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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2020
Have you ever met Death? She’s quite nice. Oh yes, and she is a she. Before I met her, I always imagined Death to be some sort of scary looking thing with a cloak—not quite human, not quite monster. Death is actually quite beautiful, to be honest. Nothing to be afraid of in the least; on the contrary, I imagine people wouldn’t dread the actual event itself if they knew Death. It’s not the first time I’ve met her...
There are very few things I remember about childhood. The taste of mac' n' cheese with hotdog slices, summers at the community pool. And Zoe. Zoe was my next-door neighbor. Her family moved into the neighborhood at the beginning of our fifth-grade year. She was tall for her age—almost five feet—had a pet iguana named “Ziggy”, and always wore the same pair of sandals that were designed to look like a cou...
The universe is an amazing thing. Vast. Beautiful. And perfectly balanced—as a whole that is. There may be localized anomalies, little pockets of ups and downs here and there, but in general, balanced. A cosmic yin and yang. You can think of it like very poorly microwaved leftovers. Some parts are boiling hot, some parts are freezing cold. There’s light, and there is darkness. The weak and strong, rich and poor. And yes...
I was never very popular growing up. You'd think I would be. My family was rich. My dad owned an aerospace engineering and technology conglomerate. "The King of California" they called him. He was worth over a trillion dollars by the time he was thirty. And yet, nothing about his net worth could do anything to help my genetic disorder—my special sauce, as he always called it—a funny little walk I have caused by weakened...
CRACK I pull the bolt back on my rifle, drinking in the lingering smell of gunpowder as the empty cartridge is ejected from the firing chamber. Another round slips into the barrel as I lock the bolt in place, and I align my sights back on target. That last shot was a bit high and to the left—not great. But I’m getting old. And it’s been almost twenty-five years since I’ve had to use these skills to earn...
0:10 Time is such a funny thing. It’s fake, really, when you think about it. Nothing natural about it. I mean, who was the first person who decided how long a second would be? Or that a week would be seven days? No, no, don’t go look it up on Wikipedia. You can do that later. Besides, that’s not my point. My point is, time is manmade, a tool, something we use to measure or modify reality...
Part-time writer Full-time USSF Guardian Overtime geek Speculative/Fantasy/Sci Fi FB | IG | T @ authorjchammer See more at jaredhammer.com
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