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Bruno Lowagie

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2019

Stories (44)

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182 Followers

12 Following

44 Stories

973 karma pts

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The Golden Kingdom

Submitted to Contest #30

“Unfortunately, my dear Scheherazade, the time has come for you to die.”The mighty sultan beckoned the executioner who carefully checked the sharpness of his scimitar.“So be it, o honorable sultan,” Scheherazade replied, “but grant me an answer to one last question.”The sultan showed the palm of his hand to the executioner and nodded to his temporary concubine. Scheherazade’s question surprised him: “Do you know the story of the Golden Kingdom?”“I can’t say that I do,,” he answered. “Would you care to tell me that story before you go?’ ...

5 likes

A Tale of Two Friends

Submitted to Contest #29

He was the best of friends. He was the worst of friends. He was my richest friend. He was my poorest friend. We had good days. We had bad days. We said we would remain friends forever. We knew we would become each other's biggest rival. In short: our relationship as friends was one of love and hate.“Aren’t all relationships?” he once asked me.I know there are other, better relationships, but knowing him the way I know him, I fear he might never find someone to have such a relationship with. As a c...

4 likes

Caterpillar-Becomes-Cocoon-Becomes-Butterfly

Submitted to Contest #29

That one summer I longed less for the summer than for what would follow summer. I'm born in June. I turned eighteen in the middle of the final examinations in senior high school. That wasn’t the only reason why my birthday went unnoticed, though.A couple of months later, in October 1988, we would all go to college. I can’t say I regretted saying goodbye to my fellow students in high school. If you’d ask me who I was friends with back then, I fear I wouldn’t have known what to answer.Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine, but when I grew up, bo...

4 likes

Our Two Weddings

Submitted to Contest #28

My mother-in-law has three children: a son, Christiaan (born in 1966), and two daughters, Marjan (1968) and Ingeborg (1970). I met her youngest daughter in college.The year was 1988; Ingeborg and I were both eighteen years old. We became best friends in our freshman year. We ended up in bed with each other after the opening party of our sophomore year. Oops… In my first year in college, I appreciated Ingeborg as a friend. It didn’t come up in my mind that she could also be my girlfriend. As far as I was concerned, the change in our...

7 likes

Vampires and Zombies

Submitted to Contest #27

A train stands still in a field. The weather outside is bad. It’s raining, and clouds are covering the moon. There are three people in the last wagon of the train: Steven, Marc, and a stranger. They don’t know why the train has stopped. Steven: “This looks like the setting of a horror movie.”Marc: “What do you mean?”Steven: “We’re in a train that stopped for an unknown reason in the middle of nowhere. There are only three people in our wagon, us two and that silent stranger three rows behind you. We haven’t seen or heard anyone in the p...

9 likes

Family Tree

Submitted to Contest #27

My grandmother, the mother of my father, used to be the most beautiful girl in the village. Every boy was jealous when she chose my grandfather as her boyfriend. He was an outsider to them because he had gone to college in the city.There was even more envy when the young couple married. They bought themselves a Ford Mustang for the occasion —an American car that clashed with everything the British countryside stood for. The villagers frowned upon the newlyweds, but the couple didn’t care about what other people thought of them. They were hap...

8 likes

The Discovery of Music

Submitted to Contest #26

There once was a time when mankind didn’t know music. The only sounds men and women produced were noise and voice. People talked to each other abundantly, but there was no rhythm in their words, no melody in their sentences.The word “lyrics” couldn’t be found in any dictionary, simply because it didn’t exist yet. As for music, there was the knock-knock of the carpenter hammering nails into wood, the kling-kling of the blacksmith forging metal on his anvil, the klang-klang of the trolley driver warning people to get out of the way, the ting-t...

9 likes

Overachiever

Submitted to Contest #25

I wanted to be a writer long before I could read or write. As a child, I wrote down whole stories using glyphs that no one but me could decipher. I was one of those rare kids who longed for the first day of school, because that was the day every secret about reading and writing was going to be revealed to me.I grew up in the seventies in the small city of Ypres in Flanders —which is the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium. My youth was quite uneventful. I went to high school in the eighties. I liked languages and sciences alike; my favorite cours...

6 likes

A Life Well Spent?

Submitted to Contest #25

Peter couldn’t believe his eyes. He had finally found the book he was looking for.For twenty-seven years, he had searched for it in every library and every bookstore. He dedicated the first half of his adult life almost entirely to his quest. It didn’t take long before he was considered being the expert on rare books. Kings and beggars, knights and knaves, scientists and wizards, they all turned to him if they needed to find a book of some sort, whether it was a book that could help them make someone fall in love with them, conquer the world...

12 likes

The Interdim Bureau

Submitted to Contest #24

I wake up in a strange bed, next to a woman who isn’t my wife.Diffuse light penetrates through the curtains. The only sound in the room is the soft ticking of a clock. I’m looking right into the half open mouth of my supposed one-night stand. What have I done? How did I end up here? What happened? I blink my eyes and then I recognize the woman; it’s Linda from accounting. Suddenly I realize she isn’t breathing anymore.My throat feels dry. I try to rub the sleep from my face and discover that I have a mustache and a beard. Not the usual stubb...

12 likes

The Masked Bandit

Submitted to Contest #24

A man can only mourn so much.The sheriff had given me the week off after my partner’s funeral, but I reported back for duty three days later. Crime doesn’t rest; neither should I.My partner Ken and I had been chasing the masked bandit for many months. Last week, we almost had him. I could have sworn we hit him with at least one of our bullets, but the villain shot back. It was my partner who bit the dust. “I’ve found you a new partner,” the sheriff says when I show up at the office, “He’s from out of town. I’ll introduce him to you, but...

7 likes

When it snows, it blizzards.

Submitted to Contest #23

“I think I forgot my keys,” I say. When I turn around to go and fetch them, I suddenly realize that I didn’t leave any footprints in the snow. “Oops, I might even have forgotten my body.”I walk back to the office, and indeed: there I am, sitting behind my computer screen, still trying to figure out how to fight global freezing. Watching myself I must admit that my wife is right. She always complains that I do look like an old, scattered professor. I wonder if she still loves me.“Come on,” I tell my physical self, “It’s time to go home.”“Is i...

13 likes

A Clean Sheet

Submitted to Contest #23

Looking up from my work, I witness how the first snowflakes appear in the sky. As out of nowhere, they swirl down softly and invite me to get up from my desk. From where I stand, on the eleventh floor of a dull office building, I have a nice view on the streets below.“It’s not really winter until it snows,” my grandmother used to say. Celebrating Christmas without her for the first time in my life, felt awkward. It wasn’t really Christmas without you, grandma, I reminiscence in silence.The flakes are getting bigger and bigger, as if grandma ...

6 likes

The Winter King

Submitted to Contest #23

Ice flowers were growing on the window of the attic bedroom.“We can’t pick those flowers,” Helena explained to Mister Rabbit, “And even if we could, we’re not allowed to do so. The Winter King would come and catch us. He’d lock us up in his cold palace.”Mister Rabbit only listened with half an ear. He was hungry. He wanted breakfast.“Do we really have to get out of bed already?” Helena moaned in reply, “It’s so nice and warm under our blanket.”But Mister Rabbit insisted, and Helena felt an urge to pee coming up.The splatter of her water was ...

14 likes