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Kathleen March

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2020

Stories (385)

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385 Stories

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A Lifetime

She taught travel writing in a small college. It wasn’t a bad job and she got to choose what she taught, but the students were there to fulfill a requirement and some hoped to pick up some pointers for their next trip to Paris or Prague. The course wasn’t going to leave them any wiser about going on excursions to exotic places, but they figured it was easier than taking a foreign language. That was a lot of work and what if they decided to go to Copenhagen or Oslo instead of Venice? All those hours cramming Italian into the brain would go fo...

8 likes

Houdini is my Hero

There they’ve done it again. They’ve picked me up out of my normal life and put me back in the box. They think I belong in the box, in some sort of squarish space with four straight sides and a bottom, plus four flaps on top that may or may not provide me with a possibility of escaping.It’s possible that every one of us gets put in a box at some point in life, but it’s also possible that some of us spend a lot more time in one. That can be for different reasons. Some people accept the box and plod on, although their plodding is slow because ...

3 likes

Food for Thought

She was an extremely successful chef in an extremely successful restaurant on the coast of Maine. The midcoast, to be precise, although exact location is better off a secret. Once they hear about the great food, prices, and views, the tourists start to invade our state and they just come for the lobster, not the scenery or history. (We aren’t happy about that.) It had taken some time and effort for her to become head chef. She had gone through rigorous training in three countries. She was an expert at preparing seafood, as might be suppose...

5 likes

Bathrobes and Slippers

She didn’t know what a parable was for a long time. Then she learned. And waited…She was so anxious and lost. It felt like she knew where she was, but there were too many paths and pitfalls. Something could always go wrong, even when a person was trying to do the right thing.It might have had something to do with the old nightmare she kept having. The never ending nightmare whose meaning any Psych 101 student could figure out: fear of failure. Except. Except she had not been a failure, at least not what the nightmares were always about: Teac...

6 likes

Niar

‘Chove en Santiago, meu doce amor’ (Madrigal á cibdá de Santiago.) Federico García Lorca, Seis poemas galegos. The year the above line appeared in print was 1935, although Lorca had been to Santiago years earlier. Friends invited friends to the old city. Lovers invited lovers. There were others. Visitors of a certain type were puzzled about where they could find the ‘place with all the face on the wall’. Puzzled as they walked in the opposite direction and because ‘the place with all the faces on the wall) was the Catedral de S...

4 likes

Justice, She Said

Write a story about someone seeking revenge for a past wrong, they said. How can I do that, I said. Yet they deserve it, I said then, after mulling the idea over for a bit. Once I’d accepted the fact that revenge was justified, I began to think of how to write about how to carry it out and I started to look around for models to guide me. You see, I knew I would probably be committing a crime and might very well get caught. Still and all, I wanted my crime to be perfect. Please be advised that my own act of revenge mig...

5 likes

The Journey

She was undertaking a long, dangerous journey, but nobody seemed to notice. There were probably several reasons for both the journey and the lack of awareness on the part of the other residents of the town. It might be a good idea to think about them. Sometimes we can learn important things when we pay more attention.Gertrude Stein wrote a lot about a lot of things. She wrote this: “When they are alone they want to be with others, and when they are with others they want to be alone. After all, human beings are like that.” Stein was certainly...

6 likes

Collaging Rosalía

Everyone in town was talking. They couldn’t help themselves. They couldn’t stop. They spent day and night tossing their thoughts about her around. Day and night. Waking and sleeping. They were obsessed and wouldn’t be free of their obsession until they solved the problem. Because it was a problem. It was a serious matter, very serious. So serious, in fact, that they were having trouble dealing with it. With her, with what she was doing. With what she was saying. They were convinced it was dangerous to have her in their midst, just walking ar...

6 likes

Friends For Life?

My friend once told me a story about a friend of hers. I thought you might want to hear it, too. I don’t know if it’s true or if my friend - or her friend - made it up. In any event, it’s a story worth telling, about friends worth having, real or imagined. Feel free to tell me what think, as I know you will, since you’re my friend.*****Two people met in an L.L. Bean outlet store in Freeport, Maine. Freeport isn’t a bad little town, although unfortunately it’s almost always full of visitors looking to spend money in this part of the Casco Bay...

6 likes

Can you hum that tune?

Prologue I’m going to tell you a story. It’s a good story, an important one, at least to me. It all started some years ago, although nobody knows exactly how many. Its main character is a little girl named Kat, or at least that was what they called her when the story began. When the story ended, her name was different. It was Reed, which is unusual, but that was her name, so that’s what we’ll call her. Reed put blood, sweat, and tears into pretty much everything she did, never stopping to question whether it was worth it. Until one day s...

8 likes

Speak, Stone, Speak

Rain poem Once rain had driven her away. Now she swam in it. Tears rained inside her, diluting what was sad or said. Ducks claimed her. Leda or thirsty Danae counted golden coins and thirsty Ardea stood watching. Tattooing drops shattered any thoughts, and rested, missing every word. Her lips were sealed. Things were in pieces. Everywhere. Xacia was her middle name. The only one she had. The one she never understood. The one she never said aloud. Konjac, devil’s tongue, the sponge was filling her lungs. She ...

6 likes

For the Love of…

Mid-July in Maine. Different than ever before. It never got that hot in Maine, as far as she knew. The day had been long and very, very hot. Stifling. She had felt like she was melting, and maybe she had been, especially around noon. Rivers of salt and sweat, transparent rivulets furrowing her face. Swirls of auburn no longer moving in the breeze that did nothing to alleviate the mercury’s ascent. A sea of clacking leaves jostling for shade and finding none. A body struggling to remain inside its poor skin, fearing the worst. Hot, tortured h...

6 likes

I Decline

Her name was funny. It made us laugh. She taught Latin. Mrs. Isabel Patten taught Latin. You can’t make stuff like that up. Her name rhymes with the subject she taught. latin I, II, III, and IV. If you started with I, you kept going until you got to IV. You were pretty much stuck with Latin and Mrs. Patten. That was all right, because it might have been Latin - for the smart kids - but at least it wasn’t French. That meant putting up with Mrs. Rodney’s horrendously nasal voice, even in the words that had no nasal vowels. The choice was ...

10 likes

Name the Narrator

She ran her hands through her long curly hair, always a natural auburn. The gesture wasn’t one of desperation nor did it signal worry. Not at all. Not now. Not any longer. That was all in the past. Despite years of having considered it then walking away from the idea, it had finally happened. She’d finally done it. She’d resigned, was leaving her faculty position (Professor of English Literature) after sixteen years of navigating very choppy waters. She wasn’t going to relive that period because at long last she could say she wa...

6 likes

In My Life

Oh, everything was real ~ Caitlyn Smith I’ve loved them all… Maybe in another life… I’ve loved… Loved them… In my life… All of them Loved Maybe in another life… Maybe I The bits and pieces of words that had once been a John Lennon song nobody wanted to sing because it was too sad: “In my life, I’ve loved them all.” Only the longest line wasn’t from the Beatles. Or the last one. Those words had stealthily joined the others, but it didn’t matter. We remembered the song as it was, accurately. We used to sing it, thou...

6 likes