Kathleen M.

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2020

Stories (24)

24 Stories

499 karma pts

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“Face Me in the Goodwill Parking Lot You Coward” by Kathleen M.

TW: Swearing, violence, mild descriptions of blood and injury. This is a true story, but names have been left vague/changed for privacy. I'm trying to get back into the swing of writing things, so I might as well take advantage of this prompt. ********************* “We’ll be closing in five minutes, please bring your items to the front and thank you for shopping with us.” I didn’t pay much attention to the woman who turned around on her way out to scream at my coworker to shut up. The registers were busy, and the woman was leavin...

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“The Songbird's Beginning” by Kathleen M.

Lizzie was having a horrible, awful, loathsome day. She would have tacked on more adjectives to that description, but her brain wouldn’t cooperate. How does one get fired from a job waiting tables at a second rate restaurant? Apparently arguing with a customer was a surefire way to lose your job. Even more so when the customer was a man of wealth and you were just a girl. At first, Lizzie was proud that she had been fired. She now had an excuse to sleep in every day. Then, as she got closer and closer to her apartment, the feeling of pride r...

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“Finding You” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #103

Every night I have dreams. Sometimes they’re about Before, and other times they’re about the Way Back. I do everything in these dreams and unlike reality I was never alone. There was always a person with me. They changed every time, but I knew deep down that they were the same person. We slayed dragons while wearing clunky suits of armor, and we protected villages which became towns, and those became cities. We explored abandoned buildings together, but not like the abandoned buildings Now, the ones from Before. We were always together, no m...

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“Hidden Guidance” by Kathleen M.

*The next book in my series. See bio for order*Arpina had a problem, and it was being caused by the two people she had come to love as family. Dana was moping around the office, and Robin was being too professional. They had gotten into a fight, and Arpina didn’t know why. Fortunately for Arpina, she knew how to sneak around from her time on Isla de Abundancia, and she knew how to solve mysteries from Robin’s lessons. It only took a few hours of digging to find the Project Songbird file folder. Arpina scoffed at how easy it was. “You’d ...

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“The Pirate Queen” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #98

She was a queen, but not in the conventional way. She wasn’t born into a royal family, and she would never marry one of the many princes or princesses searching for love. Tilde was a queen of the seas. The pitiful boats the navy boasted splintered under the weight of her beloved ship Doppelganger, a sleek vessel that hid as many secrets as its captain. Tilde dealt in blackmail like a politician dealt in half-truths. She was as rich in knowledge as she was in gold, but only one of those things could fully bend a person’s will, and certain bri...

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“Call Me Icarus and Let Me Fly” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #97

Warning: Mention of torture *** His cell is at the top of the tallest tower. The single window provides him with a full view of the stars. Up there, he isn’t the hero the public once declared him. He isn’t anyone, in fact. When people come to deliver food, when the princess comes to beg him for answers in regards to why he murdered her father, and even when knights come to threaten the worst punishments they can imagine, he sits and stares out that single window. The bars are rusty, and it would only take one shove to dislodge them, but t...

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“Fancy Meeting You Here” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #95

I wrote this for another prompt but it kind of worked for this as well. Unfortunately I've been very busy this week so I don't know how good it is, but I'm posting it anyway. *** Thea wasn’t always a nervous wreck. It was because of the trauma of losing her parents, having to drop out of college to take care of her little brother, and then watching her brother quite literally fade away in their living room, reaching out for her as he screamed for help. Such a shame that her indecision had only gotten worse from there. Five years later Thea...

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“Project Songbird” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #94

The next book in my ongoing series. See bio for order to read in. *** Two men were arguing in front of a complicated machine. The taller of the two had his arms crossed, while the shorter made wild gestures. She couldn’t hear what they were saying, only that they were very upset about something. “Ladies, ladies, you’re both very pretty.” A woman walked over, kissing the taller man on the cheek and giving the shorter a one armed hug, “But arguing over your contraptions isn’t going to give us government funding.” “We need to postpone the...

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“Bees? Bees.” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #93

Dedicated to the Dungeons and Dragons group, including the warlock with her two sugar daddies (patrons), the monk whose godly parent is one of those sugar daddies, the barbarian who poked a zombie and had to amputate her own arm, and of course the dungeon master who has watched me pull off some of the worst nat 20s in Dungeons and Dragons history.***The coronation party had been going swell, if you asked the Paladin. His queen had ascended to the throne, and the gala that followed featured some of the finest music and dancing, as well as exq...

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“The Assassin's Guide to Making It Everyone's Problem” by Kathleen M.

The library was closed, yet that stupid superhero was standing in the middle of the place with a book on astrophysics. Astro-freaking-physics, the nerve of him. He only had eyes for the book, seemingly unaware of the assassin for hire perched on one of the shelves behind him. If X had brought his gun, it would’ve been a clear shot. After all, only one superhero could live through a bullet to the head and it certainly wasn’t the one with the nerd book. Sadly, X did not have his gun. Or his throwing knives. He would’ve been grateful for a chem...

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“Ghost Towns” by Kathleen M.

Part of my series starting with “To Go Beyond”. First two stories will be linked in the comments. *** It started with a call from Robin’s mother, which was never a good sign. This time it was because Robin’s younger sister was being accused of a crime she claimed to have not committed, and Mrs. Lee wanted her private investigator daughter to help the family out. Unfortunately, where Robin went, Arpina and Dana followed, which was how they ended up packed on a train from California to Arizona. Arpina, who had never been on a train before, w...

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“Paved with Blood and Tears” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #85

TW: hallucinations, panic attacks, and depictions of burning to death Dedicated to the friend who helped me build this world. *** “That’s the thing about this city…” I muttered into my glass. "It keeps you prisoner. There's always a job and a room for you, but at the cost of your freedom." The man next to me gave me a strange look, and the bartender topped him off. "It's not all bad here." She reassured him. He wasn't upset by my statement, he was confused because that was the start of our conversation. I continued, "You're new in town...

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“To Go Beyond” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #83

When they bought the office, Dana rigged the door with as many windchimes as she could buy. While Robin toiled away in the back rooms, setting up bookshelves and display cases for their trophies and spoils, not of war but from their many jobs and travels, Dana hung windchimes so that the door would always open with a cacophony that could be heard through the entire building. Robin pretended to be annoyed, but when she heard the door open with a crashing noise with Dana’s cackling as accompaniment, she couldn’t help but feel something warm bl...

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“Nothing Artificial About It” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #82

In the year 2112, artificial intelligence was perfected. Androids were mass produced to ease the workload on humanity. Of course there was backlash against this. People took to the streets in protest of the loss of the jobs they wouldn’t be doing anyways, but Orion, the company in charge of android production and programming, kept rolling out newer models with more advanced tech. Eventually the androids started malfunctioning. They overturned not only their programming, but also the government. This culminated in three things: the founding o...

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“Beware of Mortal” by Kathleen M.

Submitted to Contest #78

A note for those reading: I rushed this but I was going for the same vibes as when you get a dog and your dad says he's not going to be the one to take care of it and then he and the dog end up bonding. The gods used are part of the Armenian mythology, which is interesting but also really hard to find information on. “Astghik, why is there a tiny mortal in the temple?” Vahagn loved his wife, but sometimes the things she did made no sense. After the fall of the Pantheon, she maintained some fame with Vartavar, a day that was once...

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Author bio

Profile picture from Conner's Doodle Creator picrew by DoodleConner Check out the sequel to my story "To Go Beyond" https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Fmw9AVeNk85iGfN9oFzXDpGzYtSi4StTk34UXA93EeY/edit?usp=sharing Series order: "To Go Beyond" "To Come Back Home" (Link above) "Ghost Towns" "Project Songbird" "Hidden Guidance" "The Songbird's Beginning" Okay, forget the whole rats in a hoodie thing, it turns out those rats were a disguise as well. I'm actually an entire swarm of bees pretending to be four rats that are pretending to be human, but I keep getting distracted by colorful things. I'm also a college student. If you've seen me with this site opened in the middle of a bio lecture, no you haven't. I'm trying to find time to write, but life is hard and I've been losing a war with Amazon's self publishing website for months (note to my future self: don't use Amazon's self publishing site ever again), so my creative juices are gone and I think I've permanently lost my half of the brain cell. My current hobbies include waxing poetic about the moon, staying up until three in the morning to do homework, waiting for my Minecraft husband to get home with the milk, and performing medicated baths on the crustiest of dogs at the local animal shelter. If this sounds like you, you may be entitled to financial compensation. Fun fact time: Your mitochondria comes with extra DNA. This DNA is passed down from your mother only. The mitochondria was originally an organism on its own, though there is some debate over the actual origin. That being said, it is imperative that you all know this: the mitochondria is, in fact, the powerhouse of the cell. Enjoy your stay. (And by the way, Reedsy, I still would like to indent my stories please and thank you.)