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Barrel Coops

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2025

Stories (26)

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19 Followers

16 Following

26 Stories

522 karma pts

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An Empty World - 2 - The Road to Aberystwyth

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #301

The morning they left the farmhouse was a bit too quiet, it was not with dread or with doubt, but with the kind of hush, that new quiet they were not quite used to yet, and with a sense of trepidation of what there was yet to come. Patsy stood by the kitchen door, her backpack snug against her shoulders, one hand resting on the weathered handle. Callum was already outside tightening the straps around the old camping gear from her father's bedroom. They had bundled it up and tied it together with some frayed rope they found in the barn. This ...

8 likes

The Radio Signal

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #300

It started with posturing and threats, then came the tariffs. Prices escalated out of control. People revolted against food poverty across the world, the lack of amenities, poor housing, and prices continued to rise, but the shepherds didn’t care, they just kept getting richer, while the sheep were getting poorer. Then it went global. Tit for tat tariffs driving prices even higher, countries blamed each other for their economy crashing, then someone pressed that button. “THE BUTTON.” Everything went to shit in an instant. It had been years s...

11 likes

Now You See It... Now It’s Just Awkward

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #299

On the cobbled fringe of Leicester Square, nestled between a suspiciously smug hot dog cart and the ever-watchful bronze gaze of the Bugs Bunny statue, stood a small man in a purple velvet cape that had obviously once seen better days. The cape flared every time he moved, well, at least, it tried. One corner was caught in the Velcro of his bag, and the other trailed along the pavement like an introvert at a networking event.“Ladies and gentlemen!” he boomed out, raising his voice above the clamour of the TikTok dancers, the revelling footbal...

13 likes

A Day in the Life of Ronald’s Version of Reality

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #299

Ronald liked to think of himself as a creative inventor. Not a creator of machines or even gadgets, though he did once tape two fans to a chair and called it a “hovercraft.” That, however, got him being banned for life from the garage by his father. Oh no, he was the master inventor of what he thought were legitimate excuses to get out of doing anything. And not just any excuses. No, not from Ronald. He was a connoisseur of absurdity when it came to a creative excuse. He was the craftsman of the unbelievable. At just 12-years-old, he was a b...

11 likes

Aliens Ate My Homework… Then Fixed My Wi-Fi

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #299

Lucy Sanderson didn’t believe in aliens, not really, not in the little green men with blinking antennae, nor bug-eyed space invaders you saw on Saturday morning cartoons, at least. She believed in deadlines; in the unforgiving tick of the kitchen clock and the way her heart thudded every time Ms Carter called for her homework. If she had a superpower, it would probably be the ability to instantly find misplace things at the exact moment she needed them, most especially her math worksheet, which was now, quite possibly, lost somewhere under t...

8 likes

An Empty World.

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #299

She didn’t remember much about the drive to the farmhouse, she just remembered the rain tapping against the Land Rover windscreen and the smears left behind by the wipers. She remembered the way her father kept checking the side mirror, like he was expecting someone to be following them. He didn’t speak to her much at all. Not at the station, not on the road back to his farm, not even when they pulled up to the house, a place that looked so old. It was like it had been borrowed from another time. It had been three days since the funeral; she...

15 likes

The Rhythm of Silence

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #298

The mist clung to the hills like mud to a boot, ever persistent, never quite willing to go. Morning in the highlands arrived quietly every day, not in the manner of a whisper in the wind nor the melody of a sweet birdsong, but with a hush, as though the land itself knew the world of the deaf. Smoke curled lazily from the chimneys of the stone cottages, mingling with the low cloud that swirled across the glen. It was a place where silence was not only common, but expected this early in the day. And yet, for Owen MacLeod, silence had never bee...

5 likes

The Last Waltz of Lady Evangeline

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #298

The carriage wheels crunched against the gravel drive, their melodic beat slowing as the grand facade of the formidable Ashcombe Hall finally came into view. Evangeline Marchmont… but no, Miss Evelyn Marsh, the music tutor now, she reminded herself, as she pressed a gloved hand softly against her stomach, as if to still the raging butterflies that had stirred the moment Hampshire’s misty countryside gave way to the looming silhouette of her former life in the form of his imposing house. The estate hadn't changed at all. The Ivy still clung s...

17 likes

Teeth and Claws

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #298

Teeth and ClawsThe manor stood like a ghost in the woodlands. Caroline's home, if she could even call it that, lay just five miles from the endless spires of Oxford. Moonlight pooled on the crumbling stone steps of her sanctuary. The ivy clung to the walls as if trying to pull the place back into the earth, whence it came all those centuries ago. Within its cold, dusty cavernous hallways, Caroline had moved like a whisper through time.To look at her, you might easily believe she was in her prime, a girl merely in her twenties. Her skin so pa...

10 likes

The Blood of the Oaks

Barrel Coops

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 ...

10 likes

The Final Signal

Barrel Coops

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 ...

7 likes

Dawn of the Last Medici

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #297

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,” ...

7 likes

The end, 46:18:04 and counting.

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #297

“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...

5 likes

The Tenth Hour

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #297

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...

9 likes

The Assassins Mark.

Barrel Coops

Submitted to Contest #297

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...

17 likes