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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2022
Submitted to Contest #168
“It should have been here by now!” This from an angry commuter stood at the very edge of the platform as though breaking the rules and taking an unnecessary risk by standing well beyond the line would prompt the late train to make its arrival now challenged to an unequal game of chicken, or perhaps the man fancied himself a matador. There were murmurs of agreement. People might not have liked the man standing there, puffed up with his own self-importance, a legend in his own lunchtime, but they agreed with the sentiment. The train was lo...
Submitted to Contest #167
It’s all about survival. There is nothing else. I am under siege. People are animals and the world is a harsh and cruel place. Here I am in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong people. Worse still, I don’t know what to do about it. I cannot escape, so I keep building my survival strategy. It’s the only way. It is Monday. I am awake early, but that is not to say that I am up early. I lay awake in my bed and try to keep as still as it is possible to be. I cannot hear them. Not yet, but I know that I will. Sometimes I lay ...
He writes. That is all there is to it. There is nothing else. There has been nothing since the entire planet closed their doors on the world and hid from the angel of death. No one told him that he had to sacrifice a lamb and mark his door so that the angel would pass them by. He did not know, so he did not act. His ignorance was the angel of death. Life is a big, dark joke and he is living in the punchline. The angel of death played a prank on him. It wasn’t the pandemic that took Leo, his little lion. Not directly...
Submitted to Contest #166
It was all going so well. Better than I could ever have dreamed of, you know? I had found my unicorn at the end of the rainbow and my life was right on course. I knew it couldn’t last. Nothing lasts forever, I know that much, but just throw me a bone here. Give me more than that fleeting glimpse of how it should be! I deserved more. I certainly put the work in for it. From as far back as I can remember, I looked up into the sky and that’s where I wanted to be. That was where I belonged. I knew that from the very start. Even bet...
Submitted to Contest #165
“It’s all my fault,” she says into her lap. “No it isn’t!” he protests, instantly regretting his reaction, he lowers his voice and says more gently, “it’s not your fault. She did this. Not you.” “It takes two, Archie,” she raises her head for a heartbeat and then lowers it back to her lap, her hands moving around each other in a display of her awkwardness in this situation. He looks at those hands and the nails that she has grown long and painted black. When did that happen and how did he not notice before, when it counted? “I just wis...
Submitted to Contest #164
Where I come from, people don’t treat you nice. That’s my abiding memory of where I come from. That and… Well, I wasn’t always like this, you know? I try hard, but there I am going around and around in circles. Not all of the time, but sometimes it just kicks in and there I am, doing my thing. Only the thing I am doing isn’t my thing. It’s their thing. They taught me this and a whole bunch of other things and once these things became a habit, well I don’t think there’s any way of changing that. Not really there isn’...
Where do you go when you have nowhere else left to go? I went home. Not to the place that I had most recently made my home, that place had failed on one of the measures of a home. It was no longer safe. So, I made my way back to the place I grew up. They said you should never go back. I’m not sure who they were and what the premise of this advice was. You do what you have to do is my retort to them. Maybe I was resorting to the only thing I knew. I was fresh out of ideas and my head wasn’t going to provide me with much of any...
Submitted to Contest #163
You’ll never be content The note is there on my bedside table when I awake. I have awoken to an empty bed in a room that holds some familiarity, but little comfort, and I turn to see the note. The note is leaning casually against an untouched glass of water and I can read it from where I lay. You’ll never be content That is all that it says. There’s no greeting and there is no name to sign it off. I sigh as I stare at the note and will it to reveal at least some of its mysteries. It does not. Instead, it glowers at me baleful...
Submitted to Contest #162
“I don’t know what to have,” said Laura. “Is that usual for you?” asked Brad, peering over his menu at her. Laura lowered her menu further and smiled, “none of this is usual, is it?” Brad smiled at her, “depends how you look at it doesn’t it?” “OK,” she said, “it’s usual for you.” Brad shrugged, she was wrong, but he didn’t want to dissuade her from this notion, “under other circumstances,” he said, “are you often indecisive?” Now it was Laura’s turn to shrug. Brad wondered whether she realised that she had mirrored his own movem...
Submitted to Contest #161
I was ten when I knew for sure. I was ten when the world opened up to me and I saw it for what it was. That was a frightening moment. I can still feel that fear when I cast my mind back. This was one of those big moments in a person’s history which has a subtitle in large capitals… YOU CANNOT TAKE IT BACK Ten years old and I understood that I was on my own, and worse than on my own. That my life was my responsibility and mine alone. I suppose that’s a liberating moment in a life. There is a freedom in it and a sense of control comes to...
Submitted to Contest #160
“I loved you, you know,” I said this quietly, I said it too quietly for her to hear. Or so I thought. She smiled at me and my heart lurched in my chest. It went for a leap, but then she spoke and then I knew she wasn’t smiling because of what I had said. It was only a smile. Not quite random, but it may as well have been. “Did you say something?” I returned the smile with a paper mâché version of a smile, “thanks for this,” I said to her. She shrugged awkwardly, “we always said that we would do it, didn’t we?” “We did,” I a...
The sun washes through the land from the moment it opens its uncaring eye, intensifying and flexing its might as the day goes on. For the goliath of fire, the day is barely the blink of an eye, for the tiny miracles on the surface of the planet who rely upon that ball of fire for their very existence, it is interminable. The magnifying glass of this endless Summer burns the land and the little boy holding the glass, under which all the living creatures scurry, cares nothing for the game he plays. It is as though he left some while ago, dis...
Screaming. A pitch so high it rattles my eyes and rabbit punches my brain. My hands are at my temples and I don’t know how they got there. Breathe. You’ve got to breathe. That’s it. My eyes settle and I can see again. I scan around the room and some of the panic leaks out of me. The kettle. It was the kettle. Not screaming after all. I turn the hob off and the steam dissipates, the pressure drops and what I thought was a scream has now gone away. There is a silence that isn’t a silence at all. There is a cacophony of ...
Malsarry does not stir as I gaze upon her prone form. There is not a mark upon her, and yet she is grievously injured. I know this much, but beyond that my mind is in fog. She may as well be a statue of marble atop a sarcophagus. I clench my fists and ride out the storm of anger that has gripped me as I stand by my love. I will not allow this! There is something to be done, and I will be the one to do it. First I will save her, and then I will make the man responsible pay for this evil. “She does not breath,” I say to the attendant healer....
Ignorance is bliss, or so they say. The problem with that saying is that you don’t get to choose, not when your eyes have been open to your situation or your predicament. Once you know, there isn’t any going back. Would I want to go back? No, I wouldn’t go back and lose the one thing that counts in this gods forsaken place. She’s given me something I never knew existed, not for someone like me anyway. I stopped believing in fairy tales even as I read them. My mother made damn sure of that. My own particular fairy tale was...
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