she thought she was barren. Then, miraculously, she'd fainted at the supermarket. A blood test later had confirmed it. She was due in November. They had a routine. They ca...
Submitted to Contest #39
The fear electrified her fingers. She felt the prickle of urgency throughout her arms and legs. In training, she'd been taught to modulate herself, to notice when her heart began to race. "Our emotions interfere with our ability to think and problem solve," the trainer had said. "You must use techniques to calm yourself." For her, the most effective had been box breaths. She inhaled to a count of eight, held it to a count of eight, breathed out to a count of eight, and paused for eight before inhaling again. Then repeat. Then repeat ag...
Submitted to Contest #35
I woke up with a gun pointing at me. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me and I’m not the type who lives a life that might result in a gun being pointed at me, so to say that I was shocked would be an understatement. But there it was, black steel and cold barrel pointed six inches from my face. I saw thick fingers gripping it hard and followed the line of my sight along two beefy arms in long black sleeves. I could see that it was early morning and sunlight was beginning to sl...
Submitted to Contest #33
I was breathless, and I didn’t know whether it was because of the pectoral fly machine or what had just happened. The day had started out uneventfully. I’ve always been a gym rat. I love working out. I’d gone for a run first, the clear blue sky still cold, and robins and blue jays out for the first time. I’d gotten a gym membership at The Center because I didn’t know if the weather in Ellwood City was like at home, where a cold March day could be either a snowy whiteout or shorts weather, it was so unpredictable.&nbs...
Submitted to Contest #32
I’ve worked at United Box, Inc. since high school, which was not that long ago. Everything about United Box, Inc., is boxy. The building itself looks like a large, corrugated box, puce-colored, plunked down on a flat roadway. The roadway itself could be an assembly line belt. It runs right up to the building and encircles it. Trucks and cars roll in and out on the circular road, picking up boxes, large and small. We o...
Shortlisted for Contest #31 ⭐️
Chicken. That was the reason I’d had to stop. It seemed that there was always an item or two missing from the inventory we’d gathered from the good old Handi-Mart that weekend, and now, Thursday night after work, I thought I’d better pick up the chicken. To that list, I’d added shampoo, milk, cornmeal and two packages of gummy bears, a special request from the kids. The list always grew when we had one item to pick up. Joe’s Market is...
Submitted to Contest #26
It had been one of those glittering evenings. It was a party, a concert for one of my distant relatives. Private concerts were all the rage, and we Hapsburgs knew how to make an evening. Mama had told me that Wolfgang Gottlieb was to play. You, reader, know him by his other name, Mozart. He was a child, like me. A prodigy. The son of Leopold Mozart. Like me, fortune had already kissed him on the forehead. Austria knew both of our identities. So...
Submitted to Contest #25
As an undergrad, I worked in the college bookstore, a place where I witnessed the unlikely. It was a pleasant bookstore, old-fashioned for the most part, with dark, exposed wood and warm lighting in the stacks. The main portion was modern, with recessed lighting to attractively display college memorabilia, nostalgic felt pennants, sweatshirts and joggers, bumper stickers and the like. During the first two weeks of school, the store was always flooded with new st...
Submitted to Contest #24
"Tell us a story, grandma," they begged me. I was sipping a lemonade that was just tart enough to make me pucker, and the way the littlest one hopped up on to my lap made me break into a smile almost as wide as the endless blue sky above us. It was a summer day, and we had the time. I only learned late in life that the very young and the very old truly understand value of time spent together. The others rush from project to project, too busy to engage in leisure, which is real...
Submitted to Contest #23
The windshield wipers waged a losing battle against the thick white flakes of snow that seemed to fall more quickly than they could be wiped away on that unforgettable January evening. I'd received a letter from Forestry Professionals earlier in the month. Apparently, property I owned was adjacent to the Estate of Eleanor Hazleton, and Mr. Craig Sheldonier of Forestry Professionals had written to ask whether I might be interested in acquisition of the Hazleton property. I wasn...
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