Chris Wagner

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Sep, 2020

Stories (60)

60 Stories

1160 karma pts

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“Out of Ideas” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #68

No one ever had difficulty describing The Idea Bank. The bastards always had a corner on the market of detail and substance, at the expense of the surrounding neighborhood. It didn't even matter that they ripped off the layout from an episode of The Flash. They had all the ideas, we didn't, and they wanted to keep it that way. As long as big shots like James Cameron and the guys from Shark Tank came in there, to hell with everyone else. The building had that old fashioned Western style to it. Polished mahogany wal...

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“Red Shift” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #67

The central set for the game show looked like Mission Control with joysticks and rumble seats, banks of monitors displaying demo screens for just about every video game you can think of. Fog machines gave ambiance, console lights flickered and flashed, big speakers filled the air with explosions, whooping alien spacecraft noises and laser blasts, crystals and vaguely alien machinery props lighting up to punctuate the noise. I recognized the boom of an exploding Galaga fighter, the gobble of Pac-Man eating dots. The place smelled ...

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“The Subrogators” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #67

We strolled through a tent that smelled of naphthalene and skunk. The merchant burned fruity incense that reminded me of the chemicals they put in electronic component packaging. A variety of nonhuman creatures walked in and out of the establishment, purchasing armless turtlenecks, pants with three or four legs, jackets that allowed for wings. My hairless green girlfriend handed me what amounted to a leather strap. "Here. Put this on." My job required me to wear a number of humiliating things. For video calls, th...

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“Going Solo” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #66

The stadium had finally quieted down, the majority of the fans out in the parking lot, trying to navigate post concert gridlock. The smells of beer and pot from the crowd, though, lingered on.  All the bright stage lights, essentially large, fancy looking heat lamps, had been darkened, making things a little more comfortable. Little known fact: There are practical reasons why rockers wear tank tops and bare their chests on stage. They're not just trying to be sexy, it's damn hot, and we work up a sweat. The big s...

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“The Ghoulish Gourmet” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #65

The host of Shadow Chef always seemed a little...strange. He never took his sunglasses off, his studio had several dimly lit corners he did his announcing from, all outdoor shots were at night, and any recipes involving garlic sent the contestant packing. His personal life, though, proved this to be more than just quirky showmanship. He never went anywhere during the day. People asked about this, but he kept deflecting the question with an excuse about Covid, even when they made it very specific that they referred to the months...

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“Goodbye Sam Hain” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #65

We named our rock group Sam Hain because we only play on Halloween. I guess you'd call us a novelty band because we wear big pointy hats and robes and have a bubbling cauldron on stage with us. The magic is real, but we let everyone think it's just special effects. It was our 'sexy witch' Judy who came up with the idea because we were so busy with our normal lives that we couldn't find a good time to get everyone together and jam out.  Amberlee was busy taking care of her aging parents. It's a full time job. Anima...

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“Spinoff” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #64

A nanny job for the biggest name in the comic book industry. When I saw the want ad, I jumped at the chance. It shocked me to find out Drew Kirby had a child at all. Nobody talked about it, I saw no pictures, and heard absolutely nothing about there even being a woman in his life. Perpetually single, many people assumed he was gay. Of course, if you looked at his comics, you'd notice his fixation with female anatomy. Maybe he was bi? I'm a modern girl, so I made no judgments. Everything, the movies, the comi...

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“Madness Manors” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #64

We developed the game with the aid of the I-Ching.  When I drew Hexagram 29 during the final stage of completion, I didn't take it seriously. Just another thing we did to make our work fun, like dressing up in medieval costumes and having play sword fights. I mean, we made Eldritch Dungeon last year with a freaking Ouija board.  Little did I know that my 'flooding ravine' prediction was about to come true. Madness Manors was a console game set in an old Gothic house. You play a cute little chick who runs around in a...

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“Machu Piccu Gold” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #63

I had just begun my shift at the Lodestone Cafe when the pandemic hit. We'd just rolled out a new drink, Machu Picchu Pumpkin, for the fall season. I wasn't aware they grew pumpkin in Peru, but we've got smoothies made of stuff I didn't know existed, from places you could only reach on the back of a mountain goat, if you believed the advertising.  Pretty average stuff, if you ask me. Other than an extra purplish tint, it tasted just like the regular pumpkin pie drinks we and our competitors often bring out this time of ...

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“Freddie's Last Flight” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #63

Nobody knows that Freddie Phoenix keeps a dark thought diary, but there's a lot people don't know about me. There's only so much that can fit in a thirty minute day. The diary started one midnight when I started to have worries, and questions that couldn't be easily resolved by my friends on Rosedale Square. There was only so much you could do with a song and dance number, or a giant foam division sign. I knocked on my friend Rhonda smart's apartment door , apparently waking her from a dead slumber. I just unloaded on h...

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“You Should Know This” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #62

"Sheila, can you hear me?" My eyes flew open. I was...in a blue flight suit, strapped to a chair facing a bunch of instrument panels in a cramped compartment, two similarly clad people staring at me with expressions of concern. I was...in the small cockpit of...a strange airplane?...And weightless. "Sheila, what's wrong?" I stared. The one on my left had bushy brown hair, a name patch reading M. McAuliffe The one on the right, K. Kihoon, a man with tan skin, black hair and narrow eyes. "Where am I?" The two e...

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“They Talk Back To You” by Chris Wagner

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #61

The Googly Goose talking phone came out in the early eighties, a push button toy that 'dialed ' your favorite Googly Goose characters and piped their recorded voices through a tinny corded handset. Consumer complaints around that era said that the device was prohibitively expensive and the thin wire often broke so you could no longer hear the audio, but dad was obsessed. He took it everywhere when he was a kid. He swears that, unlike other talking phones of that era, it said something different every time. Most people know ...

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“Goblin” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #60

People have a lot of ideas about the end of the world.  Atomic annihilation. Disease. Zombies, perhaps zombie bovines if you're being fanciful.  A few have even given vampires a whirl, but nobody would have seriously expected a twelve year old goblin queen. Her three foot tall minions creep up to you from the cover of darkness, inject a magic needle in your body, and you somehow cocoon and metamorphose into an ugly, often diminutive monster.  The cocoons produce...foliage as their occupants depart and their ...

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“U-Bank” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #59

I awoke naked on a bench in a depressurization tank.  The tank had rusty steel bulkheads bearing old dripping pipes and weathered ventilation ductwork. Someone had cranked the AC to an uncomfortable level, raising goosepimples on my bare flesh. The chamber deadened most sound, save for the blower, the dripping water, and Sportscenter. The plasma TV had been fastened to the wall in such a way that I couldn't get at the controls, and I found no remote...or clothing, for that matter. The floor had chevron patterned plating like t...

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“Goose” by Chris Wagner

Submitted to Contest #58

A house makes a weird sound when the power goes out. A dying wail comes from some unknown electronic device hidden among the multitude of appliances.  The day of the blackout, the image on the plasma TV narrowed to a slit like a closed eye. The dog was the only one not traumatized by the event. Freddy only raised an eyebrow and looked around a moment before resuming his impression of a rug. My daughter Brenda, whose nose had been stuck in her phone, suddenly realized that the wifi wasn't on, and the reading light had ...

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Author bio

See more of my fiction and artwork at: https://kayboksystem.wordpress.com/

Shortlisted 1 story ⭐️

Contest #61
They Talk Back To You – read story