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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2025
Submitted to Contest #298
Margaret had always believed in the healing power of the words of kindness and in the quiet, steady art when it came to mending things, whether they were broken bones or that of the broken mind. Her small cottage sitting on the edge of the village had once glowed with warmth, the hearth always lit and inviting, a kettle always hot, her fresh herbs drying slowly above, hung from the rafters. The laughter that drifted lazily through the open windows like summer smoke in the air. She had been the beating heart of the area once upon a time; she ...
Submitted to Contest #297
The cold in the attic felt as if it had been there forever. It had soaked into the floorboards, soaked into the walls, and now it was permeating into the marrow of Jack Halley’s bones. For three days he hadn’t moved from his post, barely shifting except to scratch the coded notes into his pad or adjust the crackling receiver beside him to tune into the signal. It wasn’t the first time he’d hidden above a bakery in the middle of nowhere. But this was different. This time he was in Normandy, and it was June of 1944. And the world was about to ...
The midnight bells rang out across the rooftops of Florence one rainy night in the April of 1497, carrying with them the weight of a city caught between beauty and its slow decay into inevitable rot. Rain, as thin as threads of silk, drizzled over the cracked terracotta tiles and slid down crumbling stone walls. In the time worn workshop that sat behind the old apothecary, Matteo wiped his stained hands on his grubby apron and leant closer to the flickering oil lamp. The tincture hadn’t turned. The root he had used had been no good. “Damn,” ...
“Bloody hell, that’s beginning to look quite dangerous,” Professor Jin Dong Lee, affectionately called Professor Jimmy by his colleagues, said as he returned to the room. He stood there in front of the large glass walls of the Breckland Astronomy Observatory. His eyes were glued to the image on the digital monitors lining the control room wall. Before him, the Sun’s fiery surface throbbed with turbulent magnificence, its magnetic coils writhing and curling like dancers in a biblical inferno. For weeks, the team had been tracking the solar ev...
THE TENTH HOUR12:00 p.m. The train rocked slightly as it pulled out of Euston Station, metal wheels screeching under the weight, while the city carried on above. Thomas Quinn sat alone by the window; coat collar still turned up against the grey drizzle outside. He hadn’t shaved in two days now, and the coffee in his paper cup had cooled long ago. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t drinking it for the taste.He reached for the cup and saw something tucked under the sleeve of his coat, barely visible, just a corner of folded paper where it hadn’t been...
My face and mouth were drenched in Dimitri’s blood, as my driver’s brains sprayed across me as his head exploded just inches away. The force of it was so intense, I swore I inhaled part of his final thought. Shards of his skull tore into my face, slicing open my brow and nose, shearing off most of my ear before slamming into the rear window.Instinct took over in an instant.I grabbed the door latch and threw myself out of the car into the freezing snow, rolling clear just as the door I’d escaped from was ripped clean off by a lamppost. A hear...
Submitted to Contest #296
Reader warning: You will have to read this story to understand the secret. This is a story about my introduction to storytelling, and it started when I was just sixteen. I was at my regular local disco, where a live band was playing, and a guest celebrity DJ was spinning tracks. Partway through the night, the DJ suddenly stopped the music and picked out twenty of us from the dance floor and called us onto the stage, pairing us up without any explanation or introductions. We had no idea what was going on, not until he announced a surprise da...
A Bad Decision. The air smelled of burning tires and something sweetly rotten; it could be overripe mangoes left to fester in the sun, maybe, or it could be a body no one has found yet. Patricia pressed her back against the crumbling wall of an abandoned shop. It was becoming hard for her to breathe; she needed to rest. The gunfire had stopped for the moment, but that meant nothing. The rebels may have moved on past. She could hear their voices fading into nothing. But she knew they would be back. Her cameraman, Elias, lay sprawled in the ...
The Moscow correspondent. The snow had teeth. It bit without warming first, tore at the ears, chewed fingers through gloves, and punished the unprepared with a kind of historical malice. But Catherine didn’t complain. She zipped her coat up to the chin and pressed on regardless, trailing after her father through the crowd outside Belorussky Station. Boots crunched in cadence behind his longer stride. He didn’t look back. Simon Locke wasn’t a man who ever looked back. He had a name, sure, but mostly he was a byline. Headlines followed him lik...
The night was the kind of dark that didn't end at the skin—it pressed inwards, thick and smothering, the way grief does after the noise of the funeral's gone. London, April 1941. The Blitz had become background noise. People learned to sleep beneath it, as one might sleep beneath an old, leaky roof: restless, but used to it. A man in a threadbare trench coat moved briskly through the warren of Southwark’s backstreets. The coat once belonged to the War Office—before it found itself draped over the shoulders of Harold Lennox, a man whose soul ...
Submitted to Contest #295
The Door That Wasn’t ThereIn a rambling, but creaky, old Victorian house that had more rooms than any sensible person could ever possibly need, lived a girl called Willow Strong. She was eleven years old, and had a mop of crazy red hair that refused to stay tamed, and a mind that was always halfway between reality and somewhere a lot more interesting. She was being looked after and raised by her eccentric grandmother, a sprightly old woman with a passion for knitting and an even bigger passion for bulk buying her groceries that she called he...
Amira had always believed in hard work, not luck. She was a freelance graphic designer living her dream, the vocation she always wanted and had just moved into her new flat in Camden Town, London. Her flat was small, but it gave her the freedom she needed, and hell, it was somewhere to put her stuff, work on her designs, and somewhere to sleep. Finding somewhere in London she could work in her own space without interruptions was never going to be large and cheap as well. You have to go with what you have; she told herself. She wasn’t plannin...
Submitted to Contest #294
“You can, if you think you can,” her father said to her after she had been ranting for more than ten minutes about failing her end-of-year exam in mathematics. “You can do this. You aced your other subjects, you just need to believe in yourself. I believe in you. You have made me proud of what you have achieved so far. I know you can do this. I have been in situations where I have doubted my skills to do something and I think back to my father telling me, “You can, if you think you can,” and it spurred me on to overcome the problem. Whether ...
My Dearest Willamina. 20th October, 1856The Braithwaite Farmstead, near Sudbury, Ontario. Dearest Aunt Catherine, I hope and pray this letter finds you and Uncle Tom in good health. Almost feels like we have been at sea for eternity but finally made it safely to Canada. It was a long journey and at times, I feared I would never feel solid ground under my feet again! But now that we are here, I am starting to see the adventure in it all. Oh, Aunt, you ought to see this place! It is bigger than words can describe, unfathomable, further t...
The Weight of Secrets. The bar was a typical rough 1970s bar on the docks of London; it was a dark bar, cigarette smoke and stale beer in the air. A neon sign buzzed at the top of the room, casting an almost ghostly red light on the scene. It was a type of bar where secrets were told, debts were paid — a type of bar where men like Marcus knew not to linger. But tonight, he had no other options. He was seated in the last booth, facing the wall, a glass of whiskey half empty in front of him. The ice long melted; the drink as watered down as hi...
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