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Jack Kimball

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2023

Stories (43)
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125 Followers
100 Following

43 Stories

1858 karma pts

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One Book Wonder

Submitted to Contest #263

New York City: 1955Lonnie White pulled up his collar at a Fifth Avenue bookstore window against the cold. Black patches from lack of sleep lay under his eyes. Snowflakes, each an unkindly tiny angel to his mind, descended in the night. But it wasn’t the crystals scurrying down his back that gave him the shudders. Nor was it the ice melting in the hollow of his back. It was the overwhelming thought the snow crystals gathered together purposely, of one mind, a sentient being. This is not possible, he told himself. But it feels, all the same, l...

24 likes 13 comments 13
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Best It Can Be

Submitted to Contest #246

The eight of us gathered, lost souls one and all, at the recruiting station. We were waiting in a light rain. Every Sunday morning at 10:00 am our district had a drawing, but rumor said the number of groups to cover all the days, and even the hours of every day, were growing more and more.This morning, Adam had come down with me. He tilted his head back like he does, his eyes a little too wide open, so I could tell he was scared. The last time we'd both gotten notice our numbers came up '1' and '2'. Can you believe it, our numbers '1' and '2...

31 likes 29 comments 29
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Cold is the Absence of Heat

Submitted to Contest #243

Commander John Forebear re-enters the airlock to Novac 3 and takes his place at the bridge's command module. No sooner is he settled in than his headset sparks in static."It's a blue line here, John. Ice to every horizon, kind of mist-like, an artic blue, mythical. It's really something."The Commander smiles. Just like my science officer to admire the view. I love him, but it's another thing to keep him focused on the task at hand."I can see," the Commander replies. "Your visuals are coming in fine, but you're not on vacation, are you O...

27 likes 17 comments 17
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The Kiss

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 30 comments 30
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Candle in the Wind

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 26 comments 26
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Revenge of the Muse

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 23 comments 23
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Prodigy

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 22 comments 22
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Runner in the Rye

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 20 comments 20
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Lifeboat

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 19 comments 19
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Scarlet Guilt

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 13 comments 13
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Cabin Fever

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 27 comments 27
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The River of Time

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 12 comments 12
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The Words Change

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 23 comments 23
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Hope on the Mescalero

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 19 comments 19
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The Taking

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 21 comments 21
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