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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2020
Submitted to Contest #273
“Last one to Dairy Queen’s a rotten egg!” my friend, Justin, shouted through a mouthful of chewing gum as he barreled past me on the sidewalk, red coat flying out behind him like a superhero cape. I chuckled to myself as I watched the coat be brought to life by the unseasonably cold September breeze and pictured Justin on the front cover of a comic book with a Dairy Queen Blizzard in hand, sporting a pink-toothed, Hubba Bubba grin. “Hurry up! Your mom’s coming to pick us up at five and I wan…”. I didn’t hear the rest of his words because all...
Submitted to Contest #259
My coffee cup shakes as I pick it up, readily giving away my unspoken sense of unease like an innocent bystander pointing out the precise location of a hit-and-run (“right over here, Officer, look!”). I steady my cup as best I can before taking a generous gulp of the bitter liquid. “This isn’t going to be pretty,” I think as I watch my Uncle John (no, not the one I used to pick blueberries with on the family farm growing up, but the other one. The Uncle John who spent most of his twenties doing hard time for a situation that no one ever had ...
Submitted to Contest #103
A place in between living and not living, a place in between Here and There; a place that is almost, but not quite. A place that is not so much a place as it is a feeling, a feeling that is not so much a feeling as it is a longing; a longing to come home. It’s on these lonely highways at three o’clock in the morning, a dizzying haze of homesickness and nostalgia washing over me – candlelit windows illuminating wraparound porches in the countryside and city skylines casting a spotlight over the ostentatious glamour of a life never af...
Submitted to Contest #68
It had been twenty-four years since she'd last seen it, but the place looked exactly the same.Well...almost.Growing up in an old town like this one, everything moves at such a slow, creeping pace, that you almost expect time to wait for you to come back home before the clock starts ticking again.Twenty-four years.Just enough time for the old grocery store clerk who used to offer me candy as I waited on my mother to finish shopping to forget my name.Just enough time for me to get married and have two kids of my own.Just enough time for the ma...
Submitted to Contest #65
~ That’s the thing about befriending death: you’re not so scared when it finally comes for you. ~ “Rest in Peace”.Those are words we save for the dead.What no one tells you is that “rest” and “peace” aren’t words that are typically associated with the afterlife.Living people are funny like that. They think that once your earthly heart stops beating you’re automatically gifted with a storybook happily ever after.What no one tells you is that those earthly sorrows follow you into the unknown.One moment you’re a girl with blood running through ...
Submitted to Contest #63
“By the time I stepped outside, the leaves were on fire. Flames were all around us now, burning in such an inviting way that I stepped toward them without thinking, completely in awe with their glow. Just as I got close enough to feel the heat licking the soles of my shoes, someone grabbed my arm. As my unidentified savior pulled me back to safety, cursing me all the while for being so stupid, I was struck by a strange nostalgia for something (or someone) I always wanted but never got to have. That voice, I thought. God, that voice. I turn a...
Submitted to Contest #57
I died two deaths that year; once when my heart stopped beating, and again when the sound of my voice became nothing more than a distant memory to the people I thought would love me forever. As living, breathing beings who have never known a time in which our lungs weren’t taking in air and our eyes not looking for a clock to tell us how long we’ve been doing so, it’s only natural to wonder what comes after.Where do we go when our earthly forms finally decide to fail us and the last words that slip from our mouths become the epitaph on our g...
Submitted to Contest #54
~ I wasn't expecting to see you again, but there you were, staring at me as if time was never a measure of how long two people could love each other. ~Running into you in an old, dusty train station wasn't quite how I pictured fate bringing us back together. But sure enough, as I waited for my train to arrive, I found myself staring at a painfully familiar figure in the distance. The figure came closer and closer until I could clearly make out the slender face of a boy I used to love. You're taller now, and your features have matured as well...
Submitted to Contest #51
~ On nights like these when the ghosts of my loneliness come back to haunt me, you appear before me once more. ~Somewhere laying in the back of our old bedroom are scrapbooks filled with photos of us from better days. On the fourth page there are images forever stuck in time of us looking down at our wedding cake adorned with "Till Death Do Us Part" with two plastic, miniature versions of us holding hands. What no one told those two little people was that in eight years, two months, and thirteen days that term w...
Submitted to Contest #49
I sit and stare into my coffee cup, watching intently as the milk and cream swirl around as if they're playing a game that I'm not invited to understand. I watch intently until the swirls get caught up in the vastness of the dark liquid and vanish before I even have a chance to figure out their intimate game. I taste the coffee for the first time since making it and gasp a bit, not quite ready to come to terms with the bitterness that’s embracing my taste buds and flooding my senses. The sweetness of the milk and cream has been completely ov...
Submitted to Contest #32
We met in Tokyo under the city lights. Everything about you intrigued me; even your silhouette was beautiful. You taught me the art of falling in love. Eventually you taught me the art of letting go. I still dream about you sometimes. *** The cherry blossoms bloomed again this spring. Some days I go and sit beneath their branches, listening to them whisper in their native language about the past. They asked me about you. Remember those days when we were just children? How we used to chase the falling petals as they descended to t...
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