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Jim Moore

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2021

Stories (8)

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8 Stories

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The Breeze That Spoke His Name

Jim Moore

Submitted to Contest #325

I feel the breeze brush against my skin, soft and cold, and for the briefest second, I swear I can feel him beside me again. It slips through the torn screen, smelling faintly of river mud and cut grass. The curtains lift and fall. The porch glider creaks. Out in the yard, the maple leaves flip their pale bellies to the sky as if they’re ready to tell a secret. I stand there, hand on the doorframe, and let the wind climb the inside of my wrist like it used to when I was small—when I had a hand to hold that made everything ordinary and safe. ...

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Barnabas sinclair: a fish out of water

Jim Moore

Submitted to Contest #324

Once upon a more dignified time, I wore velvet waistcoats, wrote with a raven-feather quill, and was addressed as “Master Sinclair.” I dined with queens, lectured on alchemy, and owned more hair than modesty. Now I have fins. Not elegant fins, mind you. I am a goldfish—orange as a poorly baked tart and round as a teacup. My world is six inches wide: a glass bowl, a pink plastic castle, a gumdrop-blue pebble, and a filter that hums lullabies of captivity. My keeper is a teenage sorceress who smells of strawberry lip gloss and chaos. Her name ...

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The Old Buck

Jim Moore

Submitted to Contest #323

Most mornings start the same for me. I wake before the sun — sometime between 5:30 and 6 — and go through the small, automatic motions that make the day manageable. Coffee used to be the anchor; now it’s a cold can of C4. Pop the tab, take that first bite of fizz and caffeine, and the day lines up behind it like obedient ducks. It’s little, stupid, perfect. A ritual. This morning the fridge betrayed me. A bare patch stared back where a silver can should have been. I stood there for a second, feeling the ritual slip like a missed step. Then I...

8 likes

The wrong circle

Jim Moore

Submitted to Contest #321

The Wrong Circle Act I – The Drifter The Dodge Omni wheezed like a lifelong smoker, coughing up the last of its strength as it rattled down the two-lane highway. The hatchback was two-tone blue, though most of the paint had dulled into the color of wet cement. He’d patched the driver’s seat with duct tape three times over, but the stuffing still pressed through like weeds through a sidewalk crack. He rubbed his thumb across the cracked plastic of the steering wheel and kept his eyes on the fading white line. He had no destination, not really...

15 likes

Through the Woods

Jim Moore

Through the Woods They call me by many names. Angel. Demon. Harbinger. Spirit. I never asked for any of them. The first time I stumbled into this world, the air felt heavy with sap and stitched by birdsong. I stepped through a seam strung between two cedars, trembling like a drawn bowstring. On the far side, trees bent toward me, animals fled, and shadows thickened as though I were a moon pulling tide. A woman saw me and ran, dragging terror after her like smoke. By dawn, the seam had vanished, leaving only bark where the threshold had been....

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The Hairy Truth

Jim Moore

Submitted to Contest #319

You’re breathing too loud. Not an insult—just an observation. After a few decades listening to you swarm my woods like wheezing bagpipes in boots, I’ve learned your rhythms. You call it “stealth hiking.” I call it dragging civilization uphill and begging it to go feral. Hi. I’m the problem. Bigfoot. Sasquatch. Skookum. The Fuzzy Convincing Blur. Pick a name that makes the hashtags bloom. I live here. And no, I don’t smell like onions and wet dog—that’s your jerky fighting your bug spray. Tonight’s troupe of cryptid theater majors: three regu...

6 likes

The girl in the tavern

Jim Moore

Submitted to Contest #318

The Girl in the Cavern She was no one. At least, that’s how the story always went. Her name was buried under dust and echoes in the cavern halls. She carried water in chipped buckets, swept coal dust from the stone floors, and stacked crates for men who never looked her in the eye. When travelers passed through on their way to some shining quest — knights in armor, sorcerers with staffs, even wide-eyed farm boys destined for glory — they never saw her. She was the background blur, the faceless figure scurrying out of frame so the “real” hero...

11 likes

“The Immortal at My Door”

Jim Moore

Submitted to Contest #317

Journal Entry – October 12th, 2023 I am an old woman now. My hands shake as I write this, though I tell myself it is the chill of autumn and not the chill of memory. I swore I would never record what happened that night, but time has a way of gnawing at silence. My children are grown, my grandchildren scattered, and the story—our story—sits inside me like a stone. Tonight, in the diner on Fifth Street, I saw him again. And that stone cracked. He sat in the far corner, exactly as I remembered him, as though forty years had been nothing more t...

6 likes