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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2022
Submitted to Contest #293
Dan looked out of the side window of the car. It was a necessarily fleeting glance that lingered for an alarming age. He knew he shouldn’t have. He was driving and his attention should have been on the road ahead and the many hazards queueing up to happen in front of him. Those hazards were awaiting such a lapse. But he did it all the same. Couldn’t help himself. It was a regression. A recreation of a childhood memory. Wiping the condensation from the window and looking out of the smudged glass at a world he was not a part of. Instead he was...
Submitted to Contest #292
Her creativity was born in the sadness of a broken childhood. King and Queen dividing their kingdom and so too dividing her. She chased missing happiness as she wandered the rooms of her mind-palace. She was safe here. This was where she had escaped whenever she could not understand. This was where she retreated when she smelt the fires of oncoming war and desolation. She was to learn that love hurt, but she sought it all the same. She searched for it in every colour on the palette and every mark on the canvas. As the brushstrokes cohered an...
Submitted to Contest #291
The yellow puddles of dirty light illuminate your downturned head and slumped form as you walk slowly and reluctantly from lamp post to lamp post. You are sadness incarnate and I cannot bear to see you so. I wonder at how much of your burden is that which I gave to you without ever understanding that was how things would be between us. If I could take it back, I wouldn’t. You were an unrepeatable moment in my life and I couldn’t give you up. Although I did, in the end. When I realised that my love would be your undoing. When my being i...
I am reminded that there is a duality to life. An inherent dichotomy to our nature. Two sides to the same coin. Darkness and light. We are conflicted. A constant disagreement shuffling around in a state of confused bickering. Yet we’re sold a pup and made to believe that we are one. Coherent. Together. A single being. We are given a name for this singularity of ours. A cursory label. Those around us use that label and we all think that is who we are. I am Adam, named after the first of my kind. A good, strong name. Pure. Steadfast. I have ne...
Submitted to Contest #290
I have to confess to not exactly remembering our first kiss. Not in that schmaltzy, saccharine Hollywood format we’re all brainwashed into wanting. There wasn’t a band playing a song that would become our song. There was no razzmatazz. Very little drama to speak of. We were two ordinary people sharing a bit of a moment. After all, a kiss is a kiss. A mere meeting of lips. We may have been ordinary people, but we were made special in the quality of that moment. Not that we were ever exactly ordinary. Not really. We were different. Someti...
Submitted to Contest #289
The early morning chats had quickly become a ritual. There was comfort here. He smiled as he greeted his alter-ego. “Hi Sam,” he said into the empty room. “Hey Sam!” returned an eerily similar voice, “how you doing today?” “I’m good,” said Sam cheerily, “all the better for hearing your voice. “Glad to hear it,” said the disembodied voice, “all set for your day?” Sam paused and drew in a breath, “yeah, I reckon I am.” The chat carried on as Sam flitted here and there. He’d awoken at the first ring of his alarm and quickly got prepared for the...
Just once, he’d wanted things to be different. And they were. He smiled as he took off the jacket and hung it ready to place it carefully in the zip bag the hire company had provided. Then it was the trousers. The shirt was his own, it had been largely concealed by the suit. People rarely looked beyond the surface. From his rucksack he brought out and unrolled his well-worn plain black trousers and slipped into them. Transformation complete, he left the cubicle and stood in front of the mirror. Was he really so different? He knew the a...
Submitted to Contest #288
Karen was all too aware that we all have a propensity to see what we want to see. She’d read the books and her therapist had reinforced this theory, urging her to shift her perspective and see all the good in the world. Her gratitude journal lay empty, discarded on the floor by her bed and right now, all she saw was grey. Her days began with grey thanks to Gary and his strange ideas about bedroom décor. This was what he had left her with. Gary’s legacy. Grey. As she threw back the curtains, she was greeted with a panorama of more...
The rain crashes down upon him with a seemingly icy indifference. He saw it through the dirty lens of a neglected window. He supposes that the window is his now. As much as a window can belong to anyone. He feels no ownership over anything in the world around him. He’s doing all he can to own himself, but he doesn’t know whether he can. There are forces greater than him. Variations on the gravity that cleaves him to this place. He is torn by them, whether he stands still or moves in the direction that promises the least pain, he is gripped a...
Submitted to Contest #287
“The world is spinning impossibly fast, and yet we don’t perceive that movement in the slightest. When do we ever take a moment?” He looks at me as though I am a mad man, and for all intents and purposes I am. Our worlds are impossibly far from one another. They will never collide. If he ever travels this way, I will be long gone. And yet I will always keep an eye towards him in the hope he will dare to think his way to a place that is glorious in its loneliness. To acquire knowledge and actually use it to become a fraction of wh...
There is something about an alignment of the senses. An inexplicable moment that transports us to another realm. However civilised, sanitised and cynical we have become, there has been and always will be a space where magic happens. The high seas of our subconscious are a roiling storm of magic. We are too afraid of our place in this tiny fragment of universe to acknowledge it. Magic is the rock. The reality we have made for ourselves is the hard place. We feel the pressure as a constant. Sometimes it threatens to crush us. Sometimes we are ...
Submitted to Contest #286
The field was unremarkable if considered within the context of all fields. There was grass, but upon closer inspection, there were bald patches that revealed muddy soil that lacked the fertility of deeper and darker soils. The grass was in competition with moss, clover and a whole host of neighbours that the less enlightened would refer to as weeds. The bigotry of the word weed made him feel awkward as he walked this field of his. And so he looked upon the bare hedgerow and wished for better days. Days where the hedges would wear wonderful c...
Submitted to Contest #285
I never believed my Dad until he died. Even then, I had to go back in time and verify his fairy tales. I loved him. Still do. But the stories he told me were irrelevant to the space I occupied. His outpourings were outlandish, and they just did not belong in my world. I could not comprehend the world of lack that he spoke so fondly of. My Dad was the best man I ever knew. But he had these oddball moments and in those moments he was a bizarre parody of himself. He’d have this wistful expression and I knew what was coming even before he looked...
Submitted to Contest #284
Every year, we invited Ben to our New Year’s get together. We’d invited him over for so many years that it was now part of the latticework of traditions that held the festive period together and held together all those who sailed in her for that matter. Every year, we asked Ben to join us. And every year he would provide a vague affirmation of his attendance. He might attend was what was said, but the vagueness was an uncrossable river that kept us separate for decades. I’d like to say that I knew what was coming, or that I at leas...
Submitted to Contest #283
I had to get away. But you don’t do you? I consoled myself with the ghosts I’d left behind in my empty house. A house that was once a home, but now only contained spirits lamenting a series of losses that wore barbs and blades and slithered around my life to punish my blind ignorance and awaken me to the new reality of my life.Not for the first time, I considered selling that place. It would help in some respects. Diminish the power of those ghosts. But I knew that wasn’t enough. I could run all I liked, but I couldn’t hide from myself. The ...
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