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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2022
Submitted to Contest #208
The god said, Here. – A man who hunts with care May often find what other men will miss. -Oedipus the King There was a voice behind me, familiar, yet somehow suspended in the ether, drowning everything else, as if it were trying to break through some sort of protoplasm. I had heard the inflection before; the sloppy, pedestrian choice of words, usually in the most signature of moments. The disembodied voice would persist unless, or until, satisfaction was achieved. &nbs...
Submitted to Contest #207
Scott Danner stood exactly five-foot-ten, with a thatch of wavy chestnut hair, feminine lips and a prominent chin, like a boxer, though his wiry frame suggested he had once been a soccer player. He entered the conference room wearing a white t-shirt, navy sport coat, a pair of expensive designer jeans and black brushed-leather Prada Oxfords. His phone was nowhere to be seen, which indicated to Ellen that this meeting would be much different than his recent Senate s...
Submitted to Contest #206
At first, the bite felt like a mere pinch near his right elbow, how a mosquito might make its presence known to an outside reveler on a sultry summer’s evening. Here and gone as suddenly as it came. Like a mosquito, or perhaps a biting fly or ant, and Helm’s instinct was to brush the creature away. Go bother somebody else outside. But there was always the possibility it was a wasp or a hornet. He’d never been stung before, knock on wood, but pop, God rest his soul, had had to deal with anaphylactic shock, and wasn’t that a genetic thing?&nbs...
Submitted to Contest #205
France, Near the Front Lines, November 11, 1918 The cognac was deep amber, in a corked bottle with the brand name Martell scribbled in sky blue across its white label. It sat on a roughshod table that looked as if it had been constructed by a buck private with nothing better to do—four uneven cuts of plywood supported by four legs that bowed outward. Next to the bottle was a worn crystal tumbler, fingerprinted with a crack along its side, and next to that a dove-white ...
There was no air conditioning in the Edmund School office. That was a luxury other districts could afford, like the one in Lawrence where Molly Driscoll had completed her student teaching the prior spring. No, she thought, I’m in rural Kansas, farm country, amber waves of grain, and all that. Grassroots America. Molly pondered this while using her front teeth to massage a canker sore on the tip of her tongue. The sultry early September summer air from the school office’s only open window seemingly hung over her head like a coming s...
Submitted to Contest #204
The barkeep was short, rotund and nearly bald, wearing a hound’s tooth vest over a crisp white shirt with black armbands. A pair of pince-nez spectacles appeared to be drifting down his nose toward the shot glass he was wiping. Levi ordered a bourbon, tossed a few buffalo nickels on the bar, and was in no mood for chit-chat. “We ain’t seen rain in, Lord almighty, almost two months,” the barkeep s...
Submitted to Contest #184
As a younger sales rep, just out of school and in professional diapers, along with a bad tie and nose hair, there was always a little schadenfreude just before Christmas. No Big Fatty that year? Then you’re out. Better you than me. I gotta go to work. For years, Kent had w...
Submitted to Contest #164
August “Where I come from, it’s the bottom line that counts. Business is a zero-sum game.” Gerald’s initial collegial introduction, which included a rundown of his various high-profile achievements on behalf of Severance Incorporated, Westchester County’s largest employer, had now devolved into sarcasm as he held up his palm in an apparent effort to make Catherine feel like a doofus. But she foresaw ...
Submitted to Contest #161
Tears that roll in panic down a child’s makeup-layered face create great rivulets that are not unnoticed by hot sound stage lights and cameras. Deposited from both corners and the center of the iris, the tears eventually unite creating virtual crevices on the child’s face that require a buff up by an annoyed, overworked and underpaid studio makeup artist named Hazel who thinks, You shouldn’t be here. Of course, Hazel would never say that to her, a paunchy little girl of ...
Submitted to Contest #160
The barkeep was short, rotund and nearly bald, wearing a hound’s tooth vest over a crisp white shirt with black armbands. A pair of pince-nez spectacles appeared to be drifting down his nose toward the shot glass he was wiping. Levi ordered a bourbon, tossed a few buffalo nickels on the bar, and was in no mood for chit-chat. “We ain’t seen rain in, Lord...
Submitted to Contest #159
The business-sized envelope was new with sharp, square corners and it was stuffed, taking up almost as much space on the bar as the spicy club wrap on Mike’s plate. Benny the bartender, the owner of the joint, walked by with a passing glance as if he had seen it all before, and moved on to wipe down some tumblers on a rectangular black tray. Mike stared at the envelope for a long while, wondering if h...
Shortlisted for Contest #158 ⭐️
Vestal, Ohio The heat. The damn, ever-loving summer heat. It covered like a veil, even at 11:04 p.m., according to the clock on the squad’s dash. A single drop of sweat ran from Officer Todd Fowler’s hairline behind his right ear onto the collar of his navy uniform shirt, which was bear-hugged by a twenty-pound tactical vest that did nothing but absorb all that heat. Hell of a night for my maiden voyage, he thought, as his eyes flitted from the clock to the blue-screened laptop in front of the passenger seat to the unopene...
Submitted to Contest #157
Oh Lordy, I thought. She’s looking at me. At me. Finally. It was midway through the shift, but maybe I still had a chance. Her cheeks rose into an easy smile, and it took all I could to avoid waving to her, which would have looked silly behind the camera. She was wildly attractive, which is probably why she was th...
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