Menu

Prompts
DirectoryContestsMagazineFAQ
Stories
Studio
Apps

Hire professionals for your project

Advice, insights and news

Online publishing courses

Free publishing webinars

Launch your book in style

Bestseller PodcastBook Cover ArtSuccess Stories
Tools
Book Promotion SitesBook Review BlogsBooktube Channel GuideBook Title GeneratorCharacter Name GeneratorIndependent PublishersLiterary AgentsLiterary MagazinesPen Name GeneratorPlot GeneratorPublishers DirectoryShort Story IdeasWriting ContestsWriting ExercisesWriting Scholarships
Menu
Prompts
Contests
Stories
Blog
Directory
Contests
Magazine
FAQ

AnneMarie Miles

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2021

Stories (54)
Comments
Library
330 Followers
207 Following

54 Stories

3302 karma pts

?

Only Child

Submitted to Contest #295

I have three siblings, but I am an only child. People are always surprised to hear about them, the three curious souls who grew up alongside me and are now nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, people are more surprised to hear I’m the youngest of the four, and the first to have a child of my own. If my “older” brother and his wife had been more careful, I may have been the only one brave enough (that’s not to say we’re not grateful; I do love my nephew, from a distance).Distance, that’s the word. That’s what stands between all of us. It is probably ...

2 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

Grief AI Assistance

Submitted to Contest #286

“Do you want me to continue, Mrs. Shafer?”Blair is watching the wine drip down the wall, scarlet streams leading to the broken bottle on the floor. She senses it staring at her from the kitchen doorframe, a blurry outline in her peripheral, watching.Her husband had been reading to her. She stirred wine into mushrooms, inhaling gulps of bitter steam while Parker sat on the couch in the other room, reading a passage aloud from their favorite book, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. At the precise moment Addie realized Henry Strauss had remembe...

17 likes 3 comments 3
Read story

Fresh Pine Creek's Parked Gossip, Episode 17

Submitted to Contest #254

[Transcribed from a previously recorded live stream]Hello Campers and welcome to another episode of “Parked Gossip!” Coming to you live from Fresh Pine Creek RV Resort where we hook you up with more than just 50-amp electricity, water, and sewage at every site, I’m your host, Morgan Juliana, here to hook you up with all the campground gossip.If it’s your first time tuning in, let me tell you how it works. Each week, residents of our campground can drop a note into our Guest Gab box in the office, and every Sunday morning, I open it up and sp...

17 likes 15 comments 15
Read story

Traffic

Submitted to Contest #253

Highway 17 is a parking lot. I'm stopped in the hottest stretch of the 26-mile route going through Los Gatos. It’s the final few miles before the ascent, and it is completely unshielded by a cloudless sky. Tall bushes line the paved highway but the sun is high above us and offers no shade. In the distance, a precious cover of trees waits tantalizingly atop the mountains, my home lying on the other end of the summit in the southern end of another county. So close, yet so far.If I knew it was an accident, this blockade of unmoving vehicles wou...

13 likes 9 comments 9
Read story

Spilling the tea

Submitted to Contest #252

It was dark inside the teapot. Crowded, too. Cast iron walls created a cavernous chamber that was both loud and cold. Around him, Smith sensed an endless sea of sticky flesh. It should have been warm, all those bare bodies, but instead, it felt clammy like a feverish chill. It made Smith's skin crawl; made him retract and contort and twist. No matter how he flinched, there was only more cold, sweating flesh; and without his vision, that was all there was.That, and the screaming.The screaming echoed, vibrated through his teeth, filling his ca...

18 likes 15 comments 15
Read story

Monster Goals

Submitted to Contest #231

To the human living above me, I'd like to propose some changes.It’s been a year since you issued me your set of rules, and in that year, I’ve complied. You’re still alive, aren’t you? Your dog is still alive, yes? And if you’d bothered to check under your bed once in awhile, you’d know that it’s the cleanest it’s ever been (turns out dust bunnies and ants and snack crumbs make a delicious meal, thanks for that suggestion, by the way). Overall, I think I’ve made a really great monster-under-the-bed, and I do hope you'd agree.Now, I know one o...

50 likes 37 comments 37
Read story

A Funeral

Submitted to Contest #230

“It’s just you and me again,” I say.I’d waited until the flock of my relatives had dispersed, and finally, I am alone at his casket. His pale face looks at peace, and it makes him almost unrecognizable. I’m used to the anger, the depression, the mask of whatever vice he could find.On his lapel, someone, my mother I assume, has issued him a rose. I scoff at the symbol of love. That word, that feeling, had been foreign to Floyd, absent in every corner of his life. No matter how hard I tried to love him, I was nothing but a worthless, unwanted,...

22 likes 27 comments 27
Read story

Sensation

Submitted to Contest #230

Dr. Adrela says it happens to everyone.“We’ve forgotten how to feel with our bodies. We get stuck in our heads, and we try to rationalize all of our feelings. Our brain is a wonderful resource, but we are overusing ours, especially when it comes to this. It can lead to problems…”Dr. Adrela says we’ve become over-domesticated, that we’ve lost our connection to our animalistic nature. “Do you think animals in the wild are depressed? Of course not! There’s no time for depression when you are hunting for food, fighting for your life, fucking, or...

17 likes 19 comments 19
Read story

Elf Off the Shelf

Submitted to Contest #229

From the beginning, there had only ever been one rule: Don’t let anyone see you move. But after what I saw tonight, I was afraid I was going to have to break that rule.The Dunken’s house was full of people. From inside Mrs. Mitchell’s purse, I carefully peeked out through the open zipper and saw dozens of recognizable faces, people who had come over to pick up Oliver and Sklyer’s friends over the years. They were all laughing and eating and drinking merrily. Despite Christmas having already passed – this I knew because Mrs. Mitchell had alre...

24 likes 20 comments 20
Read story

Dad's Cereal

Submitted to Contest #228

My daughter found a hat in one of the boxes collecting dust underneath my bed yesterday. Out of boredom, she had asked me if she could “investigate” the contents of this unknown space, a place in the house that she had not yet explored. If it had been December, I would have quickly said no, frightened by the possibility that the truth of Santa’s workshop would be revealed at too early an age. But in the middle of fall, the thought of purchasing presents and stowing them away felt distant and hidden. I had been busy with other things, perhaps...

36 likes 26 comments 26
Read story

Blizzard

Shortlisted for Contest #227 ⭐️

The blizzard was inside him now, in more ways than one. He felt his bones grow goosebumps the way he thought they could only appear on his skin. They seemed to shiver between the muscle and tissue that were once soft, now like icicles hardening beneath the surface. His fingers and toes succumbed to their numbness much quicker than they had in the earlier days, warning him that even five minutes of stillness was too dangerous. But as he shifted in the small cab of his truck, the effort felt enormous, and his breath threatened to release the l...

57 likes 81 comments 81
Read story

Little Red Wishes on Wild Things

Submitted to Contest #226

Beneath a hooded cloak, I gaze up at all the things on fire in the sky, searching for shooting stars. The sky is as vast and deep as the ocean, as dark and sinister as the forest; it upholds all of its chaos, displaying its trauma, as if to say: “You should know better than to trust in me.” I distract myself, looking for constellations while I wait for morning, hopeful that a glowing streak of light might seize my wish and free me of this burden.Release me of those devil’s eyes, my heart yearns.When a cloud emerges from my lips, I pull my cl...

21 likes 20 comments 20
Read story

Watercolors

Submitted to Contest #225

He tells me to sit still.It is not hard to do. I am lost in thought, lost in my reasons for being here.I keep thinking of that woman I never knew. The person in the painting on the wall in the hallway of the house I grew up in. I keeping thinking about what it would have been like to know her, what it would have been like to call her my grandmother.Or would you have preferred, abuela? Did you speak English? Even that, I do not know. Even that, my father will not say.He only says, You look just like her.I test your name out on my lips: Mary. ...

29 likes 22 comments 22
Read story

Carry Me

Submitted to Contest #224

“I can’t sleep,” I whisper.I am seven, standing at the foot of my parent's bed. My father is snoring, and the rain is pounding steadily onto concrete. I imagine the worms coming up for a swim somewhere in the grass.“I can’t sleep,” I say again, but I only hear the bed squeaking as my mother shifts to her other side. I can’t tell her I’m scared. I can’t tell her my brothers shoved me in the linen closet when we were playing hide-and-seek and left me there. It’s dark in my parent’s room, and I know it’s silly, but I am frozen, too scared to ge...

35 likes 40 comments 40
Read story

Cerulean

Winner of Contest #223 🏆

The door is cerulean, a bright and vibrant blue, but really it is the color of my sudden uneasiness. The feeling creeps up me slowly, jumps out at me dauntingly, and I am frozen in it. If the door were a mirror – and how I wish it were as innocent as a mirror – I would see my face reflected back to me, and it would tell me to run.I’m not sure what’s more jarring: the fact that this door is a clashing contrast to the rest of the library décor, or the fact that I’ve never noticed the path we took to get here before. I suppose there are better ...

187 likes 188 comments 188
Read story