Carina Caccia

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2023

Stories (45)

45 Stories

885 karma pts

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“Strangers” by Carina Caccia

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...

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“I'm Well Enough to Know - Or am I?” by Carina Caccia

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,...

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“Small in His T-Shirt” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #252

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...

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“Non-Story” by Carina Caccia

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...

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“Frida la Baikarina” by Carina Caccia

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...

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“Paradise Lost” by Carina Caccia

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...

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“What's Beyond the Fig Trees?” by Carina Caccia

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...

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“The Saddest” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #247

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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“You Were Just on Time” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #239

To gawk, to ogle, to stare; there is more to looking than meets the eye, hence our nuanced language which allows for distinctions. Now, he wasn’t merely looking at me, but leering. He licked me up and down like an ice lolly, and every time I glanced up from my novel, or from the window and the rolling hills, those cloudy eyes were on me, something was rumbling, and lightning was bound to strike.I’d later come to find that his name was Jose Luis and that his grip was uncomfortably warm.Jose Luis looked to be in his late fifties, twice my age,...

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“Yours Truly, Twenty-Nine” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #236

My dearest Nineteen, There’s a boardgame on my shelf gathering dust. Last year, I lugged it up and down the French Riviera in my suitcase—squeezed between summer dresses, Daisy Dukes and dreams—and finally, here, to Alicante. I’ve opened it once to read the instructions; you need at least three players, and that’s two too many. And yet it strikes even me as peculiar. Why did I buy it? knowing that I have nobody with whom to play. I must have dreamt something up that day, for it’s never the coat on display that we buy, but the self we imagi...

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“Tête-à-Tête at a Train Station” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #235

She hadn’t meant to kiss her, hadn’t meant to make her cry, and she very well hadn’t meant to leave without saying goodbye, but the train—an hour late—was pulling into the station, and if Bella was any good at anything, it was running away. “It’s a cliché but are you running to or from something?” asked Amelie. They’d met a half hour ago, both affected by delays, and now sat on cold tiles just outside the news agency, Bella’s legs around a small backpack, Amelie’s propped up on a green 80L rucksack as though it were a footrest. “I don’t know...

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“A Modest Tale of Hope” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #231

Hope is not big, momentous, grand; it is not a plumed picture hat, not a coat, not a bag. It is as modest as the boring, old underwear beneath all that glamour, the underwear we somehow manage to change (almost) every day, despite being glued to our beds, losing lovers and friends, and despite unemployment. Margaret rolled over and turned off her alarm, picking out a painful wedgie. She was wearing Tuesday’s pair of underwear for the second consecutive day, one of the six pairs her ex-mother-in-law had sent her for Christmas (Monday was miss...

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“Parachutes” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #223

His sister’s hand-me-downs hung from his small frame like… a curtain? The halls were quiet, save for a distant cough, the turn of a page, and the click clack of a keyboard. Nora dried her hands on her trousers, and re-entered the warm embrace of the library, its warm lights, and green carpeting. She sat down at her laptop and scanned the room, the hunched shoulders, the black, brown and blonde heads lowered over books. And there on the red couch lay Chloe, eyes closed and legs outstretched, balancing her laptop like breakfast in bed. She wa...

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“And The Jingle of Keys” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #221

The elevator hiccupped up to the third floor, the light flickering on cue as though a stagehand had flipped a switch. Nora was used to the rattle, the hiccups, of dwelling in the throat of an unoiled tinman who would hock her up onto the third floor like phlegm. She grimaced at her pallid and ghostly reflection; her lips were a purplish blue from the cold outside, and the sterile light made holes of her eyes. She wiped at her smudged mascara with her free hand, a bag of crisps tucked under the other, and the doors screeched open behind her. ...

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“This Perfume Reeks of Déjà Vu” by Carina Caccia

Submitted to Contest #218

I squat on the shower tiles, blue and white, and zip open my wet makeup bag. A floral pungence wafts out and overwhelms; it blossoms in my nose, my head, my heart, like a sweet, throbbing migraine. I pluck my eyeshadow palette from the wet mess, and mourn the smudged and sparkling petals of burgundy; they too smell of manmade flowers. I dig precariously through the bag and find the culprit with an ouch; a broken perfume bottle pricks my finger like a thorn, and déjà vu smells of Gucci Flora. I pluck the pink shards from the bag like petals—h...

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Author bio

Drafts, streams of consciousness, and the human condition in all its naked vulnerability. P.S. How do we indent margins on here?

Shortlisted 1 story ⭐️

Contest #276
Another Origami Nothing – read story