Jim LaFleur

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2024

Stories (13)

13 Stories

2159 karma pts

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“The Kiss Collector” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #290

The shutter clicked with the finality of a judge’s gavel. Elias Ward lowered his camera, its lens still focused on the couple through the crack in the door. Their silhouettes merged in the amber glow of a forbidden lamp, lips meeting in defiance of everything sacred in their sterile world. He counted the seconds—one, two, three—letting them savor their last moment of intimacy. The door yielded to his touch with a whisper. “Department of Emotional Regulation,” he announced, voice carrying the practiced chill of winter frost. The couple jerked...

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“The Woman in Room Zero” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #289

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. The thought echoed in Evelyn’s mind as her eyes adjusted to the stark fluorescent light above. She lay on a cold floor, her head throbbing with each pulse of illumination. The ceiling was a perfect white square, unblemished except for that single light panel that seemed to hover like a trapped sun. Pushing herself to sitting, Evelyn pressed her palm against her temple. The skin felt tender, though she couldn’t remember hitting her head. She couldn’t remember much of anything beyond driving...

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“The Cold Man” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #288

The first snowflake materialized in mid-August, drifting past the neon sign of Eddie’s Bar & Grill like a lost feather. Vincent Graves watched it descend, his steel-gray eyes tracking its lazy spiral until it dissolved on the scorching pavement. His breath clouded in front of him – a physical impossibility in ninety-degree heat. A woman hurried past, her sandals slapping against the concrete. As she crossed Vincent’s path, she wrapped her arms around herself, shuddering violently. Her pace quickened, but she never looked up, never acknow...

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“Steam and Stardust” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #287

Steam curled from the kettle’s spout, a ghostly ribbon dancing in the dim morning light. Orion Carter traced its path with failing eyes, remembering how he once tracked the trajectories of distant comets with that same careful attention. The familiar ritual of making tea had become a treacherous dance, his fingers seeking the counter’s edge, measuring distances by memory rather than sight. The kettle’s whistle pierced the quiet apartment. He reached for it, muscle memory betraying him as his hand missed the handle and brushed against the sca...

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“The Letter He Never Sent” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #286

Dawn seeped through the library’s arched windows, the light transforming the silence into something sacred. Samuel traced the leather spine beneath his weathered fingers, each crack and imperfection as familiar as the lines on his own palm. The gilt letters caught the light, flaring like captured fire, while shadows from the iron shelving cast prison-bar patterns across the floor. In twenty-three years of cataloging books, he had never felt time’s presence so keenly, had never heard the tick of the wall clock echo with such merciless precisi...

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“Glass Tombs and Digital Ghosts” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #285

In the dying light of December 31st, 1999, Sarah Morgan stood before her basement shelves, counting cans of preserved peaches for the seventh time that day. The amber-hued fruit floated in glass tombs, distorted and strange in the fluorescent light that hummed overhead like an electric dirge. Her fingers, pale and trembling, traced the dates she’d meticulously written on each label – expiration dates that might outlive civilization itself. The basement air hung thick with the musty breath of concrete and fear. Stacked against the walls, jugs...

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“The Y2K Scare” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #285

[Frank’s living room, 11:45 PM, December 31, 1999] “Gary, pick up, you magnificent bastard!” The plastic receiver digs into my ear like a cheap headset at a telemarketing firm. My living room looks like a refugee camp designed by a doomsday prepper with a serious bean addiction. Towers of pork and beans wobble precariously, threatening to topple like a Jenga tower built by a toddler. D-cell batteries scatter across the coffee table like metallic confetti, and duct tape creeps up the walls like silver kudzu. The emergency radio I bought at Ra...

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“The Enchanted Reflection” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #284

The boutique hummed with the frenetic energy of post-Christmas sales. Shoppers jostled for space, arms laden with discounted luxury goods, their voices blending into a discordant symphony of complaints and excitement. Sarah Jensen stood behind the counter, her forced smile threatening to crack under the weight of another 12-hour shift. Her reflection in the glass display case stared back at her—a pale, tired face framed by hair that refused to cooperate despite the expensive products she used. “Miss! Excuse me, miss!” a sharp voice cut throu...

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“The Last Caroler” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #283

Thomas Green shuffled through the snow-laden streets on Christmas Eve, his weathered hands clutching a worn songbook. Each gust of wind seemed to whisper memories of better days, when his voice rang strong and clear through these very streets. Now, at seventy-eight, his once-resonant baritone had faded to a trembling whisper, but his determination to continue his decades-long tradition of caroling remained unshaken. The town had changed. Where festive lights once turned night into day, darkness now reigned. Thomas adjusted his threadbare sca...

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“The Sun Prison” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #282

The air hung thick and heavy, a damp shroud clinging to the rough-hewn stone walls. In the perpetual twilight of the dungeon, phosphorescent moss crawled across the upper reaches of the cavern, its sickly green glow barely enough to cast shadows. The silence lived and breathed, punctuated by the metronomic drip of water, the skittering of unseen creatures in the deeper tunnels, and the rhythm of resigned breathing from the huddled forms in their cells. Dax shifted on his cot of woven reeds, the coarse fibers a constant reminder of his impris...

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“The Snow Globe Guest” by Jim LaFleur

Submitted to Contest #281

The Christmas lights cast dancing shadows across the living room walls as Daniel nursed his third glass of wine, watching the party unfold from his corner sanctuary. His notebook lay open on his lap, its pages as blank as they’d been for the past eight months. Even here, at Sarah’s annual Christmas gathering, he couldn’t escape the crushing weight of his writer’s block. “Still hiding in corners, Dan?” Sarah appeared beside him, her emerald cocktail dress catching the light. “You know, the whole point of a party is to actually interact with p...

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“The Writer’s Block” by Jim LaFleur

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #252

Jack Thompson’s fingers drummed a chaotic symphony against his cluttered desk, surrounded by the remnants of unrelenting perfectionism—crumpled paper mountains, an army of empty coffee cups, and the flickering screen of his laptop displaying the solitary bulwark of his creative struggle: one stubborn sentence. This single line of text, which he revised with the same unyielding dedication some might reserve for disarming a bomb, had been his nemesis and companion for five torturous years. “The sun erupted over the horizon like an overzealous ...

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“The Unintended Masterpiece” by Jim LaFleur

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #246

Once, in the recesses of Josh’s cluttered study—a space so densely populated with crumpled papers and half-finished manuscripts it could have been mistaken for the lair of a particularly literary breed of dragon—a plot of exquisite pettiness took root. Josh, an author whose disposition was as sunny as a thundercloud, and whose success in the literary world was comparable to a lead balloon in an origami competition, harbored a grudge. This was no ordinary grudge; it was an epic, monumental, could-be-the-subject-of-a-Greek-tragedy kind of grud...

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Author bio

My first novel published in 2024 is “The Further Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.” It is a continuation of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.” On Amazon at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DHYJFL8Y Find me on X at: https://x.com/realJimLaFleur Subscribe to my Substack at: https://jimlafleur.substack.com/

Shortlisted 2 stories ⭐️

Contest #252

The Writer’s Block – read story

Contest #246

The Unintended Masterpiece – read story