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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2022
Submitted to Contest #289
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 ...
Wonderful. It should be wonderful. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And I guess, by inference, that’s how I’m supposed to be. I am supposed to be wonderful. No pressure there then. No pressure at all. Dance monkey! Dance! Perform. Put on a show. Delight your audience. Only, there is no audience. Not this year. And that feels wrong somehow. Wrong in a way that makes no sense to me as I awaken to a Christmas morning on my own.Christmas is steeped in all manner of emotional herbs, spices and vices. Year upon year, it ferments and becomes a stron...
Submitted to Contest #282
“Sorry, Dad.” He glances at his son and almost says what? His face a picture of puzzlement, more so as he sees the big grin on Gerrie’s face. A grin that has no business accompanying an apology. Then it hits him. And it hits him hard. “Oh!” he cries, “you smelly beggar! Oh wow! Where did that come from!?” He opens the car window beside him, and then decides it would be a good idea to open the window next to the stink-bomb boy beside him. A boy who is looking very pleased with himself as he offers an explanation or an excuse. His father ...
The sky is a pale grey as though it mourns for the passing of the sun. At this time of year, the two are estranged. When they meet there is a discordant chill of animosity. Occasionally, the sun will make a show of it, flirting with the clouds, or shining brightly as it slips away to pastures new. Going to a place it prefers to be. The abandoned sky collapses in on itself and deprives us of the sparkle of its children. Seldom do the stars come out to play when the sky is so saddened. I walk a well-trod path, observing the greys that bleed fr...
Submitted to Contest #281
People are strange. They really are. That’s why I’m drawn to them. What’s fascinating is that some of them are drawn to me too. It’s a match made in heaven. Only that’s a bit of a fib. Part of the strangeness of people is in the language they use. Half the time, they don’t really know what they mean. Sometimes they don’t mean anything at all. Sounds innocuous doesn’t it? But it’s a dangerous as hell. I like to visit during the Christmas holidays. Or the Holiday Season as it’s now called. A rebranding aimed at being inclusive, when all it rea...
Submitted to Contest #280
The grass waves to the breath-filled song of the wind. No, wait. That doesn’t sound quite right. Maybe just the voice of the wind. The luscious grass dances as the wind sings. Something like that anyway. I look around me. Casually, like I’m taking in the view and not at all looking for a sudden change in the landscape that would signal my end. Should I admit that I’m scared? I’d be mad not to. But then this is madness. I’m narrating my life because my life actually depends on it. The moment I go quiet, it’ll come for me. I know that much. Sn...
“At the end of the day,” I look out over the vibrant, green valley and I take it all in. I read the landscape and I listen to it. I feel it within me, and not for the first time I wonder whether it is real, or just something my unconscious projects before me in order to make this life bearable, “it’s a beautiful world.” I sit in the noisy silence of the hilltop and allow myself just to be. The rest of the words spill out of me with my next exhalation, “at the beginning of the day, it’s also a beautiful world. Trouble is, we busy ourselves to...
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