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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2022
Submitted to Contest #258
It’s a Thursday and in its Thursdayness it is grey and unremarked. The daily annotation deconstructs the flow of time, a swamping of cheap custard over the artistry of a pâtissier. The point is drowned out. Meaning is washed away, and few will ever go in search of its bloated corpse. Dan wends his weary way home. Drops his work bag in the porch. That bag haunts his life. Its position as a sentry is a badly thought out mistake. He’s reminded of the work he hasn’t completed each and every time he passes through the front door. That bag stains ...
There was a well-known, famous and very funny comedian who was always destined for the stage and fame. His energy told you all you had to know about what he was and what he was for. The man was made to grab a crowd by the scruff of the neck and drag them to a better place. A place where people laughed at themselves, and each other, and in so doing exorcised the demons who’d hitched a ride inside them on their rollercoaster ride through life. This man had his own demons. Everybody does, but comedians don’t have the luxury of laugh t...
Submitted to Contest #257
She laughs as the song comes on the radio and in that laugh he sees the girl she once was. He wants to be young again. To know her through the ages. To be with her and share his life with her. All of her. To know her from the very start and onwards, into an eternity which he could not bear if it was not for her, and a love he had not thought possible. Not for him. Not for them. He supposes the song is a classic now, but he remembers when it was first played on older, crackling radios. Those radios were new back then, now they are obsolete. R...
Submitted to Contest #256
In the heat of battle you are transformed. There is so much less to the world and yet you become so much more. The flesh may be weak, but the spirit rises up to be counted when death stares it in the eye. Once you have tasted that exotic and intoxicating poison, the life you lead dies. There are vestiges of something that sometimes resembles a life, but all it really amounts to is awaiting the next adventure in the jaws of death. “I call it The Test,” I say before wiping the ale foam from my beard. “And I call it Hot Air,” Balur grins at me ...
Submitted to Contest #255
Fred nurses his pint as though it’s the final part of his death row meal. He stares down into the amber depths contemplating all the answers that reside there. Answers reduced in size so that he can no longer see them. The fact of the matter is that he’s suffered that reduction. He is deflated and no longer has awe for the infinite. His part in this charade was written out long ago. He finishes his pint, then looks around him. He doesn’t look lost exactly, more perturbed that this is where he’s been washed up. A useless piece of flotsam havi...
Vicky was still there. That was the kicker. That was the cause of a perpetual limbo that wore a different outfit every time John blinked. So many thoughts. And they whirled around and around in his head leaving a trail of sticky candy floss in the stead of a coherent mind. It hurt. But he loved her. He loved her and that was all that mattered. John had never stopped loving Vicky. He didn’t know how. He knew all about love. After all, he’d been practicing it since he was born. He’d read about it too. There were many stories about love. And th...
Submitted to Contest #254
The invitation stipulated the attire. John was never a fan of formal dress. Comfortable anywhere other than a suit and the places where a suit gained entry. To John, a suit was armour and he was a lover, not a fighter. He aimed at loving pursuits, not that it got him anywhere. He consoled himself with the avoidance of the fight. Even the prospect of conflict left him cold. Sometimes, he wondered whether he was a coward. He didn’t feel any cowardice trembling in his blood, but then people became desensitised to their sins, telling themselves ...
Submitted to Contest #253
It had to be perfect. And what was more perfect than the place where it all began? The place that they had made theirs. A vantage point from which they had imperiously surveyed their birthplace, their birth right and the world beyond. A world that awaited them with open arms. A world that lacked its gods and cried out for them to take their rightful place at its head. This was a place as perfect as they were back then. And they were gods in those heady days. Their dreams were not the mere dreams of mortal men. They saw beyond that ...
My Mum once told me to enjoy life. But she added a warning, and that warning was that time has a habit of speeding up as you get older. She may as well have told me not to panic. Or to smile, and that it might never happen. That was the attention I paid to her advice, and to her for that matter. And yet I remember her words well, and now, in the context of who and what I have become, I understand where she was coming from. This wasn’t a soundbite. This wasn’t knowledge. She meant what she had said, and in order for me to understand, I had to...
Submitted to Contest #252
As Bill walked home he put his unease down to the fact that he had not been feeling right all day. The day itself had taken against him from the outset. Rising from the messy pit of his bed he’d paused in his half-arsed redistribution of his duvet. Dumped the forgotten duvet at the foot of the bed and patted at a spot on the sheet that looked about as wrong as it had any business looking. The situation of this patch was embarrassing, being in the area where his crotch and backside vied for position as he tossed and turned in the grip of the ...
In the pursuit of success, Dan had found a state where all his needs were taken care of. There was not one need that he could muster that was not already catered for. The identification of a need that required attending to became something of an obsession for him, and in time he began to suspect that he was becoming bored with life itself. That he’d bested the final boss, and there was nothing left to play for. He'd even toyed with an array of wants. Wants however, were substandard needs. Dan was wise to that from the outset, and so this var...
By all accounts, John was a nice bloke. Not a very nice bloke. Just nice. Nice being the go to word for people who didn’t have anything else nice to say about a person. Using nice to describe someone was in itself not nice. It wasn’t just that there was a lacklustre laziness at play in the use of this go-to word, it was that the underlying meaning of nice was pathetically negative. By describing John as nice, a person was telling the world that they were bored with John. Never was there an excuse to be bored, and so this should hav...
We meet via friends. Always theirs, never mine. A small knot of misfits and losers desperately clinging to each other as though they aren’t dragging each other down, when that’s all they’re capable of. Sharing a broken camaraderie that strokes the one thing they all have in common, the crushing boredom of their isolating loneliness. I can taste their wounds. Each and every one of them. These inept creatures kid themselves into thinking they have done a good job of hiding their pain and inadequacies. I’ll tell you something for free, the more...
Submitted to Contest #251
Dogeared paperbacks were her preferred companions. These rascally mongrels could suffer the rough and tumble of her daily life, and come back with tail wagging and looking for more. There was love here. Not the polished art of a chocolatier, instead this was roughhewn and had a substantial heft to it. She relished breaking their spines and scarring their faces. Releasing them from the dog pound cage of their conformity so that they were free to become the characters they were always meant to be. This was the conspicuous aspect of her reading...
How to begin? I lose count of the times I have faced this question. There are so many beginnings in this life of ours, and only a singular end for many of them. All the strands that we follow as we make our choices. Interwoven, however much we think we can keep them apart. I’ll begin with words. Those strange conveyances of meaning. Or not, as is often the case. We occasionally take a moment to look up the meaning of a word, but all we are looking at is a clinical definition. Meaning goes much deeper than that. Meaning goes all the way to th...
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