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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2025
Submitted to Contest #309
The kettle whistled just as the morning sun spilled through the kitchen window. Nora reached out to switch it off, the steam rising like a ghost in the air. She plucked the spearmint tea bag from the ceramic jar and dropped it into her favorite chipped mug, cream white with blue vines painted around the rim. It had been her mother's once. Everything in this house had been her mother’s until it became hers. As the hot water rushed over the tea bag, coloring the mug with earthy greens, she felt that familiar pang, like missing someone in a dre...
The light in the room was dim, the early evening sun just beginning to slip through the curtains in golden slants. The scent of freshly brewed coffee lingered in the air, mingling with the faint trace of cleaning supplies—something sterile, clinical, almost too clean. Judith sat by the window, staring out at the garden she no longer remembered planting. Her fingers moved slowly, tracing the frayed edges of the quilt on her lap. The fabric was soft with age, worn down by time and touch. She thought she had made it herself once. The pieces fel...
Eli never learned what color the ocean really was. People told him it was blue or green or gray, but those were just words — words he couldn’t trust. The ocean, to him, was a sound, a presence, a constant rhythm in the world. When he stood at the edge, the crash of the waves drowned out everything else. The wind, the salt on his skin, the sand slipping away beneath his feet—those were the only things that mattered. They were like memories he could never quite hold. Sometimes, he asked strangers at the beach, “What color is it today?” “Blue, ...
Submitted to Contest #308
The dock was older now, the wood grayer and soft in places where it had taken in years of sun and rain. It still groaned the same way underfoot, though, like it remembered every barefoot step, every summer night jump into the lake. Emma sat at the edge, feet dangling over the side, the cool water lapping gently against her toes. She hadn’t been back here in fourteen years. The cabin behind her, nestled between two white pines, stood mostly unchanged. The screen door still squealed on its hinges, the porch swing still leaned slightly to the l...
Submitted to Contest #307
*Content warning: Contains themes of psychological disintegration, mild body horror, and surreal depictions of memory loss and identity collapse.* I. A Letter Arrives The envelope bore no return address—only a name rendered in sepia ink, as if scorched into the vellum: Thalia Weaver. The paper exhaled a scent of old libraries and damp stone. She hadn’t thought of the Lyceum in a decade. Not since the breakdown. Not since her therapist told her dreams of mirrored staircases and lectures in extinct tongues were “displaced academic stress.” She...
Trigger Warning: Contains Suicide or Self Harm And Substance Abuse --- Talia had always been a lucid dreamer. From the age of seven, she could will her dreams into castles and creatures, storms and safaris, reshaping her unconscious world like clay. Her parents called it a gift. Her therapist called it a defense mechanism. Talia called it freedom. But even she wasn't prepared for the dream that started on the night of her twenty-ninth birthday. It began with a train. Not the clunky, familiar kind that ran from her city’s downtown station, bu...
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