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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2020
Submitted to Contest #124
“Stay in the left lane.” “In one mile, make a U-turn.” “In 800-feet, make a U-turn.” “In 200-feet, make a U-turn.” My GPS unrelentingly urged me to perform an illegal U-turn while I remained steadfast in my refusal to play along. With all of its intelligence, shouldn’t it know better than to demand I make an unlawful turn? If it can pinpoint my precise location on the entire planet, to the exclusion of all other locations, and knows the location of my destination within just a couple of feet, it doesn’t seem to be a str...
Submitted to Contest #123
Her name couldn’t have been more befitting of her disposition. It was as if the gods had convened and prophetically chosen it for her. In truth, however, she was unintentionally christened when her mother, thoroughly drained after thirty-eight hours of labor, simply looked out her hospital room window and muttered, “It’s sunny.” A nurse who’d been attempting to complete a birth certificate for more than twenty minutes assumed this was the answer to the question she’d already asked three times, to no avail, and proceeded to write it d...
Submitted to Contest #120
Kneeling on my bedroom floor, surrounded by a sprawling disarray of packing boxes, I reach for the heavy, oversized, and very dusty books on the bottom shelf of my bookcase and begin pulling them out to organize them into boxes. I hum as I pack, then start ad-libbing a little song to amuse myself: “Yearbooks go in this box…Picasso over there…travel books way over there...” I stand up to perform a little twirl followed by a leap to the box I’d already started filling with travel books in order to drop in Spain and Italy. I hop back over s...
Submitted to Contest #76
Amanda, a new mother – and a single one at that - came to the startling realization immediately after giving birth to her baby boy, Kevin, that she was going to be the one and only person on the planet required to teach him everything. Absolutely everything. So, not only was she exhausted from the 24-hour ordeal she had just endured, but also at the magnitude of the job ahead of her. Of course, Kevin could learn some things from other people, but none of those people could possibly teach him as well as Amanda could. Amanda was sure of that...
Submitted to Contest #75
Trigger warning: abuse This wasn’t supposed to be her mission. Sheila wasn’t born into a happy, carefree life. Every time she pulled out her dusty, faded photo albums and scanned through the photographic evidence, she noted it was extremely rare to find an image that captured her smiling. In fact, in nearly every photo she appeared to be on the precipice of bursting tragically into tears. Throughout her childhood, the mantra Sheila’s parents frequently uttered was: “Children are meant to be seen and not heard...
Submitted to Contest #59
Sheila had barely tiptoed outside the borders of the United States, having only ventured on a couple of short jaunts into Mexico and Canada. So, when she saw an opportunity for exciting travel, she made a bold move – she volunteered to represent her team at an industry conference in Brazil. Little did she know at the time what she’d be getting herself into. “It sounds exciting,” she thought to herself with a smile, “I can do this. No big deal.” First, she needed to sort out getting a visa. Luckily her company used an agency to help wit...
Submitted to Contest #56
Not everything in life turns out how you expect, or at least hope, it will turn out. In fact, most things don’t. That fact didn’t dissuade Melissa from eventually getting remarried after several years of not dating at all after a very protracted and unpleasant divorce from her first husband. He stalked her endlessly throughout the divorce process, spouting ridiculous protestations about his dissatisfaction over their separation and tormented professions of his undying love for her. “God help me,” she thought to herself e...
Submitted to Contest #55
That summer started out like every summer that came before it – swim lessons and bible school, followed by the obligatory three-week long August road-trip to visit our relatives in the mid-west. Those summer vacations always involved lots of sleepover parties with cousins, playing with new litters of kittens or piglets, helping with cows at milking time, riding tire swings, ping-pong matches, having ice cream sundaes for dinner and going to the movies. Our aunts, uncles and cousins were infinitely more interesting to me and my siblings tha...
Submitted to Contest #47
Have you ever left in the dark of night, with nothing more than a suitcase in hand, heading toward the station, so to speak? You might have left to hop on a bus, or on a train, or you might have driven away in your own car. No matter. The train was leaving the station and it was abundantly clear it was time for you to go. Despite the circumstances surrounding how you leave, for some of us, there are happenstances in life when we have no choice but to leave, suitcase in hand. I do wish for you, dear reader, that you've never ...
Are you an honest man? A truthful man? Or do you bleed the souls of others solely for your personal gain? Will you convince a woman that you love her, when your deep underbelly quietly reveals you’re using her for whatever you can get out of her – money, sex, a responsible partner who can pick up the slack of your irresponsibility, and the children you deserve to have? Will you quit drinking tomorrow? Or is that just a story you keep telling me to kick the can down the road another day? Will I have to tiptoe around you and watc...
Submitted to Contest #46
Beth didn’t understand why the other kids in her class always groaned on Friday mornings when it was time for their weekly spelling quiz. Especially if the quizzes had fun words in them, like the time their teacher had all rhyming words in the quiz – words like hairy, fairy, bury and marry. Beth giggled as the teacher called them out and carefully spelled each word correctly. And why on earth did the other kids not like writing essays or poems about their summer vacation? It was awesome to think about all the fun things she had done ...
Submitted to Contest #44
Sandra was born with a sideways heart. She lived 38 years of her life without any knowledge of that fact. Only after she’d endured frequent heart palpitations for months, did Sandra finally seek out a medical professional to ascertain her body wasn’t planning to kill her any time soon. Sandra waited for months before even considering scheduling a doctor’s appointment because, frankly, her life wasn’t ‘anything special.’ She went to work, she came home to her tiny studio apartment, and she took two weeks of vacation every year to go...
Submitted to Contest #43
With a shiver, I tugged on the collar of my thick wool coat to pull it up higher and button it tighter around my neck to stave off the cool early morning fog and harsh wind coming off the bay. From a few blocks away, I could hear the charming ding of a cable car bell. Quintessential San Francisco. Freezing cold and windy all year long, but there’s nothing like the sound of those bells to help you romanticize your intense suffering at the hands of Mother Nature. I sighed and carried on.Struggling to keep my body upright while carefully toddli...
Submitted to Contest #42
When I was a kid, my best friend Jane’s house was the 'awesomest' place to go. She had three bunnies, a dog, AND a cat. At our house? We had guppies. They died. We had a tiny turtle. It died. We needed better pets. I made this point abundantly clear to my parents, annoying them day in and day out with my proclamations:“I want SOFT pets.”“I want FLUFFY pets.”“I want CUDDLY pets.”Their response was always a resounding, “NO!”One Saturday afternoon; however, I discovered there was something that looked like a cage on raised wooden legs in t...
Submitted to Contest #40
I’ve always longed for an elusive something…a void in my life I never seem able to fill. Early in my career, I became a workaholic, with my drive for perfection steering me on my unrelenting path. But year after year, the elusive 'it' was missing. In parallel, I sought out relationships, failing miserably at every turn. The gap between what I had and what wasn’t there only seemed to grow. Shouldn’t one of these two most obvious things fill me up?I then pursued an endless laundry list of hobbies—climbing, hiking, camping, ...
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