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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2024
Submitted to Contest #312
They were both so gentle, she couldn't tell which one learned it from the other. Andrea Santiago stared at the twin chat windows on her screen, labeled simply "Red" and "Blue." The interface was clean, minimal. No avatars, no indicators, just text against contrasting backgrounds. One human, one machine. Her task was to determine which was which. "How are you feeling today, Andrea?" Red asked. "Present," she typed back. Not good, not bad. Just here. It had been her standard response for months now. "Present is better than absent," Blue replie...
Submitted to Contest #311
Rita didn't mean to stab Death in the heart, but when he reached for her husband's soul, she reacted on instinct. The scalpel was still in her hand from earlier that evening. She'd been cleaning Tom's bedsores with surgical precision, the same methodical care she'd used on shattered soldiers in field hospitals halfway around the world. Her fingers never trembled when they held steel. They trembled now. Death stood beside Tom's bed like a question mark made of shadow and bone. He wore a coat the color of crow feathers, his face neither young ...
Submitted to Contest #310
They said Benjamin Drew couldn’t spell his own name, but the words that came out of him were faster than justice and deeper than any man in that town cared to dig. He was born slow, which was the word they used in Mercy County when they meant something softer than retarded but harder than broken. His mother had fought like hell to keep him out of the institutions, but when she died, they put him in the last place that would take him—the Golden Fields Adult Living Center, a half-converted farmhouse stuck between a gravel pit and a closed-down...
Submitted to Contest #309
The kettle screamed, and so did the voice in the steam. Iris Blackwood pressed her palms against the kitchen counter, watching vapor rise in ghostly spirals. Three months since David's funeral, and she still heard whispers in every sound. The kettle held secrets. She reached for the mason jar on the highest shelf, her movements deliberate and reverent. Inside, dried petals caught the afternoon light like fragments of bone. Corpse-Blooms. The name felt sharp on her tongue, a word that belonged in old books and darker times. Yet here they were...
Submitted to Contest #308
At exactly noon on Midsummer Eve, Nora slipped from the pawnshop clutching a shoebox that glowed through its cardboard walls. The basement had been impossibly deep, carved from stone that predated the town above. Shelves lined the walls, crowded with objects that shouldn't exist—hourglasses filled with what looked like liquid starlight, mirrors that reflected different rooms entirely, music boxes that played melodies she felt rather than heard. And behind the counter, Vincent Ness had watched her with eyes like polished coal. "One perfect ho...
Submitted to Contest #307
Under the fluorescents my skin shone like kiln-fired china, and the professor finally noticed me. The archive basement hummed with climate control systems. Three in the morning, and I sat alone among temperature-regulated cases, cradling a bleu-fleur teacup that had survived two centuries. The porcelain felt warm against my palms, as if it still held echoes of the Qing courtesan who once sipped jasmine tea from its rim. Hairline fractures mapped its surface like tiny rivers—crazing, the conservators called it. Battle scars of time. My thesis...
Submitted to Contest #306
Mom - Today 8:32 AMHoney! I started that sourdough starter you wanted. Named him Gerald. He’s ready for pickup! 🍞Me - Today 8:35 AMWhy did you name the bacteria colony Gerald?Mom - Today 8:36 AMBecause he’s got character! He’s so bubbly when I fed him this morning!Me - Today 8:37 AMThat’s literally just fermentation, Mom. It’s cellular respiration.Mom - Today 8:38 AMDon’t lecture me, Professor Yeast. Gerald’s special.Me - Today 8:40 AMFine. I’ll pick him up after work. How hard can sourdough maintenance be?Mom - Today 8:41 AMFamous last word...
Submitted to Contest #305
The night smelled of burnt earth and gunpowder when Dan Hicks said, "You know what? I quit." But that came later, after the world had torn itself apart one more time.The trenches stretched like infected wounds across the landscape, carved deep into ground that had forgotten what grass looked like. Dan pressed his back against the muddy wall, feeling the vibrations of distant artillery through his spine. Each explosion sent tremors through the earth, through his bones, through what remained of his sanity."Christ, Danny," Jamie whispered besid...
Submitted to Contest #304
The clock on my desk began ticking backward the moment I agreed to write the king's eulogy. Its brass hands moved with unnatural precision, counting down the hours until midnight when my words would seal a tyrant's fate. I stared at the parchment before me, pristine and hungry, waiting to be filled with judgments that would become truth. As Royal Scribe of Karvenfall, I'd written thousands of documents—birth certificates that blessed newborns with talents, marriage contracts that physically bound souls together, death notices that determined...
Submitted to Contest #303
Every time Nurse Kylene adjusted the ventilator, the heartbeat on a different monitor stuttered. It wasn't coincidence—not anymore. Three weeks with the Mercy Switch implanted beneath her fingertip had taught her the rhythm of this macabre dance. Tonight, the pediatric ICU glowed with the soft luminescence of bedside tablets, each displaying translucent holograms of their patients' conditions. Kylene moved between them like a celestial navigator, each step calculated between islands of suffering. Blue auroras meant healing; angry crimson rev...
Submitted to Contest #302
Somebody slipped the resignation letter of God into the company mailroom. At least, that's what Felix Harrington assumed when the lights flickered across the infinite expanse of the Afterlife Division's Reincarnation Department. The quantum processors hummed a semitone lower, and every soul-assignment workflow froze mid-process.Felix adjusted his tie and pushed his thick-rimmed glasses up the bridge of his nose. As a junior clerk, he knew better than to ask questions when the system hiccuped. Six years of processing reincarnation paperwork h...
Submitted to Contest #301
The body arrived in bubble wrap, the return label reading '24-Hour Free Trial.'Nina Columbo traced her fingers along the packaging. After thirty-nine years of inhabiting the same tired skin—skin that had witnessed sixteen-hour trauma ward shifts, a near-marriage, and years of prescription sleep aids—she was about to step into someone else.The body would need calibration before tonight's wedding reception.Nina's reflection watched from the hallway mirror—bloodshot eyes, hair that hadn't seen proper conditioning in weeks, skin with the dull pa...
Submitted to Contest #300
No one drives to Else on purpose; it's the kind of town you end up in when your GPS dies and your secrets get too heavy.Martin Halperin had been driving for seventeen hours straight. The afternoon sun cast long shadows across the cracked Arizona highway, distorting saguaro cacti into accusatory fingers. His phone buzzed again—a text from his sister. Third one today. He silenced it without looking."Rerouting," announced his GPS. "In one-quarter mile, turn right."Martin ignored it. Right meant east. East meant facing what he'd done.The dashboa...
Submitted to Contest #299
There are only three things in this world that can make a man question his will to live: losing his job, living with his mother-in-law, and the jingle for adult diapers playing on loop in his nightmares — I, unfortunately, have all three.Let me introduce myself. I’m Kyle Brenner, formerly known as “The Voice Behind Hot Pockets,” currently known as “Susan’s disappointing son-in-law who can’t even load a dishwasher correctly.” Two months ago, I was sitting in a corner office at MelodyMinds Creative, collecting royalties every time someone humm...
Submitted to Contest #298
If you’ve never spooned lukewarm tuna casserole from a can labeled ‘Feline Fancy: Ocean Dreams,’ then congratulations—you still have your dignity. Mine vacated the premises approximately two years ago, right around the time HR’s perky twentysomething “transition specialist” explained that my thirty-two years of programming experience had become “legacy knowledge” and that the company was “pivoting toward fresh perspectives.”Fresh perspectives, by the way, meant Kyle—a cheerful intern who wore beanies indoors and used phrases like “vibe check...
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