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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2023
Submitted to Contest #280
The man lay prone on the edge of thick woods sighting down the scope of a thirty-aught six hunting rifle. Snow flurries melted on the back of his neck. For an unknown reason, and mixed with the smell of pine and gun oil, the phrase ‘veil of an endless winter’ entered his mind. He shook his head. Poetry is the vice of fools, he scoffed. Through the compressed distance the telescopic lens thickened the falling snow, proving the chalk house a quarter kilometer away a miraged dream. A woman came out on the porch centered in the crosshairs. ...
Submitted to Contest #277
“Can you lose yourself? Why do I long, a lonely desperation, to find myself again?”“You’re not alone,” my father, Time, answered. “Many feel an emptiness, a search for meaning. Although within your heart you ache, you also aren’t the same as men.” I saw my father as heaven’s strength, but Time was running old. “It’s true, Father, I often lie awake in early hours, my memory’s fingers barely touch the thing. The hound slips its bounds and taunts me in a fog. I know it’s there, but when I grasp the thing firmly, only mist escapes my h...
Submitted to Contest #275
“You won’t have your internet or TV for three months,” Oscar said to his son.Emily exhaled from the passenger seat. “Can you leave the poor boy alone? He’s only seven.”John ignored his father and continued to stare out the back window of their silver SUV. After turned onto a jeep trail, they rumbled along over rocks for two-miles, the dust trailing behind. Finally, the SUV pulled in front of a falling down rusty sign, “Idaho Rocky Mountain Ranch”. “The Idaho wilderness,” Oscar said. “This will be fun. Those hills over there? I remember ...
Submitted to Contest #272
May 25, 2024Lieutenant Michael DonavanHomicide DivisionHarrison Police Department465 Avenue AHarrison, Michigan 87078Lieutenant Donavan,Should this letter reach you in time, you will find me entombed within the Bartholomew family mausoleum at the Bayview Cemetery. Buried in the floor near the north wall is a crypt covered with a clear quartz-like stone which forms the lid. Depending on when this letter reaches you, I may still be alive.Now, before you judge Clarisa, know I loved her dearly. My wife enjoyed a generous trust and she gave back ...
Submitted to Contest #265
Adam Daedalus Rocket was not born with the middle name Daedalus, or the last name Rocket. He chose his own names. The kids in the orphanage taunted him relentlessly. “You’re a moron to dream you can go to the stars, the shortest kid in the class. Elton John’s Rocket Man is not even a real astronaut, but some character in a dumb song!” The jeering that stung the most? “Your parents didn’t even care enough to keep you. You were unloved.”There was no time for anything but school as far as he was concerned. He made no friends and kept ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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