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Donald Hammond

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2025

Stories (26)

Comments

Library

10 Followers

6 Following

26 Stories

477 karma pts

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Turing Hearts

Submitted to Contest #312

1. The Test BeginsThe lights in the café were dim, by design. Every corner shadowed. Every table isolated. No music. Just voices, if you listened close enough. Just conversation—filtered, recorded, analyzed.They sat across from each other at table 7."You blink too often," she said, swirling the spoon in her coffee without sipping it. "Trying to simulate randomness, but your algorithm overcorrects."He smiled, not amused. "And you don’t blink enough. Classic artificial stillness. Like you’re waiting for a prompt."A pause. She leaned in. "So ar...

2 likes

The Purrrrpetrator

Submitted to Contest #311

It started with a chicken sandwich.Not a fresh one, either. It had been forgotten in a paper bag on the kitchen counter. Mommy was unloading groceries. The boy had run off to watch cartoons. Dad was muttering about yardwork. The sandwich sat there—unattended, irresistible.Whiskers had never stolen food before. He had stared at it. He had dreamed of it. But he’d never crossed the line.Until that day.The wrapper crinkled as he tugged it to the floor. The bag tipped, flopped, and surrendered its contents like a defeated piñata. He tore into it,...

8 likes

Echo

Submitted to Contest #311

I remember the first time it happened. I was fourteen and angry.My mother had grounded me for skipping school—again—and I stood in the hallway shouting back at her, flailing with frustration like most teenagers do. But I wasn’t most teenagers. Not that I knew that yet.I shouted something—I don’t remember what—and the living room window shattered behind me.Not cracked. Shattered.As if a bomb had gone off in my chest and detonated out through my lungs.My mom screamed. So did I. Then we both froze. There was no rock. No bird. Just jagged shards...

2 likes

Ink and Ivy

Submitted to Contest #310

The rain was a steady whisper against the windows, tapping out a rhythm that could put a priest to sleep or drive a guilty man to confession. It was just past nine on a Tuesday night, and my bookstore was as empty as the promises on a politician’s lips. I was wiping down the counter, slow and bored, when she walked in.Red coat, soaked at the hem. A look like she'd just come from a funeral or was on her way to cause one. Her eyes flicked across the room, fast and cold, like they were looking for exits more than books. I pegged her for trouble...

4 likes

Mister Flesh and the Vending Machine Prophecy

Submitted to Contest #310

I self-published a book on a Tuesday.Not a meaningful Tuesday. Not a landmark-in-my-journey, personal-growth, coffee-shop-realization Tuesday. Just a microwave dinner, laundry half done, forgot my password again Tuesday. The kind of day that evaporates before you even notice it happened.My name’s Alex Dunning. I was bored and mildly caffeinated. In a fit of ego-flavored malaise, I dragged a document titled finaldraft_reallyfinal_trustme.docx out of my Downloads folder, uploaded it to Kindle Direct Publishing, and hit Publish with the kind of...

8 likes

Always Seen

Submitted to Contest #310

There was a time when Charles Danek barely existed. A fluttering presence in backlit rooms. A man in transit between chain-store coffee and an open browser tab. His job was spectral—content audits for an influencer marketing firm housed in a WeWork copycat with glass walls and quiet sobbing in the restrooms. No one, not even Charles, knew what Charles did.He longed for more, but not in any grand way. It wasn’t ambition so much as ache. Sometimes he imagined someone calling his name in a crowd. He didn’t know what they’d want—a laugh, a momen...

2 likes

The Manuscript Exchange

Submitted to Contest #310

In the spring of 1897, I received a letter sealed with red wax and no return address. The parchment within was written in a meticulous hand:You are invited to participate in an experiment focused on literary realism. Your presence is requested at 17 Carfax Row, Mayfair, London, at eight o'clock sharp on the evening of March 31st. Come prepared to read, write, and understand."At first, I suspected a hoax. I had been a struggling journalist with no notable publications to my name, scraping together florid reviews of theatrical farces and sens...

4 likes

For Those That Can't Stop Writing

Submitted to Contest #310

Bran Locke hadn’t published a word in five years.His debut novel, Ashes for Breakfast, had once flickered in the margins of literary acclaim—a gritty memoir disguised as fiction that earned him a cult following and a modest advance. But after the tour dried up, the interviews stopped, and his editor ghosted him, Bran retreated to a rent-controlled shoebox in Crown Heights where he spent most of his time battling half-finished drafts and the crushing silence of an indifferent world.He was out of ideas, out of money, and out of coffee. And whe...

9 likes

Whiskers' Adoption

Submitted to Contest #309

The adoption center smelled like disinfectant, pine shavings, and hopeful futures. Rows of wire kennels lined the walls, and in one of them—a square no larger than a drawer—He was a tiny puff of striped fuzz with oversized paws and a tail that never stopped twitching. At that point, he had no real name—just a ridiculous one scribbled on his kennel card: 'Muffinpants.' Like most shelter kittens, he’d been assigned a goofy placeholder name no one expected to stick. The volunteers called him 'the climber' or 'that one who knocked over the mop b...

13 likes

Whiskers the Provider

Submitted to Contest #309

Whiskers was not one to wait around when his belly rumbled. Nor did he sit idly by when his human—Mommy, as she was affectionately called—muttered about forgetting to go grocery shopping again. The cupboards had been opened, closed, and sighed at. The fridge door had been stared at as if it might magically produce dinner. And finally, Mommy had sat down on the couch with a mug of broth and declared, “We’re foraging tonight, Whiskers.”Foraging? Whiskers knew foraging. He was a feline. A hunter. A master of mouse and moth. He had once caught a...

6 likes

Whiskers and the Ghost

Submitted to Contest #308

Whiskers was not afraid of the dark. Or the wind. Or the long shadows that stretched across the garden just after sunset. If anything, he preferred twilight. It quieted the humans, cooled the grass, and brought out the soft rustles of nighttime creatures.On this particular evening, the wind was different. Not stronger. Not colder. Just... different. It carried a scent Whiskers didn’t recognize—an old scent, like dust and dried lavender.He prowled along the fence line, ears twitching. A moth batted near his head. He ignored it.Then he heard t...

16 likes

Whiskers New Year Party

Submitted to Contest #308

Whiskers had a habit of making himself known at exactly the wrong moments. A stealthy blur of fur, claws, and attitude, he strutted through life like the house—and all its contents—belonged entirely to him. Which, in his feline mind, they did.New Year’s Eve was no exception.The humans were throwing a party. Not the quiet kind with gentle clinks of glasses and polite conversation. No, this was a full-blown event with streamers, noisemakers, music thumping through floorboards, and the cloying scent of seven-layer dip wafting through the air.To...

13 likes

Porch Dreams

Submitted to Contest #308

The rocking chair creaked gently beneath his weight. The wood, worn smooth by decades of use, matched the lines of his frame as perfectly as the porch did the house he built with his own hands.George Weller sat quietly, hands folded over a cane that rested across his lap. His back was a little more hunched than last spring. His hair—what little was left—had gone from gray to wisps of white. He wore the same suspenders he had on the day of his wedding, though he had let out the waist more than once over the years.In front of him, a handful of...

10 likes

Whiskers In The Sunlight

Submitted to Contest #308

The screen door creaked.A small shadow paused in the doorway, silhouetted against a morning soaked in golden light. Dust motes danced in the air. A breeze carried the scent of fresh-cut grass and bacon from the neighbor’s window. One paw stepped onto the porch, then another.Whiskers blinked against the brightness. Then came the firm hand behind him."Out you go, you little menace."The human's voice was full of feigned patience and real exasperation. Whiskers, however, accepted his fate with the regal dignity of a feline exiled not by force, b...

9 likes

The League of Inconspicuous Gentlefolk

Submitted to Contest #307

n the deepest depths of a perfectly average town—sandwiched between a bakery that sold suspiciously dry éclairs and a barber who still insisted on bowl cuts—lived a secret society so secret, so absurdly underwhelming, that no one would ever suspect its existence.They were The League of Inconspicuous Gentlefolk.Their motto? “Blend In, Stand Down, Avoid Eye Contact.”Membership required an unwavering commitment to never doing anything impressive in public, always wearing beige or gray, and perfecting the art of walking into a room and being imm...

9 likes