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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2019
The holiday party is in a luxury hotel in the city, in the grand ballroom. The tables are set with eggshell white linen tablecloths, fine china plates and bowls, glinting silver plated flatware, and crystal glasses polished so clean that you could see right through them, like they weren’t there at all. Dinner hadn’t started yet, but the room was crowded and the open bar was bustling, as one would expect at a corporate ho...
On the day that I decided to quit running, it was unbearably hot outside. It was late August, deep into the dog days of summer, and even though it was after 5pm and soon the sun would set, the temperature remained in the 90s and the humidity was even worse. Leaving my air conditioned office and stepping outside into the heat felt like I was entering a sauna, which was not something I’d ever had any desire to experience.<...
He pulled me onto his lap, lifting my skirt, and I awkwardly wrapped my legs around his waist. In one motion, he moved so that I was beneath him, my bare ass against the leather interior of the backseat of his luxury SUV. I pulled him closer to me and he kissed my open mouth, and I felt like we were no longer separate people but one singular being leaving the living world and entering the dream world we shared, just us a...
Part 1: Jenna My sister had always been the strong one. I looked at her next to me in the limo from the corner of my eye, but the truth was that I didn’t need to look at her to know her expression – her face was as familiar to me as my own. Her eyes are brown, like mine, but hers are several shades darker, so dark that sometimes I can’t see her pupils. Right now, her gaze was out the window, not moving, n...
Mallory sat at her desk, watching the clock in the corner of her work computer. She thought about how she had her routine for the end of the work day down to a science. At this point, she thought, she had mastered the art of deception. Not the bad kind of deception that could potentially hurt someone, but the kind that gave her an air of mystery. No one in the office knew what she really did after work.
Maggie stared at the ceiling. She never knew what to do in these situations. The space in the bed next to her was empty, the blankets rumpled. She knew that she most look horrible – last night’s eye makeup smeared across her face, hair mussed and going in every direction. She listened to the unfamiliar apartment around her. She couldn’t hear the shower running, but the guy she’d slept with...
My alarm went off at 6am. I hit snooze and dozed off for a blissful extra nine minutes. When my alarm went off again, I quickly shut it off, trying not to wake my husband, and I rolled groggily out of bed, grabbing my glasses off my bedside table. In the bathroom, I decided to take a hot shower before I got dressed. It was March in New England, which meant that the mornings still held onto the chill of winter fo...
The window was drafty. It needed to be replaced, and I could feel the cold chill of December seeping into the apartment. As if on cue, I heard the heat click on, roiling through the baseboards. I pulled my husband’s old gray hoodie tighter around my body. On me, the sweatshirt was hugely oversized, more like wearing a blankety dress than a zip up hoodie. But it was warm and thick and it reminded me that he was still here, if not literally here right at this moment, bu...
Her suitcase was open. Clothes were strewn everywhere. What would she need? What was the weather like in Minnesota in the fall? It would be cold, right? So that meant sweaters, hoodies, jeans, and probably coats and hats and mittens and long underwear. Did she even own long underwear? Probably not. If she did, they’d been thrown away or donated a long time ago. She glanced at the clock. De...
“Are you sure this is what you want?” Logan asked, pen poised above the sheet of paper that he was about to sign. “Yes,” Kate replied. She stood leaning against the counter, arms crossed over her chest. Her eyes fixated on the Trump 2020 banner hanging outside the house, blowing lightly in the breeze. She’d never been more sure of anything.*“Don’t ...
The day had been unseasonably warm for October, but the night air was cold. I put on extra thick socks and my coziest hoodie, and I packed two extra blankets with my sleeping bag. Then I watched outside from my bedroom window, peering outside through the blinds, waiting for the flash of headlights coming down the road. Moments later, Jade pulled up outside my mother’s house. She was driving her mother’s old bla...
Author’s note: This is a follow up to my short story At Home, submitted in December 2019. On Saturday morning, Haley took extra time in the shower. She shaved her legs and underarms, she used the vanilla scented soap that she knew Ben liked, she conditioned her hair. It had been months since she’d taken more than a quick five minute shower before getting back to Ava, their two-year-old d...
The man I’d once believed was my soulmate was moving into the apartment below mine. If the circumstances had been wildly different, this would’ve been exciting – I’d drop my popsicle on the deck, throw a t-shirt on over my bathing suit, rush down the stairs of my deck to greet him, and throw my arms around him, like a long lost lover, or a reunion, the great love of my life I thought I’d lost forever. But the circumstances weren’t different, they were what they were, and presently he was moving boxes into the apartment with his wife and y...
Sitting in the conference room, Becca hadn’t felt this nervous since the day she’d interviewed for this job three years ago. Back then, she had been a blissfully ignorant 22-year-old recent college graduate with no clue what she wanted to do with her life, other than to successfully get a real full time job and move out of her bedroom in her parents’ house. Their boring suburban life was killing her soul slowly, she was ...
As Kelsey sat next to Ron in the waiting room, she couldn’t stop thinking about their last session. “No,” Ron had finally admitted to her. “I’m not attracted to you anymore.” Kelsey had felt her eyes immediately well up with tears. Dr. Davis looked on quietly, not interrupting this long awaited moment in which Ron finally told her the truth. It had been weeks of this – sitting in Dr. D...
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