Menu

Menu

Prompts

Contests

Stories

Blog

Directory

Contests

Magazine

FAQ

Jack Kimball

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2023

Stories (40)

Comments

Library

120 Followers

96 Following

40 Stories

1749 karma pts

?

The Kiss

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #242

“Physicists tell us that the solidity of matter is an illusion, more like a vibrational frequency than particles of solid matter, more like a musical note. “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form,” states the Heart Sutra, one of the best known ancient Buddhist texts. The essence of all things is emptiness.”― Eckhart Tolle, The Power of NowWhile my wife was still living, we would spend most every Sunday afternoon at the Museum of Art. We would drift through the cavernous halls, but always start and end with a life-sized sculpture, a nude coupl...

34 likes

Candle in the Wind

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #240

I’m no Marilyn Monroe, believe me, as my husband reminds me, but I think of her, how her life was like a candle in the wind, the Elton John song. ‘You’re gaining weight Katie,’ my husband says. ‘Maybe a gym membership?’Each night, my favorite part of the day arrives. I slip into the tub at 10:00 p.m. and relish the feeling. A warmth from the hot water rises in my hips, up my back, and into my head, and then I go into a dream and leave my life behind.Maybe it starts when I am seven. I see us driving to the hospital: myself, my ...

32 likes

Revenge of the Muse

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #239

Sebastian stood naked in his art studio. The passion was still in him from Amy, who gave everything when they had sex. Something about the sensuality peaks my creativity, he thought. The blues and reds become vibrant, all the colors come alive. My neck, a heated intensity, unnerving. I need to put it on the canvass. And so he did. Wild Horses, by the Rolling Stones, pounded out through his EarPods the swaggering sound of Mick Jagger. ‘Well you bit my lip and drew first blood... don’t stop...’. He painted glorious yellows ...

27 likes

Prodigy

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #238

As if running a gauntlet, a night train speeds on gravity tracks between crumbling high-rises. Flame scarred brick apartment buildings stand like forgotten tombstones. Rubble spills onto wet black streets, a dream-like sheen. Graffiti streaks by spelling out bloated warnings, the train moving too fast to decipher the message.With rhythmic shudders, the train slows and enters a tunnel beneath the Hudson. Soon, a landing platform appears in stark white lights. The train breaks to a stop, the Grand Central Complex.A young man and woman de-board...

31 likes

Runner in the Rye

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #235

“I’m sorry Granddad. It’s just Holly Hill is… is..."“I know, expensive," I said, saying what she couldn't.“That doesn’t mean you can’t live with me and Bill.”But seeing the way Annie put her hand to her chin as she was driving in the drizzling rain, the way she averted my eyes, how she teared up, we both knew there was no space in her tiny apartment.She pulled up to the light at the entrance to the mall, the traffic all backed up, the whites and reds of car lights in the gray light, the slow slapping of our windshield wipers. I looked around...

22 likes

Lifeboat

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #233

In every direction the only sight was a skulking blue ocean, a silver mercury one day, a crystal blue the next. The only sound was the water slapping against the thirty feet of open boat. The only taste salt, the only smell fear. I marveled at how the sky dictated the color. Water is almost clear, I thought. It’s only the sky that gives it color; the sky is like an artist painting the sea. The sea has no knowledge of who paints it.It had been twenty-one days since our steamer floundered, New Year's Eve, 1890. There were eight of us and we'd ...

19 likes

Scarlet Guilt

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #230

“I should have read the warning label,” he said with a grimaced smile, bringing two fingers to his mouth as if inhaling a cigarette. With a heart rate monitor calling down the time, the man lay in a hospital bed. Both wrists were taking in fluids from a drip hanging in suspension, and his wife Martha was across from him in a chair. The room was institutional green.Martha stood and walked to the window. A drizzling gray rain. “Please don’t joke. Not now.”Yes, a joke, he thought to himself. On both myself and this woman. This woman with flawle...

26 likes

Cabin Fever

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #227

•───────•∞•Ж•∞•───────•Then the storm broke and was replaced the next morning with a frozen 1880s blue sky, the kind when after the clouds clear the world shuts down with a blinding but heartless sun, no wind, and dead quiet. Jason and Bill huddled around the cabin's only wood burner. Above them, the pine timbers groaned and complained with the weight of the storm’s snow, over twenty feet on the roof; but what dropped their stomach into a mine shaft was the sharp crack about every ten minutes, a sound like a double barrel going off in the ra...

18 likes

The River of Time

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #223

The truth is Jason may not have killed himself. Sure, we all knew the statistics about university students doing themselves in while pursuing dead end rip off degrees. “My generation will never have the lifestyle yours has. Baby boomer trips to Greece or Rome. River cruises on the Danube. We’re stuck in dead-end jobs, in my case manager of the convenience store near the airport. You know the one. People coming in all day after getting off a flight, coming from places we will never go. At night the homeless straggle in for warmth, gloves with...

16 likes

The Words Change

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #206

“The words change,” she’d whisper to me at night in our bedroom, winter sleet against the windowpane. “They shift," she’d say, her eyes runny, terrorized, hidden in shadow.I didn’t know what she meant.My wife would come down to breakfast, not eat, just pick at her eggs, red-orange yolks. The kitchen air would crackle, an electrical charge in her presence. The smell of burnt wire. Her nails were chewed to the hub; tattered band-aids wrapped her fingers, blood seeped through. She'd left her senses by then; her face waxy, white, glistening. But...

29 likes

Hope on the Mescalero

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #204

The young man lay staked out, his arms and legs spreadeagled. He’d been dead for some time, chewed on by wolves.Jeb'd been tracking near three days on the Mescalero high desert. Endless flat grasses, peyote cactus, sagebrush, and an uncaring wind under a blistering sun. At the end of the third day, with the sun dropping in a pink, cloudless sky, he loped over a low rise and found the young man.He studied the ground. Then he pushed up his brown sweat stained Stetson, exposing a stark white forehead beneath a receding hairline. He spit, and us...

22 likes

The Taking

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #203

Serial #1: The Taking (This is the first of a serial written for this prompt, not published.)____“William, wake up.” Carol was jostling me. I hadn’t slept long; the room was still dark, shadows just before dawn. “What?” The alarm showed 5:12 AM. “Someone’s in the house. The living room.” Carol pulled me in tight with both hands. I could tell she felt scared. Really scared. I didn’t wait. The bedside table on my side held a small .22 revolver. The only time I’d ever fired it was in a half day lesson I took after the riots ...

17 likes

Virgil’s Aeneas and the Founding of Rome

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #197

“Is it fate, or us, ending the world?” The admiral asked the question, but to him the answer would not come from the doctor, but the bright star to the west where the sun had just set. The night sky opened as a stage, and there, Venus, a false star, beckoned. The admiral listened. What did his god mother ask of him now? And would he listen?The doctor dismissed the admiral’s question, to him an enquiry to a deaf heaven. To ask a star, even the brightest, where their fate was headed, seemed the logic of a child from what he could tell. “W...

17 likes

Shipwreck

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #195

Tuesday, January 23rd, 190610:06 AMIf Joe was told the sea was not vengeful, did not take pleasure in, did not revel in, the murder of helpless souls, he wouldn’t believe it; for the sea at that moment was a howling rage, purposely dragging him from the rocks at Pachena Point, plunging him beneath the surging tide. He once again came to the surface, coughing, eschewing seawater, his bare feet scrambling on the slimed green ledge beneath the swell, fighting to gain a foothold.His head now barely above water, he gasped for breath in the freezi...

24 likes

Fish Story

Jack Kimball

Submitted to Contest #191

In the pink sagebrush dawn, a herd of better than thirty brown-hided antelope stare at me from a hundred yards. I slow when my jeep makes the turn and they dart off as one, like an earth-bound flock of brown and white starlings locked in formation. They're soon lost on the featureless plain. Speeding back up, the four wheel drive rumbles down a mud road, crosses snow still left from winter in patched places, powers through, and then after miles of prairie flat, comes to the trailhead on the western slope of the range. I unload my p...

30 likes