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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2021
The building before her stretched into the sky, touching the clouds and forcing them apart with it’s violent pointed head. Dandelion stared up at it, with cuts across her arms and her legs—tired wasn’t quite the right word for what she felt in her appendages. Diagnostic checks told her there was little wrong with her legs that an overnight charge wouldn’t fix. Her mind, if it could be called that, had fixated somehow on one moment. She couldn’t see the building from where she stood, beneath the canopy of the New York city skyline. Still she ...
Submitted to Contest #268
The Ending (Of Everything) I turned toward Amanda after I read the news ticker. She smiled at me with those doe eyes and clutched my hand tightly, letting out a little giggle. I smiled back, because it’s happening just the way Clergy Tom said it would…mostly. I’d kind of hoped we could bring the sinful city of San Francisco to a reckoning. We had the weapons stockpile that he’d been collecting for ages, and a plan to start in January. But judging by the tear-filled, puffy-eyes of the newscaster, we weren’t going to make it that long. “To the...
Submitted to Contest #229
A police transport zipped by overhead just above seasonal signs that read, in most cases, the generic “Happy Holidays.” Larken Marche leveraged her laser swordspear to keep her upright as she crunched through the knee-deep snow that covered most of 56th street. She glared at the whiteness covering the streets below, bringing to a freeze all of the normally bustling commerce, and more importantly, passable walkways and streets in the dregs. She pulled her cloak more tightly around her shoulders and watched her breath mist before her in dismay...
Submitted to Contest #205
**** Trigger Warning: This story involves a terminal illness and may be unsuitable or triggering for some. **** A gentle breeze ebbs and flows, licking at my skin like the eternal ocean which laps at its sandy shores. Instead of deadwood, an invisible sea of pregnant air brings me aromas: damp earth and rotting wood are its gifts. I sense in it the painful desire for rain as the humidity cries out for its deliverance from the saturated air, ready to embrace the earth and trees like an insatiable lover. Here I stand, forgotten like an unsent...
Submitted to Contest #190
Janet sits two rows up and to the right atop a pink pillow with purple hearts, and a perfectly complementing zafu that’s purple with one giant pink heart currently hidden by her ample bottom. With any luck, she’ll be feeling much less zen in a few weeks when I get my revenge. She senses me and turns, flashing me a bright smile. I grin and nod and pretend everything’s fine, because that’s what I do. The instructor lights the incense because that’s what he does. Whisps of smoke rise, hinting at the existence of unfelt breezes as it twists and...
Submitted to Contest #184
Why do such nefarious things always happen when I’m supposed to be in bed? This was the thought that Tarina Persson considered, though nothing truly nefarious had yet occurred. Tarina was about as far from nefarious as she could be, still in her long-sleeve bamboo pajamas—her favorites, incidentally—black with white trim and vaguely reminiscent of a sailor’s uniform. However, Tarina was well aware that the wind outside, which had suddenly stopped, had, until then, whipped the coniferous trees by her back patio into a frenzy. And a quick exam...
Submitted to Contest #180
Warning: Contains some (minimal) gun violence. I was near enough to the door to catch the kiss of ice when it opened and to be reassured when the frigid blast shrunk proportionally to the width of the narrowing crack that the chill that still resided in my bones would eventually diminish. A family came through. I only dared to catch a glimpse from my station as I posed over the half-empty coffee cup that graces the three-foot-diameter table my elbows rest rudely against. The father led, head held high with a gray fedora and a black band ...
Submitted to Contest #170
The snow had stopped, and for the first time all winter, the mountain peeked out with yards of white draped over its shoulders like a cloak. The hill itself huddled in protection against the unusually cold that winter had become. I stood against the wrought iron balcony rail with a mug of hot apple cider, ready for the sounds of children sledding nearby as I knew they would soon. My own protection against the elements came in the form of a robe, thick and fluffy, and I could keep it for only a couple of hundred dollars if I paid the ho...
Submitted to Contest #167
Cherry apple dripped over his bottom lip and rolled as a drop of red-brown syrup down to Clay's chin. At twenty-four, he'd still not given up many of his childhood vices, including the least destructive of which was a penchant for hard candies that could only be found around Halloween time in his hometown of Libertyville, New York. He sucked the cherry-apple-flavored liquid up over his lip, enjoying the tart sweetness on the tip of his tongue as he plowed forward through the snow in the open market. It was a Sunday, and he liked to make it ...
Submitted to Contest #158
Warning: Sexual theme (not explicit) and (brief) depictions of nudity. She wants me. The thought that went through Harold's mind as he shared the cramped elevator, surrounded on all sides with mirrors that couldn't hide the woman in the midriff-exposing halter-top that had been kind enough to hold the elevator door for him in the four-star hotel that tried so hard to pretend to be a five-star. No. Ten…eleven…twelve… Fourteen. That was Harold's floor number. But the next floor to light was fifteen, even though he'd hammered the button thric...
Submitted to Contest #141
This story is about the war in Ukraine, though sanitized somewhat. Many violent things are implied here because the nature of what is happening right now is violent and graphic and disturbing. To tell the story without this would be to tell a lie. I hope that you can forgive me for any mistakes and understand that this story comes from a place of compassion and an effort not to look away, whatever the cost. “It’s in your head, Petr. You always let your mind run away with you. They’re not monsters, not really. They’re just men.” Maybe Ver...
Submitted to Contest #133
Caution: This is not a love story. Well, it kind of is. But mostly, this is a story about losing a life without dying, but never losing hope.Scene IThin fingers shook the crochet needles, one against the other, as the man, thirty going on sixty, looped then pulled at the thick forest-green yarn with pink crochet needles. One was pink anyway. The other was missing some of its coating, giving it a blotchy pinkish-gray appearance as he circled it it deftly around and pulled another loop through. His breath came in bursts of steam that hung in t...
Submitted to Contest #113
Corpulent flakes defy gravity, swinging like obese dancers in pirouettes as blades of the winter winds slice through my tan army coat, coming to rest on a conspicuous gap between two trees, each of which seem nearly as old as New York City itself. I fish the watch out of my pocket, hidden there because the strap had fallen off before I found it in the autumn leaves months before. At least it still keeps time mostly. Three seconds to go before Central Park finally sees something worth talking about, but the only person here to bear witness t...
Submitted to Contest #97
Trigger Warning: Smoking, Violence, Some Cursing, Mythical Creatures, Noirdefenestrate - to throw someone out of a window (Definitions from Oxford Languages)The darkness gets into everything here on the south side. Smoke from my cancer-stick winds its way up into my nose and I stifle the urge to sneeze, admiring my own reflection. A thirty-two year old with clean-cut hair left over from the Marine Corps, same place I got the habit, stares back at me. I’m going to pay some day for those cancer-sticks, but in the world in which I live, dying o...
Submitted to Contest #96
Muhammed's hands shook violently, threatening to spill the contents of his coffee mug. He wasn't even sure that he liked Mochas anymore, but here he was, ordering from habit. A frothy, foamy sip told him the truth. Caramel Macchiatos had displaced Mochas in his coffee hierarchy, but it was too late now. The light flickered, and the man looked up to catch a face peering through the window. He forced a smile and beckoned with the hand not cradling the oversized mug to his visitor to join him. At the same time, he caught his reflection in the g...
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