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Carina Caccia

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2023

Stories (52)

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70 Followers

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52 Stories

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Submitted to Contest #315

I read somewhere that we’re all a decision away from an entirely different life. Only, we don’t know it, not always, not often, because we either fail to make a choice or, when we do, we never see the alternative outcomes – not without tinted glasses, that is. And it begs the question: do we ever actually live? This life, I mean, not the inebriating nostalgia of what ifs.Tracing paper spread across the table, bare nails, 2B lead. “This,” said Nora, “is a collapse.” She tapped a circle on the page from which two thick lines branched out, one ...

4 likes

Neglect is a Womb

Submitted to Contest #313

1.How loud is a sigh? As loud as the clatter of pans, the bang of a door slammed, a church organ rumbling through you? How about an eyeroll? The silent treatment? Were they half as loud as the voice in Nora’s head? Came in spirals, it did. Looping on repeat, kind of like the swirls she used to draw as a girl, filling double-sided A4 pages. Where’d that voice come from anyway? And she’d almost put her finger on it. She’d almost put her finger on it one afternoon at the post office. Her mother sighed audibly, fidgeting with self-service machin...

15 likes

Chronicles of a Limerent Object

Winner of Contest #311 🏆

1.He hadn’t meant to idealise her, to put her on a pedestal, to overwhelm. Radiant, she was. She drew people in, shook their hands, pulled up chairs for them. Are you the organiser? she’d been asked. No, she wasn’t. Just a woman with a smile, a woman in a sundress who scooted over and made room for others. What was her name again?And then she directed her smile at him, her warmth, her questions. Matthieu stirred in his seat, gripped tight the neck of his bottle so as not to tremble. He did that sometimes, or rather, the nerves did – as thoug...

87 likes

How to Fall Out of Love: The Story of a Self-Fulfilling Pen

Submitted to Contest #307

But why do you collect the bones of every experience that disappoints you? Why do you crack them open and suck at the marrow long after there’s anything left? Three months ago, Margaret had passed, and her property, her assets, she’d left to her children. To Nora, her student, she’d left a box of stationery – BIC pens and half-used highlighters, it was abnormal to say the least. In modernity, they were disposable, really; they weren’t quills and ink pots inscribed with an ancestor’s name, no. Maybe it had been symbolic, everybody thought. A...

10 likes

Mourning Murcia

Submitted to Contest #300

Picture this. You’re riding shotgun, speeding past kilometres of arid land, then dominoes of lemon trees, beds of sunflowers. There are remnants of walls, grey-white bricks wrapped with graffiti, as small as Monopoly houses beneath an infinite blue sky. There’s wind in your hair, sunshine on the dashboard and on your thighs. You’re Nora, and you’re leaving Murcia behind.Ignacio glanced over at her, eyes golden as resin behind his sunglasses, amber lenses projecting a sunshine scar across his cheek. Nora had insisted on paying him, but he’d B...

9 likes

Woe is Brad

Submitted to Contest #299

Decorum, often, is a two-way street; or, better yet, it’s an entire city blueprint and is contingent on all of us. But there’s a world in which things are upside down, where cars fly and tenants, clinging to their curtains, are tugged from their windows by gravity (fine, that might be an exaggeration – but only in the literal sense). And in that world, decorum is a vacuous thing in its unrequitedness. It is demanded by some and performed by many – sometimes, even, when one spits in your face (quite literally this time). “Had you not looked a...

6 likes

Octopus in a Garage

Submitted to Contest #296

Have you ever felt like an octopus in a garage? What, haven’t you heard that one before?“Why an octopus in a garage?”“Why not?”One might think this were a conversation born of disinhibited inebriety, but if we, dear readers, take a closer look, we’ll find that our protagonists’ beer bottles and half-torn labels bear the wide, caricaturesque eyes of 0.0%. (Four eyes, in fact, if we puzzle-piece the poor shreds back together). Four eyes. They called him that at school, Joaquín. Never quite fit in. Went to therapy for it, actually. How could h...

13 likes

VIEJO VERDE – Dirty Old Creep

Submitted to Contest #292

I’m happier than I’ve been in seven years, until I hear my landlord’s footsteps on the stairs, hear him call my name. And for a moment he’ll take centre stage, though this is not the real story but its backdrop.—My landlord always keeps his door ajar so I must greet him by the stairwell.—“How about wine and castañas tonight?” he texts.—“Call me later,” he reads aloud. He reads my tank top. He reads my breasts.—My landlord needs me downstairs, needs help in the garage.—My landlord greets me in the kitchen, in his dressing gown, leans over me ...

6 likes

Underwhelming

Submitted to Contest #290

Often, I’m a rose or a sonnet or a bottle of wine – red as the blood that rushes to one’s cheeks, red as the lipstick one reapplies, lips magnified in a compact mirror like two twists of red liquorice. What am I?Sweet, I am. The object of your affection. Sugar plum, honey, sweetie pie, pumpkin. I’m a mouthful. Sometimes I slide off your tongue like one’s native language. Sometimes I catch in your throat like a loose seam on a branch.Obnoxious, I’ve been called. As loud as a megaphone. Other times, as quiet as string and paper cups. Sometimes...

5 likes

Reality in its Denim Jeans

Submitted to Contest #288

Nobody wants to read the story of a cynic, or so I’ve heard. Not that I am one – I’m too old to be cynical (at least today, who knows what I’ll say tomorrow?). I’m too old to don cynicism like a beret, a scarf, to paint my nails black with it, to smoke it like a cigarette and complain the world is rotting, anyway. What’s another pair of black lungs when the sky’s been smoking chimneys? when factories are stuffed like pipes? Fair point, but I think I prefer my lungs pink. And yet I’m equally too old for hopeless romanticism – at least today, ...

7 likes

Life Isn't A Sickly 23kg

Submitted to Contest #286

I wouldn’t have done it had she stayed of her own volition. Her legs don’t quite fit, and she lies crumpled like a ragdoll, her torso in the suitcase, her limbs hanging out like the petals of a flower opening at daybreak. I learned about nyctinasty on a walk home from high school once. I’d thought flowers were forever open once bloomed. Nope, said my classmate. I was wrong. Anyway, that’s beside the point. Gorgeous, she is, even in this state. Odd, though, to see Nora so weak. To have felt her wriggling beneath my grip like a fly buzzing wil...

11 likes

A Soul in Denial Doesn't Realise It's Dead

Submitted to Contest #284

Sometimes, we’re sent signs. Sometimes, we invent them. Who’s to say what’s what, and where do we draw the line? Claim it’s frequency or confirmation bias. Call it intervention, divine. Nora hadn’t left the house with the occult shop in mind. She’d strolled down an unexplored road, its unturned cobble stones, and familiar yet novel sense of grey – new globs of phlegm and dry gum and cigarette butts and candy wrappers. A window of ribbons like serpent tongues. Bags in shop windows, shoes, handwritten price tags. A florist, potted plants on tr...

5 likes

Others, They Speak of Solitude (Ha!)

Submitted to Contest #280

They tell us not to write of dreams, don’t they? as though we all had friends, and lovers and enemies; as though I had an elaborate kit of oil colours, tubes squished and squeezed, some neglected entirely awaiting acknowledgement. Oh, the privilege to have connections.But I lack even the primary colours. If anything, I’ve got a lead pencil, an eraser, and a sharpener that bites too hard. Snaps the lead off if I’m not careful. What I mean to say, dear reader (with all this nonsense!) is that I will write about my damned dreams for they’re all...

10 likes

My Aptitude Does Not Belong to Me

Submitted to Contest #279

When I first opened my eyes, they thought my pupils were dilated. But it’s a rare mutation, aniridia. Not so rare here, though. We’ve all got it besides Jacob who’s got coloboma. His pupils leak into his irises like a cell failing to divide in two, stuck in telophase like some metamorphosed insect halfway out its chrysalis. If a chrysalis were an inkblot, that is. The Rorschach test. What do you see? It’s strange, eye contact with Jacob. To stare into the leakage, the oil spill.He said looking at me was just the same. Like staring into two b...

11 likes

Another Origami Nothing

Shortlisted for Contest #276 ⭐️

Maybe I’m trying to see shape, structure, where there is none. Good morning. Glass of ginger tea. Paper tag mangled: a little origami nothing. Now let’s unscrunch last Thursday. Wow, has it been a week already?I didn’t see him, not at first, even though he was right in front of me, approaching. I scanned the tables outside, unfamiliar faces, and made to go inside – and that’s when I saw him. Quite small, very thin, dressed in dull blues and greys, a windbreaker. He’d almost camouflaged into the pavement, the drab greens and browns of the str...

28 likes