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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2023
Submitted to Contest #278
Daniel sat in a bright cubic cell. He perched on the edge of a ledge, slightly too small to be a bed, that herniated out of the smooth clean wall. A black lens was set into the ceiling and looked down on him like a shark’s eye. The door swung open and a man wearing a grey suit and a blue veil of fag smoke stepped into the cold cell. The man turned to watch the door close behind him and then leant against it, scratching audibly at dandruff with a hooked yellow finger. “Good morning,” said the man. “Are you my solicitor?” said Daniel. “...
Submitted to Contest #276
I press the button on the remote and the garage door jerks into life. A few autumn leaves cling to its lower edge as it rolls up, before they lose their crispy grip and flutter down to the concrete. My bike waits in the oily shadows. Like most children I had progressed from push along trikes to stabilised bikes to two-wheel proficiency. Whole days of the late eighties and very early nineties were spent riding around the streets in a state of BMX abandon, sometimes happily alone, sometimes as part of a peloton of weaving bandits. But that was...
Submitted to Contest #275
As things began to settle down, Jacko became aware of a patch of light, a brilliant, jagged banana of summer sun biting into the darkness. The shape rotated gently, a slow kaleidoscope of glittering sand, splattered and looped into a Jackson Pollock of slimy fluids that pattered and plopped into the soft grains. He peered at the image and tried to draw a line from it back to anything in his memory that could explain what he was seeing, but he was finding it hard to focus. The only image he could summon was a cloud of candyfloss pink foam, fr...
Submitted to Contest #274
Pavel knew a ship with him in the crew would never go down. It wasn’t because he was a fine seaman, and it sure as hell wasn’t because he was lucky. No, Pavel‘s ship would never go down because even the sea didn’t want him. Pavel was the only customer in the nameless place. On the stool next to him sat a pair of broken old work boots. There was no sign of their owner other than a neat parade of empty glasses on the stretch of bar in front of the stool that the boots occupied. At the end of the bamboo bar a record player popped and wheezed. ...
Shortlisted for Contest #272 ⭐️
You’ve chosen a good time to pay me a visit. I’ve pulled up some pretty decent leeks this morning, got some lovely onions in the store and a rosemary bush that is totally oblivious to all the nonsense that seems to have befallen our world. My garden really has been my saviour, my little farm. I can grow what I need and get by very nicely on what my garden supplies.I do wish I’d had a better crop of carrots. I used the finest bone-meal fertiliser, but they were a total bust this year. My soil is a little too heavy for them, too much clay, but...
Submitted to Contest #271
I stood by the side of the road out of town, my sodden suit jacket failing its audition as a coat. My small flight case waited beside me, a teenaged LAX luggage tag flapping in the dead black breath of the sea that steered the rain sideways through the rays of approaching headlights. I raised my thumb in surrender and pointed my gaze somewhere above the procession of approaching lights to where it might find the eyes of a merciful driver. The last of my money had been drunk in a brown, out-of-season bar the day before. The summer street fur...
Submitted to Contest #270
Just like Taylor Swift “You’ve had it done, haven’t you, you crazy bastard?” said Keller. Mitchell looked across the restaurant table with affirmative eyes. “Show me then,” said Keller. Mitchell placed his tanned hands on the crisp white table cloth, the ringed fingers of the left one drumming lightly as he set himself, before poking the tip of his tongue out at Keller. The lozenge of flesh was pure white. Mitchell had bleached his most social organ, turning it from a muscular, cave-dwelling tool, into an accessory, an iTongue. His f...
Submitted to Contest #225
The scrutiny of the gallery guard weighed on Spencer like a wet dressing gown. He’d felt watched since he pushed through the heavy doors into the guard’s peacefully unvisited room. Spencer was tired from his unplanned journey and thought that the gallery of the unfamiliar town might offer sanctuary. A place where he could clear his head sufficiently to be able to plan his next move. He had ignored the guard who lingered near a door-sized slab of a painting on the right wall of the gallery. He had turned immediately to the left wall a...
Shortlisted for Contest #224 ⭐️
“Wake up, Sarge. It’s half-past-four.” Catherine walked away from me across the village green. It was a Sunday in May and we had nothing to do. Swallows cut the clean spring air into cloudless curves. She was carrying her shoes. She looked back at me and opened her mouth to say something. “Sarge! Wake up. It’s half-past-four.” “Thank you, Grayson,” I said, stretching a hand out from my cocoon of grey wool to take back my watch. Grayson was a black shape in the burrow of the dugout. The tiny stove gave off just enough light to ma...
Submitted to Contest #223
Barnaby gazed out of his office window and imagined himself smoking moodily on the steel footbridge three floors below. He missed smoking and in his daydreams about it he was often overcoated and windswept in some gritty urban setting, giving off a sort of vaguely eastern European vibe. The footbridge over Chancellor’s Drive wasn’t exactly the Berlin Wall, but the mean little bridge which stapled the concrete campus to a surrounding fringe of woodland was the best he could do. Three papers was all he’d got through before his mind ha...
Submitted to Contest #222
“How long have you been doing this?”“Twenty-five years, sir.”“Remember your first, do you?”He did.*The air was so cold that the thick skin of clean white gloss that covered the room of steel and brick could have been ice.“Now, Albert, remember everything we talked about. We’re here to do a job. Simple as that. I’m the lead, you’re assisting. Easy money for you today, you’re here as a witness more than anything else. I’ll see to his bindings. Nothing for you to worry about.”“Yes, Uncle Tom.” As they waited Albert found that his main concern w...
Submitted to Contest #221
A pot noodle is not an acceptable breakfast for a homeowner, but the cat’s got conjunctivitis and there might be a nuclear war. The diesel shudder of the crowded bus made a cocktail shaker of my nervous gut and my vibrating seat was mixing up the dirtiest of martinis. It took a super-human effort not to add a bellyful of rehydrated beefy noodles to the oily hair that spilled over the back of the the seat in front of me. The number thirteen mercifully puked me out before the consequences of my lifestyle choices were exhibited before the jury ...
Submitted to Contest #220
The gravestone was unusually tall. It stood at the head of an unmade bed of earth. Tom had missed the funeral, but not by much. Filled but not finished, the grave still smelled of the turned earth. A pink worm flexed and headed into the heap. Tom thought of the grave he’d dug for Bruce. No headstone for him, just a spot under the tree where he’d played in the autumn leaves as a puppy. Cleanly cut in rain-beaded granite were the words: Samuel van Wyk I celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom ...
Submitted to Contest #219
“Good evening, Team! Are you ready to save the world?” Ford’s level 6 astronaut themed avatar glowed on the screen above his credit score, which was rocketing thanks to the enthusiastic start he’d made to the briefing. “The Citvore nightshift security chain is entering its 567th night of unbroken vigilance, you should all be so proud!” Clapping emojis floated up and hearts exploded in a tumbling column down the right side of the screen. “Remember, nightshift is a sacred duty entrusted to only one in ten people. It is vital to the security of...
Submitted to Contest #218
An imperfect joint in nearby tracks causes a slowly passing tram to pump a metal heartbeat through the hotel room. Now a voice, amplified by the late hour, and Guinness, calls something unintelligible to an unseen audience. Music strikes up in response. It rises from a basement deep in the roots of repurposed homes of Georgian stone to pick up the tram’s ectopic beats and thud out the message that I’ve picked the wrong street for sleep. A female voice shrieks and wheels like a gull over the waves of a drinker’s enthusiastic tenor. The be...
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