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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2020
Submitted to Contest #58
Trigger warnings: child abuse, sexual abuse Her name was Sam and I could not save her. She stood as tall as a willow tree and had a tar heart. She was a cherry pit girl in thrift store floral dresses, at home in the neon light of gas stations or the fluorescent lights of hospitals. The first time I saw her, she was eating the guts of a dead kid on the cement floor of the snuff studio that her daddy sold her to when she was a toddler. She smiled at me with blood in her teeth and gave me a thumbs up when I,...
Submitted to Contest #57
Trigger warning: suicide, self-harm, sexual assault, drugs On this, the evening of my departure from this mortal form, I bequeath to my loved ones all that is theirs. Take what I give you and know that it is the most I could have possibly given. I give, with this generous heart, the following items to the following people: To my mother I leave my nervous foot-first birth and the pain of a “husband stitch”. I leave the scars on your breast from nursing past when my wisdom teeth came in. I leave a rope of ...
Submitted to Contest #56
Trigger warnings: references to rape, suicide, disordered eating, gore, ableism I I was a girl without a country, three weeks into my year abroad in Germany. I couldn’t speak the language and detested the fact that they all drank sparkling mineral water instead of flat water from the tap. The bubbles made me feel constantly bloated, as did the cuisine. I gained almost fifty pounds that autumn. The food was like the language, decadent and behind the deceptive mask of the humble. I overindulged as I do in a...
Submitted to Contest #55
Trigger warnings: suicidal thoughts, self harm, eating disorders, sexual abuse, abuse Can you keep a secret? I've known since I was six and saw that body on the train tracks that I would die by suicide. He had jumped in front of the oncoming subway car and smeared across the tracks. My mother screamed and tried to cover my eyes and for the first time in my life I realized that some people get to decide when they die and I wanted to be one of them. Can you keep a secret? I spit my food down my sleeve like my elbows were mad...
Submitted to Contest #53
He passes the rabbit every day. The fresh reds of new roadkill have dulled to browns and pink roapy insides have shriveled grey. The fur has faded, sun-bleached. The big teeth are pushed further out by rotting gums. Every day, it is a little bit worse. He can smell it from 100 steps away. Yesterday it didn’t stink until 50 steps. That poor rabbit in the road, one reanimated by ants and stripped by turkey vultures. It smells like sweet and sour chicken from the shitty Chinese food place at the t...
Submitted to Contest #52
You hate going to that town, and have ever since you were a child and had to go there for a Girl Scout meet-up. Everything is sort of wrong there: the posture of the woman in the portrait on the wall changes and the little girls from that town have so many patches on their vests that it weighs them down and bruises their shoulders. When they talk, it sounds like they are speaking in reverse but you still understand their words. They generate a constant low buzzing. The buzzing is similar in the freezer aisle. Yo...
Submitted to Contest #51
The gutter is falling off of the house that it happened in. The paint on the siding is chipped and the windows are broken and cobwebbed. The house is, for all intents and purposes, empty. It’s not empty, though, because the ghost of what happened in those walls still lives on looping in animation frozen in that moment of violation and hopelessness. The small ghost of his child-self writhes and whimpers against a pain that hurts in his soul even worse than his body. He sees himself in s...
They were lovers, although Thomas would never admit it. He put it in other terms- Liam was easy and available. Liam was a slut and Thomas was a drunk and things progressed in the normal way of the world. There was something like love, enough to call them lovers. There were ten good years on the road before Thomas knocked up a stripper and decided to play house. Ten years of holding up gas stations and cocaine in motel rooms and each other’s dizzy sweaty sticky skin. Ten years of moving over Liam’s bo...
Submitted to Contest #50
Lilly brings the nozzle of the spray can to her mouth and takes in a long rip from the can of computer duster. The sky shatters into fractals and she sees the summer sun as a kaleidoscope. Nothing matters on afternoons like this. Dad built the treehouse for her tenth birthday. It was painted pink and spotted with lines of Christmas lights. The paint had mostly chipped off by now and none of the bulbs still lit up. Childhood had been magical, afternoons spent in search of faeries and refusing to walk through ri...
Submitted to Contest #49
The 1st second: Anxiety. I check the setting sun in the sky and try to tell the time like a boy scout from shadows cast by bridge beams. I swim through the hot pink and creamy oranges of day turning to night. How beautiful state changes are. That's what this is, a state change. I am the purple night sky melting into the yellow remains of the day. I am a wad of dough braving the oven to come out as bread. I am dry ice sublimating in the hot sun. I am ice cream dripping into liquid down a child’s sticky fist...
Sick-yellow hospital walls and the smell of sterility. The waiting room to be evaluated before being moved to the mental ward is twice my body head-to-toe in one direction, three times in the other. I watch a talk show where they spin a wheel to decide which man to paternity test. I watch a talk show where a man spent all his wedding money on strippers. I watch a reality show where a mother tells her daughter that she doesn’t love her.I am not allowed to have my crayons yet, or my coloring book. The...
They call it Gallows Humor.What do you call a man with minutes left to live?Condemned.What do you call a man with a rope around his neck and nothing under his feet?Executed.What do you call traitors awaiting execution in a small cell?In those last moments, friends.“Do you think we’ll win the war?” “Do you think reinforcements ever came?”How little the answers to these questions matter when nobody asking them will live to see the final battle.It is odd and feels insincere how one can mourn somebody who was a stranger only hours ago, but ...
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