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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2022
Submitted to Contest #251
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...
Submitted to Contest #250
He’d learnt to limit his words and in doing so he had become quieter. Now, anyone who encountered him mistook him for a taciturn man, not the prisoner he had become. Imprisoned in his own body. Trapped in a place that he had made his home only to see it taken down brick by brick to reveal impenetrable bars that no one in their right mind would seek to go beyond, for surrounded by the bars of this place was a cloying and eternal darkness which reached out for him, beckoning him forth. Promising oblivion when it was clear that pain was all it ...
Submitted to Contest #249
She sees it as much as feels it. She does not question this. Content instead to be afforded a ringside seat to a very special moment in her life. A moment made special by it’s simplicity. A celebration of an end. All of her final exams now over. The elation of having completed this part of her journey. No care as to the results of her efforts. That is for another day. All that matters is now. There is nothing else. She feels alive in a way that she hasn’t in such a long time and she embraces that feeling and pulls it closer. She sees it all ...
It was the radio that voiced the recriminations that he’d anticipated with such dread. Uncertain as to how best broach the subject, the radio stuttered and then fell silent. If the silence had been truly bad, his recollection of it was not notable. The jarring crunch of static that followed, an injured insect, gone wild thrashing about in the stifling cabin of the car, mirroring the noise in his brain. Radio and the chaos of his mind jamming but never getting into their groove, and in the midst of this punk track was a simple, repetitive lyr...
Submitted to Contest #248
Norman was the first up. He was always the first up and also the first downstairs. This was his routine and in the solitary minutes afforded to him as he made his mug of tea and toasted his bread, he could taste the flavours of another life dancing upon his forlorn tongue. Mug in one hand. Half remembered buttered toast in the other, he stared out into the world and wished himself just a few yards hence. That was all it would take. To step through the prison of glass before him and be swept up and away by the wind. A fallen leaf carried off ...
Submitted to Contest #247
Travel, I was told, would expand my mind. So I followed that sage advice. And I thought it had. It felt like it had. I felt bigger, and as a result I could only conclude that I was better for that. After all, we are supposed to grow. Firstly, we grow up. Then we expand. Our horizons broaden and broaden until we are spoilt for choice. But then, life is a series of choices. Often, the choice we make is to make no choice at all. We bury ourselves in the sands of ignorance and pretend we are staying put, when there is never any possibi...
Submitted to Contest #246
The drive to the coast was too much. He could feel the weight of it on his shoulders and another part of it pressed obscenely into his forehead. He would have cried, but that option was not open to him – it lay in a faraway place and the distance of it hurt him. There was no release here, which flew in the face of why they had come. A long weekend away from the stress of the day-to-day. An escape from the dumb humdrum. The peculiar price paid for such an adventure was beyond any that he was willing to pay, but he would pay it all the same. P...
Submitted to Contest #245
The ship’s log would state that Captain John Tanner was the first to set foot on the newly discovered lands. This was not the case. Tanner was a shrewd and sometimes cunning man. He prioritised survival over the flim-flam of bravery, chivalry and honour. He had a head on him and he used it. His crew, those who were lucky enough to live through the depravations of numerous long and treacherous voyages, would have likely referred to him as dependable. The word would be qualified, but not expanded upon. Not that anyone would have aske...
The moon was absent that night. This was a night when the see lapped at the night sky. Kissing it gently until the dark heavens succumbed and there was no way of knowing where sky and ocean began or ended. The two lovers intertwined in a brief embrace that should have been desperate in its stolen transience, but was instead languorous and so hypnotically natural that Glen could no longer remember where the horizon should have been. He stared out across the boat and lost himself in that distant lovemaking. The ebb and flow of the water undern...
Submitted to Contest #244
The photo is mine. I know this, but I cannot say why I know it. There are not the words, only a feeling that provides me with a reassuring certainty. I have to focus in a way I never used to, or at least I don’t think I did. I focus hard and another piece is provided for the puzzle before me. A piece that will fade soon enough. My existence here is temporary and I have lost the ability to make anything stick. Maybe I never had that ability, only an illusion provided by a heady cocktail of cock-sure arrogance and the ignorance that ...
Submitted to Contest #243
This dream was strange, even for a dream it was strange. What was stranger was that Mo remembered the dream. Mo knew he dreamt, everyone did, but seldom did he have any recollection of where his mind wandered to at night. Of the dreams that did make themselves known to him, most were those that occurred between his alarm and the small window of snoozing. He didn’t trust those dreams as they were impossibly long for the seven minute window he had available in which to drift off. Maybe they were dreams of dreams. He hoped not, because there wa...
Submitted to Contest #242
Archie knew he had a problem, but he also had another problem that compounded that problem. Firstly, he was in the habit of not listening. But what made it worse was that even in knowing that he wasn’t listening and that this was increasingly becoming a problem, he did nothing about it. “You can’t do this,” Archie said as he was manhandled from the car and walked to the back door of the huge edifice of a building made ominous by the dark shadows thrown by street lamps that stood well back and avoided the less salubrious parts of the city. “A...
Submitted to Contest #241
“In here!” Chelle pushed the dark, metal door open and urged me through it. I crashed through the gap. The adrenaline coursing through my body fighting with a terror that threatened to tear me apart. I could barely see through my eyes, they vibrated with fear and a roiling river of tears pushed at the weakening dam, almost undoing me. Holding it together was a full-time job I just wasn’t qualified for. My bladder vied for my attention and somehow shouted more loudly than almost everything else assailing my beleaguered senses. I was a wreck o...
“Oh dear.” “Not again.” Ben and Thom exchanged a look that asked a rhetorical question. That question was really existential in nature, but mostly it was a contrary bugger intent on making their life as interesting as it possibly could. “You know,” said Ben, “this reminds me a of City game I went to. Or rather the end of the game, when I was leaving the ground with my ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend.” Thom utilised another look in his repertoire. This look edged towards a rolling of his eyes, but that rolling never actually transpired, instead it ...
To whom it may concern,I don’t know whether I should be writing this letter. I’m not sure that I can. I think I’m writing it to see if I have it left in me to do this one last thing. Perhaps I’m writing it as a final defiant act. To prove that I was right all along. If you’re reading this then it has not only happened, it is done. That which should not have happened has occurred. I’d hoped with all my heart that it would not be so, but the flame of my hope has grown weaker with every passing hour and now, as I look upon it I’m not so sure I ...
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