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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2022
Submitted to Contest #266
I’m not the only one, but it feels like I am. Writing is a supposedly lonely occupation but you’d think you’d get a bit of support from your own bloody wife! Sometimes I feel like a burden. A deadweight. A strange loner child whiling away my life in the pursuit of a stupid, childish fantasy. She makes me feel like that. She makes me feel bad and worthless. She’s crushing my dream, even as I try to realise it. I need someone to boost my belief. Mine alone is not enough. I’m only human after all. I am frail and have moments of weakness. I some...
It took Craig an age to get into The Zone. He’d read that writers needed a familiar and comfortable space within which to write, and so he had gone about building his writing nest. He’d begun gradually, but as he worked on his own, special space he built up a fervour and an excitement of anticipation, discovering hidden antique places and poring over knickknacks as though he were searching for his own personal grail. In a way, he was. He was searching for a space that did not exist in the world beyond him, but within him. He was acquiring sy...
Submitted to Contest #265
They all looked up attentively. Craning their necks to discern the truth of the situation. Facsimiles of strange meerkats. Vigilant. Impatient. The energy in the room was twisted out of kilter. Something was happening, but no one knew what shape it would take, let alone what it was. The uncertainty created a vile razor edge that would draw blood and poison its host. It wasn’t a question of if. Only when. When. All the flights in the small airport were delayed. The old and obsolete TV was the oracle of the delays, but between the lines was wo...
Submitted to Contest #264
At the grand old age of fifty five years old, I’m invited to a wedding. As a kid, weddings seemed to be a regular occurrence. I had a crowd of older cousins and marriage was an expectation sometime after they left school. Then, when I reached my cousins’ age, my friends got married. I think I was meant to follow suit, but the choices I made precluded that. One of those choices was my first ever serious girlfriend. I think at some point she was serious. I never spotted the point where she stopped being serious and turned her attentions to a s...
November has snuck its way into the landscape and Summer is a memory that still hurts in the telling. Deathly Winter stalks the unsuspecting days, just a little further along the path of life, and the idea of rebirth is just that. An abstraction that does not yet belong in the world. There is a chill in the air, but it is not yet cold. The old church is draughty and the gutless heating pipes fight a losing battle against the belligerent rock foundations. The modern world is of no interest to this ancient place. The old stone bones are about ...
Submitted to Contest #263
Life ain’t fair. I should know. My life was an involuntary homage to the unfairness of life. My life was a joke, and I was waiting for the punchline. Waiting in a limbo of anticipatory disappointment. The way the script always goes, I’d either not get the joke, or the end the punchline signalled would be mine. At least I’d be deaf to the laughter that was my funereal lament, but I heard its pre-emptory echoes all the same. The walking dead. The cruel laughter haunting every waking moment. Waking me from nightmares too gutless to make themsel...
We have history, but that’s all in the past. There’s a car crash at the end of that history and she was in the driving seat. Only she wasn’t driving at the time. She was somewhere else. I see that a lot these days. It’s the modern-day dog in a manger. They sit in that driving seat, but they have no intention of driving. Their attention is elsewhere.She was elsewhere when it ended, and I thought I’d forgiven her that betrayal, but now, as I force my head around an intransigent neck, I still can’t bring myself to look beyond what went wrong. W...
I saw a therapist once. It was more than once. The attraction was elemental. We both kidded ourselves that there was more there than there really was. Something beyond the sating of physical desire. Maybe there was, but neither of us explored that aspect of what was on offer. We liked the thought of each other and what was on display was intoxicating. The taste of her lingers on in my memory. Her words however…She didn’t exactly open up. We’d both been open in our own way. Had to be in order for what we had to be so dizzying and mind alterin...
They call me a hero. Do they really know what a hero is? Not conspicuous brave deeds, but what it takes. It takes a lot to be a hero. It consumes you. This is a young man’s game. A place of dreams. Better if you don’t have a clue. Stick your ideals on the situation and make it stick. There is something beyond hope in the young. There’s an unwarranted certainty. They know.Well, I now know and the dream that I was is a hollowed-out husk. They still believe. Of course they do. I’m a part of the fabric of their concocted reality and I keep on pl...
It wasn’t me. It really wasn’t me. I never wanted this. He made me do it. He made me… This city wakes up to its own darkness. During the day it lays dormant and brooding. It’s pulse is barely audible as it crumples into a waking coma. The day-walkers spill in on the trains and the underground, acting like this is real. They do their jobs, they buy their lunches and then they flee from the awakening of this dark titan. Oh, some stay for dinner and drinks. A little walk on the wild side to provide them some excitement. A brief escape fro...
Submitted to Contest #262
They’re saying that it’s the hottest day of the year. This gets me every time, even before I recall the hottest days of my youth. Those days were hot. Hotter than anything you get nowadays. Then there’s the whole premise of this assertion. It’s just so premature. The first day of the year is always the hottest day of the year at that point in time. Then, as Winter gets bored with terrorising the landscape, and Spring attempts to make peace with the world, there are days that are warmer than the preceding days. I will concede that these are c...
The Summer sun beat down relentlessly upon the car roof, cooking it. Jenner shook his head at the shimmering air, not looking forward to climbing into an intensity of heat that his motor’s blowers had no chance of banishing. Huffing his annoyance at the sun and it’s tardy seasonal appearance, he started the engine and lowered the front windows. Still the radiating heat threatened to singe his eyebrows. It was barely ten a.m. “What’s the world coming to, eh?” he asked the car, patting its dash. His Audi was nigh on a museum piece. He didn’t e...
There was once a life within which I existed. Encased in a fantastical ecosystem designed to cocoon me from the pain of reality. Then it was over. A breeze-block in the face. I didn’t see it coming. The impact of the ending sent shockwaves of negative energy into batteries hidden deep within my body such that every time I thought I might have some respite from the pain of my sudden, shattering loss, those batteries fired up and fried my nervous system, leaving me reverberating with a sickness that I could not comprehend, let alone deal with....
Submitted to Contest #261
There are no words. This is because I have never bothered to bring them together in any meaningful way. The words exist, but I chose to dwell in a feeling. Not always the same feeling at that. I am no poet. I have never tried to describe the sky as it puts on a show and reminds me that it can wear colours other than blue. Other than grey. The sky is the sky. It was here before I ever arrived on the scene, and it will be here long after I am gone. So long that it may as well be an eternity, and I have no understanding of what that means...
Submitted to Contest #260
…there is no end. That is the difference between life and a book. Not a story. Stories are merely parts of a book or a life. Stories that are the constituent parts of a book, shoehorned into a finite space to please the reader. Some writers may protest at this assessment. The pomposity of their convenient disregard of themselves as the original reader is a big lie. That lie distorts and corrupts. It is a fiction that detracts from fiction as an artform. But then the artist is as selfish as they come. Whereas art is not. Art is a gift that ke...
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