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Ben Cerasi

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2021

Stories (29)

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29 Stories

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All Capes are Bastards: The Shadow Ban

Ben Cerasi

The game of life and death is rigged with loaded set pieces. The driver’s hand brushed the rearview mirror—again. Every thirty seconds, like a tick, like a habit he couldn’t shake, his fingers trembling as he fought the tightening in his chest. There's No way they got the plate. He’d switched the numbers. It was clean, and smooth—just like always. Clean. But clean felt like a lie, the sweat on his palms slicker than the night air pressing in around them. Wasn’tt the Sinner’s Den that had him twisted up, not the usual dive full of bro...

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The Umber Squall (A Case File from the files of Harold Tempt)

Ben Cerasi

"All flesh would perish together, and man would return to dust." The Book of Job flapped against a weathered fence post, the brittle paper snapping like the skin of something long dead. It wouldn’t be long before the wind took it and swallowed it up with everything else. I used to imagine if Hell existed, it would be fire—scarlet and tangerine flames caked across canyons, licking at the bones of the damned. But that was a child's nightmare. No, Hell wasn’t fire. Hell was dust. Hazel dunes like dead high tides, stretching to the horizon...

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All Capes are Bastards: The Painted Prophet

Ben Cerasi

The city wasn’t just steel and asphalt, not to him. It breathed. It bled. Every building was a rib, every alleyway a severed vein. The streets were brushstrokes of history, painted over again and again, each new layer hiding the violence beneath. But blood seeps through the paint.And Elias had seen what lurked underneath—the original image. The first wound.Not lost. Only buried.And now, something beneath the city had opened its eyes.It had been waiting.And it was hungry. The painting had driven Elias Mercer somewhere beyond the reach of rea...

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All Capes are Bastards: The Red Feathers

Ben Cerasi

All capes are bastards.People stamp it on us like a mark of shame. I'm fine with the title of bastards. We inherit nothing—no deeds or legacy. We inherit the needle-marked sirens that wash up near North Beach. I find grime between the cracks. The demons that never get exorcised. The blue glow from the screen carved shadows across my face, catching on the red fractures in my eyes—the kind that came from too many nights where sleep was just a rumor. I ran a hand over the stubble lining my jaw, feeling the weight of too many hours and too littl...

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Manos De Sangre

Ben Cerasi

The devil below me had tasted many delights in his journey through the Global South. Regimes had risen and fallen beneath his boots. He had witnessed Fortunes being made and lost in the time it took to pop in a fresh magazine. They rarely ever tasted as sweet as the blood leaving his mouth. Diablo Jaguar wiped the blood from his lip with the back of his gloved hand, laughing. A deep, jagged sound. It matched his Hands of Stone. The crowd roared around them, half-drunk from cheap beer and the thrill of violence. Money stopped filling th...

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All Capes are Bastards

Ben Cerasi

I came into this world kicking and screaming, covered in red, and I’m pretty sure I’ll exit the same way. The alley reeked of rain-soaked trash and stale sweat. The mack daddy's joints rattled, his muddied feet sliding to a stop against a dead-end brick wall. He wasn’t out of breath yet, but I could hear his heart hammering through the quiet. They always run. Maybe he should have hesitated to lay hands on women working the corners and taking a major cut. I owed a favor to a few women and a couple of nonbinary folks who worked the...

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Harm Be Done

Ben Cerasi

The room is unfamiliar and I don’t know how I got here. The wraiths we become as our skin sheds start to reflect the cracks in the mirror, and the shadows bleed into the streets. My eyes gradually began to acclimate to the dim and eerie bulbs in the deserted hall of mirrors. The red fissures in my eyes matched the scarlet stains on the glass as I pursued an uncanny ghoul across their haunting ground. A chilling fog had settled inside this long-abandoned structure. Every step I took reverberated through the cold, lifeless air, se...

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"Where the Marigolds Wilt"

Ben Cerasi

The endless rows of hollowed-out orange and wicked gourds grinned their jagged grins at me as I left behind the city’s polished façade. Out where the sidewalks surrendered to gravel and asphalt gave up to sunbaked dirt, it was different—grittier, lonelier. The county lines weren’t drawn with rulers here; they were sketched by time and neglect. This wasn’t the part of town you saw on postcards, no tree-lined boulevards or corner cafes. Just long stretches of empty fields and the occasional truck kicking up a cloud of dust. Out here, people wa...

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Autumns Ashes: A Chapel Black Casefile

Ben Cerasi

C: Files Uploaded: Freedom of Information Act—California Bureau of Investigation. Violent Crime Task Force. Authorized by the CA Attorney General.Subject: Applied Criminology—Special Agent Rachel Tempt. Audio files are attached. Every bullet leaves a trail of paperwork behind it, a lawsuit etched in brass casings. There’s no honor in it anymore. Just silence after the gunshot, then the endless colonoscopy of post-shooting committees. They’ll pick apart the moment, frame by frame as if that could explain why we stare down the abyss and still ...

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The Stain of Samhain

Ben Cerasi

The smog that greeted Liz as she left her Jeep was thick and putrid, curling up into the sky as the last light of day faded behind the mountains. The sun’s retreat only seemed to feed the fire; the flames licked hungrily at the darkening sky, growing brighter with each passing second. Liz’s fingers tapped nervously on her holster, her heart racing as she drew closer to the smoke. As she moved toward the rising flames, the smell hit her like a punch—burning meat, charred flesh, and something sickly sweet, twisted with the acrid tang of melti...

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Veils of the Valley (A Chapel Black Story) pt 2

Ben Cerasi

The shadow of October cast its dark presence upon the town, flames of the sun snuffed out. Our unit was no closer to shutting down the manufacturing and distribution of bathtub gin, in the way a sand castle was to stopping the high tide. Devout preachers successfully persuaded the local men to yield their hunting weapons. We all clung on to our firearms as talisman and such, much like our forefathers hugged on to their spears and muskets when every shadow spooked them outside of their huts. my pleas for a curfew fell on deaf ear...

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The Wraith of Grapes

Ben Cerasi

Intercepted Transmission from The Penal-Agricultural-Station. (PAST) [Unauthorized viewing will be subject to mind wipes] We stared into the abyss and in the blackness between the stars, it glared back and found us wanting. The silence that looms over this once-tranquil retreat is suffocating, like a weight pressing down on my chest, constricting the air in my lungs. There's a chill in the mechanized air that has nothing to do with the temperature – the kind of cold that settles deep into your bones, the very atmosphere is tainted wit...

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Thicker than Water

Ben Cerasi

Oakland- The wraiths we become when the open late signs burn out become the cracks in mirrors, and the shadows that bleed into the streets. Life is a fleeting measure. in the heat of combat, it can be marked by the passing seconds The Kanashii had savored the pleasures of life, found none as intoxicating as the taste of blood escaping from his lips. In the center of their training grounds, there stood a meticulously crafted mini bonsai garden, adorned with a stone and a delicate rake. Beside it, a changing of the guard took p...

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Dark Room and Ruins: (A Chapel Black Case File)

Ben Cerasi

Its often said that each picture is a vessel for a thousand truths; I've come to believe they harbor a thousand secrets instead. In the cloistered confines of the darkroom, I meticulously arranged the virgin sheets upon the surface of the ominous chemical bath. The blood-hued bulb above sputtered faintly, casting an eerie glow as the once colorless photographs began their descent into the murky depths.. Once a resident of the city that now seemed to slip through my fingers, I was inexorably driven out, beyond the somber hills of Livermo...

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Black Blood on the Red Hunt

Ben Cerasi

The War Letters of Doctor Amos Range: Recovered From the San Joaquin County State Hospital “There's a sea of black blood seeped inside foreign soil. Countless young boys, eager for adventure and a chance to prove their worth, found themselves on the frontlines. I wasn't just a mere dishwasher or shoe shiner; I was unseen. My purpose was further cemented by Uncle Sam as we were turned into gravediggers and cooks. Destruction resided within the mind of a skilled specialist. When armies couldn't acquire enough bullets for their ...

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