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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2024
Submitted to Contest #279
The gas station tucked between your hometown and Memphis only accepts cash or party favours, so Marie opens her satchel over the counter and lets memories freckle the toothpaste-blue linoleum. An alabaster poker die. A spindle of hair-thin cotton. A deck of playing cards. A button popped from the collar of a school shirt. This is all you have between you and the attendant is looking down at it like a janitor skirting a subway. You want to say: “That's our lives, it’s all written down, but you can't see what it means.” Instead, yo...
Winner of Contest #273 🏆
The girl in the graveyard is your best friend, so you take her home. The night is a bruise between you, a blotch of rogue in the passenger window; the colour of fruit left out to fester. The body pries at her seatbelt, a finger, then two. The radio echoes static, the body shuffles in her seat. You study the face; the similar slice of jaw, the nose humped from where a baseball had hit her at twelve, just slightly off centre. The skin like a rain-licked plastic bag. The stink of musk and sulphur. You want to look away but you cannot. She's so ...
Submitted to Contest #249
The morning after my daughter dies, I drive her to an IHOP. The road is scabbed with filled, worn-down, then refilled potholes so by the time we pull into the parking lot the old station wagon is shaking like a wet dog and Marnie’s left cheek is plastered to the vinyl back-seat. Cornsilk hair wreaths her tiny head, lips parted in sleep, pink fists only starting to grey at the knuckles. She looks so much like a porcelain doll that it makes my chest ache. Morning hangs a little lower with empty streets; sun scalds the asphalt, leaving dimples ...
Submitted to Contest #239
We don’t call it a rain, not at first. In the purpled night, stowed away behind weatherboard walls, we imagine it's anything else. An incessant pattering against the asphalt: children throwing stones. A shatter that pulls us headfirst from our sleep: a drunk losing grip on his bottle. The scrape of objects sliding over dew-glossed footpaths: roller skates, scabbed knees, feral cats’ claws. Speculations which make sense. In the mornings, we pull lost things from the gutter like hair from a shower drain. Ring Pops which have already begun to b...
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