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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2023
Submitted to Contest #272
I only watch her because I care. There she is, a small dot moving across the screen. Another sip. Another toke. The room swells with smoke. Spirals. I magnify the pub she’s entered, check the photos. Street view. Who’s she with? And how is it that she got over me so quick? Proof. It’s proof that she never cared. Proof that I was right. Unless, of course, these men are a rebound. Bars, a refuge. Beer, a distraction. Surely, I meant more to her than that. Bitch.But God, the craving fucking hits and my gums throb, my canines ache. Small dot on ...
Submitted to Contest #268
Blair was never particularly creative – at least, she didn’t think so. In high school, her friends had taken visual arts, photography, music and drama. She was always at their showcases, always in the audience, always a guest (once even a muse!) but never the artist herself. And at university, she’d taken forensic accounting, but the course wasn’t nearly as colourful as the artist retreats or improv. nights her friends attended – not to her, at least. Rather, her degree was grey and overcast like a storm cloud, and if it were a person, it’d ...
Submitted to Contest #267
1. Nora wiped her hand, sticky with ice block, against the wooden fence which, to nobody’s surprise, would later be the culprit of the throbbing splinter in her finger.“Nora!” a voice rang out from the balcony above. It was her cousin – she’d taken the last cola Sunnyboy from Grandma’s freezer.She peered about then squeezed through the gap in the fence where a plank was missing, into Mean Lady’s overgrown backyard – there were spiderwebs on the shrubs, spiderwebs hanging mid-air, their owners big and black and ga...
Submitted to Contest #265
Trigger warning: mild gore.The apples were rotting on their branches, encircled by an aura of fruit flies. The buzz of the garden vibrated through Annette’s being, burrowing through her ears like termites, eating away at her insides as though they were wood – only she didn’t have any insides, and she was, in fact, wooden. Given her hollowness, she was propelled forward only by an innate knowing – a curious something that animated her wooden legs, ridden with termite holes, to rise and fall with a featherlike frailty. A gust of wind could hav...
I was watching Melancholia, watching a blue planet expand and consume the cinema screen. It was the end of the world, and all the while I was thinking of Isaac. Less out of melodrama, I hope, than out of boredom; the film was mesmerizingly dull. And yet I left the cinema with an odd sense of clarity: I’d hurt someone who genuinely cared about me. “What are the lasting effects?” he’d asked of my past relationship. I didn’t know, I said, but I’d surely see them triggered in a relationship (or situationship, in our case). And now the verdict is...
Submitted to Contest #261
You have long been my what-if, and here I sit in tears with a bottle half full and half empty of wine.“I don’t want to give you false hopes,” you said, finally giving me closure. You don’t want to be with me, and if you did, I probably wouldn’t want to be with you.It’s your lack of interest, I bet, that makes me want you. Your lack of interest, I bet, that makes me experience what I’ve labelled love – only, it isn’t love. It’s what I grew up with: it’s a craving for validation. And yet if you were to validate me, I’d probably lose interest.“...
Submitted to Contest #257
Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass.— A Midsummer Night’s Dream “You were magnetic up there,” said Tatiana, starry-eyed and spellbound, as though the music and wine had entered her bones, the lyrics her heart. Her marrow and cartilage were alive with it, her tendons vibrating like guitar strings. She might have imagined the smile reach Jack’s eyes, the rouge in his cheeks, the lip-bite. She felt light, lighter than she had in a long time; she was dreaming, only she wasn’t.“Is that right?” said Jack, pulling up a stoo...
Submitted to Contest #256
Nora was never much of a musician. In fact, in eighth grade she’d received a D in music – partly due to her lack of talent, and partly due to her incessant talking. You have a lot of potential, all her teachers would say, and she wore it like a badge.But I suppose that isn’t relevant, so where were we? Nora was never much of a musician, so it was a peculiarity, albeit an endearing one, to find her onstage at an open mic night. She hadn’t anticipated the crowd, and amongst them her muse glistening like a pearl, lifting a bottle to his lips. W...
Submitted to Contest #252
We had Janine and Bill round yesterday, not that I wanted them in the house. I couldn’t tell John no, but what was he thinking? The last time we were on the verge of separating, he told me it was as though he and Janine had known each other all their lives. It’s not that I’m in love or anything, he’d said, not that I’d asked.John’s at work and so I’m writing in the kitchen. I don’t really want to sit at my desk in the bedroom – it throbs with last night, with the echo of John’s voice, and despite the tall windows, the sun on the floorboards,...
1I run my finger over the surface of an old dressing table—dust, silver thimble—and perch myself on a precariously wobbly stool. I stare into the mirror, into its wonky rendition of myself. It has a cloudy, greenish hue and its circumference is freckled with dark spots—a few of which are superimposed on my collarbone—and I’m unsettled by the ashen face that glares back, the purple beneath her eyes, the eeriness of her white dress. It’s the mirror. Even the sunlit bookshelves behind me have lost their glow, the grass has lost its green, and t...
Submitted to Contest #251
In my elsewhere does it also rain blood?Is this my freedom or my confinement?This is not a story, not really, just the writer’s attempt to make sense of the three dead birds she’s seen this past week, amongst other signs (or trivialities). I’ve Googled it, of course. What does it mean to see dead birds everywhere?The first bird was a chick, shrivelled up on the sunny pavement by the bus station; the second squished in the middle of the road, guts like minced meat; and the third splattered across a zebra crossing.This gullible writer, yours t...
Submitted to Contest #249
It’s funny how the world works – or, better yet, doesn’t. Had Alejandro not bumped into Frida, had their shoulders not collided, then maybe, just maybe, that handrail mightn’t have impaled her like rotisserie chicken, or in her words, like a matador’s blade through a bull. On a rainy day, September 17th—coincidentally, the narrator’s birthday—Frida and Alejandro boarded the bus that would change everything.“I could be a flea,” she said, “or headlice.”“Just to be with me?”“Claro, and you’d carry me around in your clothing, or on your scalp.”F...
Submitted to Contest #248
Reality wasn’t real when she did it; it was cold and empty. People don’t understand that, though, do they? Reality wasn’t real when she did it; it was a phantom of sorts, absurd in its stubbornness like a little boy declaring himself to be a doctor. Why? Because your father’s white dress shirt reaches your knees? And where’d you get that stethoscope? Did Daddy give it to you?Reality wasn’t real when Rachel did it. The knife, sure, it felt tangible, but this too was just another absurdity. She’d adjusted her grip on the handle, laughing at th...
Submitted to Contest #247
For as long as I can remember, I’ve not been allowed beyond the fig trees. Heck, I’ve not been allowed around them. Every harvesting season, I watch our people pluck the big, purple beads all the way from my window. Dad says I’ve called them that ever since my first vision. I was six when it happened, and it was fig-induced. Mary says my eyes turn purple when I eat them. Like twinkling gemstones, she says. I wouldn’t know. Dad doesn’t allow mirrors in the prophecy room. Something about light refraction. Not that I’d be able to see myself, an...
15th April, 2024Monday08:30 a.m.How presumptuous of me to think the recesses of the human heart is unexplored territory! How presumptuous to think my experiences are unique! But I did, I do, sometimes. I’m a coloniser declaring terra nullius where generations of feet have trodden before – culture, customs, stories.We’re all a bit like Lu Xun’s Ah Q or Voltaire’s Candide, our ignorance a child’s newspaper hat—roll it up and you’ve got a telescope! —as we frolic about wreaking havoc with a toothless grin, adult teeth yet to grow in. Want to pl...
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