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Joshua Scott Hotchkin Wordpress.dungherder.com

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2020

Stories (44)
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419 Followers
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44 Stories

1819 karma pts

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What Lovely Antibodies You Have, My Dear

Submitted to Contest #55

5/27/2019 Dear Mr. Edmunds, I recently signed up online through a prison pen pal agency, and was given your name and address as a potential match, as determined by scores indicating mutual temperament and personal interests. I hope that over time we can find common ground and become friends and confidantes. In the meantime I will allow you to respond, so as to indicate the nature and depth of the pen pal relationship you are seeking. I look forward to hearing back from you soon. Authentically, Jayden Dickinson <-/(*)\-> 6/2...

31 likes 7 comments 7
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Layla Eases His Worried Mind

Submitted to Contest #55

As a general rule Gus was not convinced of the trustworthiness of squirrels, but he did not consider Layla to be like any other squirrel he had ever met. Layla was his friend and confidante, the only other living being he could fully trust, besides the Queen, of course. "Can you keep a secret?" he asked, as his furry friend ate sunflower seeds out of his hand. "Of course you can, sorry I asked." Layla looked up at him and gave Gus a reassuring look, followed by a warm smile and a wink, then went back to work nibbling busily on the sunflo...

26 likes 2 comments 2
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It Used To Come In Bricks With Little Orange Worms

Submitted to Contest #55

By the time I was a senior in high school almost all of my friends had experimented with cannabis, but I held out until the night before graduation ceremony. This was not because I was scared, nor was it because I was particularly puritanical for a specific reason. Smoking pot seemed boring to me as a result of watching my parents do it as I grew up. It was always so obvious, too. We would be instructed to go play outside for an hour, and when we returned they relied on us to entertain them and make them laugh. There was never any attempt to...

27 likes 4 comments 4
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I'm Not Going To Tell You To Calm Down But You're Not Going To Like The Alternative

Submitted to Contest #54

There was very little light in the parking lot, which was going to make my job much easier to do, but also presented issues. The women I pick have one thing in common, they need to look like her. The one. The only one. Danae. But in this double-edged illumination I can only make a rough estimation. She is older, I think, than I usually go for. Definitely older than the seventeen year old girl I had fallen in love with almost a decade earlier. However my hunger is too great. I am driven by a need that can only be spoken in the language of sta...

34 likes 16 comments 16
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The Surrealist Academy

Submitted to Contest #54

Two men are boxing on a trampoline while politely discussing the sexual context of a 14th century Persian poet's work. The dark haired one seems to believe there was latent bestiality suggested in the poet's pentameter, while the bald man insists that there has never been a clearer case of asexual sonnets. Suddenly a six foot bodybuilder races toward the men carrying a giant Styrofoam hammer, that must still weigh fifty pounds due to its size, but she wields it expertly and the men run off in exaggerated fear, as the muscular woman bashes th...

29 likes 9 comments 9
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The Bluesman

Submitted to Contest #54

"Damnit boy, you quit makin' a god awful ruckus with that thing or I'm gonna whup your ass but good," the elder man scolded as he yanked his guitar away from the young wannabe.The young man walked away hurt and angry. He wasn't gonna work in no white man's field. He planned to escape that fate by becoming a working musician, but nobody would teach him to play the guitar, and he didn't have a natural talent for the instrument. He had tried practicing but he didn't know where to begin, and although he had the drive, he didn't necessarily have ...

32 likes 8 comments 8
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The Story of My Cancellation

Submitted to Contest #54

I knew it was a bad idea the moment I said it. It was my first day on the job, and the network writers room was full of all kinds of absurd spit-balling, so I thought it would be safe to just toss a stinker right out there as sort of an introductory volley. The idea was that they wanted to create yet another musical contest show which had some intellectual credibility by featuring a respected literary figure as host. I have no idea why that combination was chosen, but that is what we were told we needed to build the show around. Undoubtedly ...

30 likes 10 comments 10
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The Queen of Albuquerque

Submitted to Contest #54

Looking out over her kingdom from where she stood at the top of a parking garage downtown, The Queen of Albuquerque wept. Her kingdom was in a bad way, and her people milled about below more desperate, broken and miserable than she had ever seen them before. The illness which had caused the world to shift into reverse while going 100 mph down the highway of civilization seemed like child's play compared to what the shutdown had done to the downtrodden. Every day there were new faces, people who'd been bucked out of the cozy saddle of their l...

21 likes 0 comments 0
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Choppin' for the Queen

Submitted to Contest #53

In the seventeen summers Gus has spent living on the streets, this year is the worst. All those other summers contained options, like a cool library or fast food bathroom, but this summer contains only hunger, pain and delirium. The heatwave has been going on for weeks, and Gus can actually feel his socks growing into the fabric of his foot as a result of the constant layer of foul moisture that connects the two surfaces. He stretches out in the foyer of one of the city's many boarded up businesses and cools off the best he can before he has...

20 likes 0 comments 0
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The Forbidden Web

Submitted to Contest #53

It had been a long and arduous journey to the cottage and all eight of Madlyn's legs were throbbing in pain. She could not tell which was worse, the steady, intense throbbing of her exoskeleton, or the hunger pangs wracking her stomach. Since there was no trace of Jelena's scent, she inferred that her lover had not yet arrived to their rendezvous point, and decided to spend what little strength she had left building a web to catch a desperately needed meal. As she was wont to do, Madlyn lost herself in the process of weaving her web. Back ...

22 likes 2 comments 2
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Blue Raspberry Rage

Submitted to Contest #53

Standing in line was never one of my strong points. In general I was a dismal failure in the art and science of patience all throughout my life. I was born to run at a speed of one hundred miles per hour, but the world moved as though paced as a school zone five minutes after the final bell. I felt like a dog on a leash in a field of quadriplegic rabbits from the moment I was born until the very end when my frustration collapsed on itself and turned me into the black hole that swallowed the universe. Not sorry.In those final moments of exist...

18 likes 4 comments 4
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Sacrifice Island

Submitted to Contest #52

A menacingly urgent beeping accompanied the countdown screen on the display which Learo was facing from the seat the Space Authority had buckled him into as he protested and fought against them. The sound was so penetrating that he could feel his own skull oscillating at its obscene frequency. High to mid range with some kind of chorus or tremolo. Then the engines began to rumble, and a subterranean bellow about a thousand octaves below baritone joined the unbearable countdown klaxon in a full on assault against his consciousness, and just...

24 likes 0 comments 0
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Everything In A Thought

Submitted to Contest #51

"Wow, you weren't kidding, you really can see ten times as many stars from here," Sati marveled to her companion. "I don't think I have seen anything even close since my family went on vacation to New Mexico when I was fifteen.""You didn't think I would drive us all the way out here if it wasn't pretty amazing, did you?" responded the the man named Joey whom Sati had been dating for about three weeks. "Anyhow, this is where I spent a good deal of my late teens. Smoking weed on this bridge and staring at the sky.""I love how you can hear the ...

14 likes 0 comments 0
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Clothed

Submitted to Contest #50

Sarah rummaged through the costume trailer looking for something comfortable to wear. The costume department had agreed to let her choose clothing she would be cozy enough in to perform uninhibited, even though they would get the final say in which of the outfits she would wear on set from the several she picked. There had only been two occasions in her life in which she had been fully clothed, both times in ceremonial garb, for her maturation ceremony and naming party. Those outfits were nothing like the remnants of humanity's past she wa...

11 likes 0 comments 0
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