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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2022
Submitted to Contest #226
I wanted to kill him. Not all of the time. Not much of the time at all. This was not an obsession of mine, more a temptation. Like chocolate, a second helping of my mother’s lasagne or that car that’s been buffed to the most seductive of sheens and placed under clever lighting. You want it, but vying with that want is a knowledge of how it’s bad for you and that things won’t work out the way you want them to just because you want them to work out that way. That isn’t how it works. The world turns and reality has its way. Why? Because it’s ...
The death of Terry was the final straw for Bert. Once again, life had short changed him. English Bull Terriers were supposed to live for more than a decade. Terry Bull only made it just past his sixth birthday. If that wasn’t bad enough, Terry checked out with what the vet referred to as complications. Translated into layman’s terminology, this meant that the vet was going away for two weeks all-inclusive and Bert was footing the bill. Soon after Terry passed Thanksgiving reared it’s fat and ugly head. A holiday of excess enjoyed...
You can’t choose your family, and I lost the family lottery big time. I doubt anyone ever wins big, not unless they are gifted a very limited number of family members who have mastered the art of not inflicting themselves upon family members. There is supposed to be a compensating strategy to make up for family and it has something to do with friends. Apparently, you can choose your friends, but that all falls down because it’s not like you can form a cadre of friends who you take with you wherever you go to protect you from family and the...
Submitted to Contest #225
I have to admit to noticing him a number of times before taking the time to attend to his existence. Fleeting glimpses in the midst of a crowd. A chance sighting as I sped past in my car. The blurred reflection in the train window. I dismissed each and every occurrence as a waking cheese dream. You see, I have a pet theory, a half-baked hypothesis that I concocted on the hoof as it were. My musings centred around the simplicity of faces. There are only so many combinations of features and this helps explain my regular encounters with the f...
John’s mum used to say that you ended up with the house that was meant for you. When he was younger, he was uncharitable towards his mother’s sayings. He found them to be twee and ultimately irrelevant, but as he calmed down and relaxed into his life, he found merit in what she said understanding that she’d done a fair amount of living, mostly before he came along and changed her into a parent and mother. She’d been more like him than he had cared to admit. He still struggled with that admission. Finding and securing a house had been a pro...
Submitted to Contest #224
I can’t remember the last time. We all have this in our lives. We have done something in the past. We know for sure we have done it and we have instances that we can recall, or we have a collective recollection, a bundled up set of experiences with a blurb that explains what they are. But when we come to think about it, we cannot select the most recent instance of that experience. For me, I was sure that I had made a point of this simple act on a cyclical basis. That a shaming bout of time elapsed until I felt the building pressure...
“Tell us the story of the sun and moon, Grandpa!” Shell smiled her best smile at the old man and he returned her smile warmly. Faun, her older brother looked up from his play and scowled, “that isn’t right. It is the tale of day and night, not the sun and moon.” Grandpa smiled again, the same smile for the boy as he had had for the little girl, “both are right in their own way. After all, you cannot have day without the sun and the moon lives in the night.” “Please tell the story, Grandpa!” she tugged the leg of his trousers as thoug...
“I can’t sleep.” “Well, at least try!” Maureen harrumphed, grabbed a fist full of duvet and span over taking more of the bed clothes than was fair. This was her protest. On the face of it, her protest was about George encroaching upon her precious sleep, but as with many arguments there was more to it than that. This argument had history. George was aware of some of the history. He wasn’t a dolt. He also knew that there would be elements of Maureen’s chagrin that he was oblivious to. Things that had had their day and he’d let go of,...
Submitted to Contest #223
By the time I discovered the room my Uncle James had told me was hidden in the Bodean Library I had discovered far more than the room itself. In fact, my voyage of discovery almost eclipsed the original reason for my search. I had hunted high and low and had long since given up on the room as I suspected that it was a device of Jimmy’s to hook me and have me undertake something useful in my three years away from home. Such subterfuge was not beyond my uncle, he knew that I was a kindred spirit. Everything came easily to me and as a result I ...
It was whilst driving that Professor Giles Latham made the momentous decision. This rash and outlandish decision had been brewing for some time now. In the airing cupboard, far too close to the immersion heater it sat bubbling away. The proportions of the ingredients thrown into the ponderously burgeoning container were perilously incorrect and so an explosion was inevitable. It was anyone’s guess as to when the explosion would take place, but the magnitude would be attention seeking, that was for sure. Also for sure was the mess it would ma...
Submitted to Contest #222
“Ow!” I cried, “what was that for?!” “So you will remember,” my father said sternly. And I did. Now, if you were to ask me. If you were to request that I look back down the years. Through the jaded lens of the person that I am now, not the fresh and craze free lens of the green boy that I was then. If you were to say to me, did your parents ever hit you? I would give you a categorical no, and I would mean it with all my heart. You see, that tap he gave me did not hurt. Quite the opposite. My Dad loved me and I was never, ev...
Twenty years it took me. Twenty long, hard years. Twenty years to discern the meaning of just a few small words. But then, that’s living and living is all we’ve got. “You’ve got this,” my Mother said these words whilst wearing a pained smile and then she let go of her very last breath, letting go of my hand and her mortal coil as that warm air wheezed out of her. The transformation was shocking. I saw the life seep away from her and I wondered where it went. This wasn’t my Mum. Not anymore it wasn’t. She’d left me and she’d left me...
School was completely shit. I need to get that straight from the very start. Filled with a bunch of tossers and the worst of them were the teachers. Sanctimonious know- it-alls spouting crap that was neither use nor ornament. Surviving was all it was about. What a waste of time. Good job I had a good bunch of mates. We had a laugh. That was all there was. It was a case of getting through it and nothing more than that. The day I left school was the best day of my life. I’d arrived. End of the bullshit. I was going to earn and a man ...
There are moments in life where everything narrows to one point. For a heart-stopping moment, it’s as though the air itself solidifies and either side of you there are walls and the walls are closing in. They close in so much that you’re trapped in a tunnel. A spec of data travelling down the wire. Then, as the transition makes itself fully known to you, it all makes sense and the surging tide of fear settles. The fear has not dissipated, but somehow it has turned, becoming an ally in the endeavour that beckons. I step up onto the stage an...
Submitted to Contest #221
“It just doesn’t feel right…” Sally gave John The Look. The Look was actually a suite of looks, but John lumped them all together because one way or another he was in trouble when she looked at him like that. Maybe it was more nuanced than he supposed, but John played it safe all the same, and so far he’d kept the fallout restricted to the initiating trouble and held off most escalations. As far as was possible anyway. He wasn’t dull and limited, he understood things well enough to know that sometimes the initial trouble was an openi...
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