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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2023
Submitted to Contest #284
TWs: Terminal illness, Abuse, Depression, Language The sky wept, restless. Stadium bulbs clunked on, hospital eyes in the black. Daron and I stood at center field, rolling ankles, necks, sleeking water from our faces, hair – readying for kickoff. We shouldn’t have ever met – the age between us too great. But Daron was a prodigy, the only freshman to make the varsity soccer team. I shivered, turning in the dying light as we waited for the ref. For the briefest moment I saw Daron in my periphery as if catching my pale shape in a mirror: narrow...
Submitted to Contest #248
TW: themes of suicide and pregnancy lossThe way to my houseIs always the same but IWho live there am not:A matter beyond controlWhich of me there or missing-excerpt from Complaints and Celebrations, A Collection of Haiku and Tanka, by Alan RileyThere is only one leaf hanging in the maple tree outside my house when the police show up. My mother lifts the blinds at the window, breathes fog onto the glass.“What’s going on out there?” she asks.“It’s probably Alan next door,” I tell her as I upend the shoe bin in search of the panda stuffed anima...
Submitted to Contest #220
A serpent slithers through the desert. It drags its colossal body over the crunching bones of ancient victims, swishing torrents of sand in its wake.The earth trembles. Above, a dark cloud appears in the blue sky.The serpent pauses, swivels its head. It fixes a yellow eye on the cloud, watches it darken, broiling with fury, as if dragging in a long-winded breath, readying to strike.The snake doesn’t hesitate, moves fast through the desert, positions itself at the edge of the cloud’s lightning rage. There is nothing but dry, hungry sand stret...
Submitted to Contest #215
My world has been cleaved in two, a knife wedged in the wood between my before, and my after – the two halves spinning recklessly close to an edge, ready to drop. In the before, everything made sense – my entire life straight lines leading me here: into the lair of a snake. I was gifted a magicked knife from the Queen herself, the blade soldered, tamped, and sharpened into a gleaming point, laden with the drippings of magic – all with the sole purpose to hunt and kill the last great demon that threatened the known world. I imagined how...
Submitted to Contest #209
Somewhere in the middle of 2007 I swallowed Rage whole. I can’t recall the hour or the day, only the place – among white brick barracks sitting on the easternmost edge of Ukraine, the ones we turned into a makeshift summer camp for orphans.This was well before I knew my enneagram number: Nine, Peacemaker. The easygoing, self-effacing type. Complacent. Receptive and reassuringly agreeable. A fellow Nine from church asked how I dealt with my anger. I turned on him quick. “I’m not an angry person.”I didn’t know then, my anger a leashed thing, a...
Submitted to Contest #204
Naya holds a dying man in her arms.It was reckless to save him.More than reckless – unlawful, punishable by death. Or worse, expulsion.She pulls at the collar at her neck, presses a shaking hand to the man’s throat. His pulse picks up, flutters like moth wings against the light pressure of her fingers.No one has ever entered her world before. It is sealed shut with magic – a great domed barrier that swirls like a vast oil slick against a desert sky, a bowl clapped down over its skittish prey.Her people talk of Outsiders entering their world ...
Shortlisted for Contest #196 ⭐️
Panic is a hand at Leven’s throat.He’s been ignoring the sun ghost for days now, dismissing it as a mere sunspot in the periphery of his vision, a black stain from staring into the sun too long. But the shadow has only grown larger and more defined, slick obsidian flames climbing up its body, giving the impression of a billowing cloak in the stagnant heat of the desert.Leven swallows, quickens his pace to catch up to his father. “Any sign?”His father doesn’t turn, merely clicks his compass open, snaps it shut. Click, snap. Click, snap. “It’s...
Submitted to Contest #194
Today I did the thing I was never supposed to have done: I quit writing.Written a million ways, in a million advice columns, said by a million authors to aspiring writers: Whatever you do, KEEP WRITING.That’s what I have been doing, mind you, for nearly twenty years, since I first decided I wanted to be a writer in the prepubescent halls of middle school. My dad taught me the meaning of hard work and dedication to the cause, a loyal employee at his company for nearly thirty years. The work is hard and tedious at times – he prepared me for th...
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