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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2020
Submitted to Contest #57
She had known it would come to this for a very long time. She was an old queen - one who had outlived her husband by a great many decades. She had lived her fair share of lives, made her fair share of mistakes. She was certain history books would sneer upon mention of her name. Perhaps her own descendants would mock and ridicule all the choices she had made in life. She wouldn’t blame them. She had made so many mistakes. This would not be one of them. Their kingdom was an old one, ruled by older still superstitions. They said that the youn...
Submitted to Contest #43
Age Twenty-one My dad died today. He died in a hospital room surrounded by people who claimed to know him, to love him. It didn’t fit him very well. I was on the roof when it happened, smoking. I promised him I’d give it up. I promised that I wouldn’t be like him. Look how well that turned out for me. The worst part about it all was when the nurse finally came to get me, the last living relative of the man who raised me, all I could think about was how it was so unlike him. He was supposed to smell like smoke, not lung cancer. He was suppose...
Submitted to Contest #41
“Another one?” Tyra looked up from her laptop - where the messy sketches of a story she thought was a good idea when waking up in a cold sweat early one Saturday morning resided. Her roommate - Airi - had her lip curled in disgust. Her pale skin caught the glow of the fluorescent light, turning it the same shade as cream. It provided a nice contrast against the coffee black hair that glided down her back. By her feet, buried in the white carpet of her rug was a scorpion. It moved carelessly, freely, oblivious to the giant disgusted at its me...
As he entered the forest that morning there had been snow. It clung to his cloak as it drug against the earth and kissed the soles of his feet through his worn out boots. His thick wool socks were almost completely soaked now, yet he trekked onwards. In his hands was a basket filled with small amber vials. Antidote - or at least that was what the man in white had called them. The vials were supposed to save those who’d fallen ill in his village. He wasn’t smart nor had he ever claimed to be - so he listened to this mysterious man. He ha...
Submitted to Contest #39
A long time ago, when the nights were clear, people used to sit around and eat grapes and think about things like what happens to someone after they die. Now there were no more clear nights. There were no more grapes to eat. And most of all there were no people to sit around and think about these sorts of things. There was only her living all alone in a world without light and the only thing on her mind survival. When the sun disappeared from the sky, it wasn’t anything as dramatic as it going “pop!” and suddenly it wasn’t there anymore nor ...
“Diptīkita eet kiupa diptīkita eet jerjupa mēst.” What begins in blood must end in blood - that was the first lesson Jay’s mother taught him. As he stared up into the pitch of the night sky, he wondered if the same could be said for all things. Would what began in stars also end in stars? Was it somehow possible if he kept staring and staring, his face dampened by the dew lorn grass, he could somehow find the finale of his life intertwined with those uncountable little speckles? It had been six years since Jay last saw the stars. The city w...
Submitted to Contest #38
The longer you look out a window, the more you see. That much only stands to reason. The longer you look, the more things you notice. He had been staring out of the window for a very, very long time. Probably since he was born. His mom liked to tell a story about when she first brought him home from the hospital. She said that his eyes never left the sky - as if he was captivated by what he saw. There was no sky anymore. At least none like what he would have known as a child. Mom said they used to live in the country but something, something...
The lights of the stage are merciless. They capture and consume you as you are and project that image back into your eyelids. Every drop of sweat must glisten and glimmer like a jewel on the head of a king. Sweat is more than sweat - it is an admission of nerves or of strength. It is an admission that you are playing as hard as you can and that is a vulnerability. Sweat is never just a natural reaction your body has. Sweat can never be a mere combination of water and salt meant to cool you down under the burning heat of those lights. S...
Submitted to Contest #37
Ever since he was little, he knew better than to leave the house in the woods. They raised him nice enough - Granny baked cookies on Saturdays and Pawpaw would read the paper aloud. They weren't his real Granny and Pawpaw but they insisted that he called them by those names. He did as he was told. He wanted to be good for them. They wanted him to be good for them, though it was rather difficult. “You can’t leave the house,” Granny told him one day. She’d most likely told him this many days before and would continue to tell him this man...
Submitted to Contest #36
August 28th, So here’s the thing - my name is Yvonne Naomi. It’s an awful name because my parents hated me ever since I left the womb and were like “Hey! Why not ruin this kid’s life!” but naming me after my two very dead and very racist grandmas wasn’t enough; they decided that Yvonne Naomi was a bit of a mouthful so they shortened it. Shortened it to what exactly? YN. They’re sure hip. Uh-huh. That’s my actual damn name. It gets better - oh so much better. My eyes? Blue. What the hell. That’s not even fair. Ten percent of the populat...
October 18th, The first time you get married it’s supposed to be something special. I guess most people don’t ever want to have a second wedding so they go all out with the first one. Big cake, big dress, big bucks. And then your first kid is this thing that’s like… out of this world cool. Like, you and your wife or girlfriend or this weird hookup just brought this thing into the world. This little dark-headed, squirming infant that has eyes that seem too big for its skull and filled with so much… wonder. My therapist said I should take up j...
Shortlisted for Contest #35 ⭐️
He was a small boy - too small for his age. His lips were chapped from the cold and his nails were filed down from trying to get back into the house. It was no use. She’d locked the door and no matter how loud he cried, she wasn’t going to open it again until she stopped being mad at him. He was a small boy - too small for his age - and he wore clothes that weren’t anywhere near warm enough for the weather. He shivered - then sneezed. Once, twice. He was no good against the cold and so he’d always resented the winter months. During summer, h...
Submitted to Contest #35
She had always liked the color white. Her mother hadn’t though. White always stained far too easily - a slave to earth and grass. White wasn’t a color for people to wear. It was a color for snowbanks and clouds and fair maids of myth. It did not belong to the hard toiling people of the soil that they were. Their features were always smudged in mud or freckles. So it was, she only had one white dress which she only wore once every year. The day of the spring dance, a festival of Ēostre. Though she wore the iron cross of Christianity around he...
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