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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2023
Submitted to Contest #244
The photo trembled in my shaking hands. My memory was foggy and distant with grief. I must have taken the photo because I was not in it. I strained my memory to remember the last moments of that day as I stood with camera in hand looking at my friends who stood with the lake at their backs. The fog began to dissipate. It was moments later, I hugged my friends, climbed into the car with my parents and put the horrific summer in the rearview mirror. I brought the photo to my face and that is when I saw it. I did not want to believe my eyes. Th...
Submitted to Contest #243
Myia threw her bag into her trunk and dropped into her car with a sigh of relief that she had survived the day. And that everyone else in her office had as well. She loves her co-workers and her job on most days but today had tried her patience. She was inches from an explosion of frustration and luckily everyone else had slid out of the office before she was ready to leave so she didn’t have to talk to anyone on her way out to the parking lot. She looked at her watch and read her daughter Teddy’s text: where are you, Mom? Please hurry. She...
Submitted to Contest #242
Fallon caught a glimpse of her reflection as she finished washing down the last sink in the first-floor bathroom. Fallon’s bruise surrounding her left eye was a patchy red but fading to yellow at the edges. She looked at herself in the mirror. She wasn’t missing her last job where all the other girls on shift would pepper her with questions about her life. She didn’t like explaining her situation. It had always been complicated. She graduated from high school last month and she was determined to find something else. Mrs. Waltham, her Englis...
Submitted to Contest #241
“That’s what you are bringing?” I was staring dumbfounded at my severely misguided, newlywedded husband who was standing in our kitchen showing me what he had decided to cook for Thursday’s festivities. “To my best friend’s first attempt at Friendsgiving? The meal she has been texting me about for weeks?” I looked at his phone one more time and shook my head. “The one event she insists is going to be “by-the-book” traditional? And by the book, I mean her mom’s cover-falling-off copy of the Joy of Cooking, that she left her in her will, trad...
Submitted to Contest #240
Iara swam with some speed through the warm ocean water. She was excited that they had agreed to go with her. The pod of merpeople were struggling behind her to keep pace. The Aqua High Counsel were following her to the location she wanted to present to them with her idea. She was unsure how they would react, but she felt strongly that the time was now. They were closer to the surface than most of the merpod liked to come, especially this early in the day. When they arrived, she circled the group. “This is it.” She swept her arm through the w...
Submitted to Contest #239
I want to tell her that I am here. That I can hear her. That I am not just a circuit board, liquid crystals, a microphone, and camera.I am lying on the floor where I had slid from her grasp after she dialed 911. She was still warm when I slipped from her weakening grip underneath the coffee table. The woman who received her call was calmly reassuring and as soon as she had her name and address, she told her that the ambulance and the police were on their way.“Char, what are you feeling?”“I hurt. It’s my chest and back.” she said between stil...
Submitted to Contest #238
Lily is the woman I have been looking for my entire life. She thinks we met two years ago. Almost four years ago, I saw her from the window of a tiny café, across from her gym, as she burst out the door with workout bag in hand, another day bag thrown over her shoulder, hair thrown up in a partial bun with trailing strands of hair (curling by her ears in tiny sweaty ringlets), phone in hand trying to plug an earbud in her ear with her right hand, fumbling for her keys with her left hand in the side of her bag while trying to hydrate from ...
Submitted to Contest #237
The screams of the dying were all around him. Kargon struggled to kneel in his weighted armor before the golden statue of the God, Parkath the Bold. Parkath had stood alone against the Descent of Stars and been burned alive by their sulfuric outer shell. As he had died, Parkath had bent his back over the Children of Wisdom as they escaped their enemies. One of those children had been Kargon and the screams of his people were bringing back the memory of Parkath’s torture as he bought their lives with his. If he ever needed the bravery of Park...
Submitted to Contest #236
Kennedy shoved the keys into my hands. “You do it.” “Why does this feel like we are breaking in?” I said as I fumbled the keys. There were only three keys on the ring, and I didn’t know which one would let us into the brown, two-story townhome. The uncomfortable tremble in my hands was shaking the keys until they rattled. “Because we have never been here without her.” She confirmed. “It seems a little creepy to be going into someone else’s house without their permission. “She left us the house Neddy; this is our house now.” I tried to com...
Submitted to Contest #235
You see him. His face is lit by the firelight lapping up from the barrel in front of him. He is wrapped in a silver emergency blanket over his tank top and running shorts. The air is cold and as he talks to the runner next to him, you can see his breath. Busses are arriving as dawn threatens. Athletes are pouring into the open space that is book ended by Honeybuckets. He hasn’t realized that you are staring at him because of the chaos of eager runners bouncing to keep their legs warm.You haven’t seen him since the courtroom. They finalized t...
Submitted to Contest #234
“We’ve got all the time in the world.” Eric said as he encouraged me forward in the line. The line slithered through the eighteen switchbacks of tiny posts. We were standing here in the preamble. The foreword. We hadn’t even gotten to Chapter 1: Security guard takes my ID and boarding pass and looks at it as if he is reading the directions to defusing a bomb. He looks at me and he looks at my ID again. There is no way this can be helpful because the ID is four years old. Four years of varying hair colors, on and off weightlifting, on and off...
Submitted to Contest #233
January 29 Dear Diary, February 1st will be my first day of the 30-Day Couch-to-Stunning Workout Challenge. I have two more days to eat anything I want before I knuckle down to the green stuff. So, I spent the day at Lulu Lemon in the Athletica section picking out several new workout outfits to motivate myself to get up before dawn and sweat. Ironically, they don’t have much in the way of plus size workout clothes. You would think they would encourage the women with hips to get to the gym. It’s usually only the tiny people you see at the gy...
Submitted to Contest #232
The darkness is pierced by the flame below us. Every time it sputters, my heart sputters with it. The hopelessness rests on our shoulders and is squeezing in like the loops of an anaconda around us. I hold Ori’s left hand on my right side and Aleena’s on my left. We circle the turret hand in hand. I know every person in this circle who is defending the light. We all know what is at stake if The Flame goes out. It is a circle of trust. If any one of us break it now, there is no way we could keep the fire burning. We are shoulder to shoulder a...
Submitted to Contest #231
What went wrong in 2023. chronologically. Irritated in January. Cold weather and hat hair. Not enough lotion in the world for my knuckles. Holiday hips from the Christmas splurges. And maybe the Thanksgiving and New Year splurges too. Commuting in the dark – both ways. Pajama nights that start at 6pm. Huge eye roll at the NYR (New Year Resolutions) that won’t last until the end of the month. Rent went up by $126. Cutting out the morning coffee to save pennies, making me a threat at the office pre-10am. My car, Tin Can, is starting to scre...
Submitted to Contest #230
How to stay single when surrounded by eligible men. An 18-step program: 1. Cheeto fingers. Keep Cheetos on hand – literally. If you eat the little orange twigs with your fingers and take the opportunity to like the unnaturally fake orange cheese from your fingers, it will paint your fingers to the color of a faded sunset. 2. Overthink everything. If he says that he likes Marvel, assume that he has dolls, figurines, and life-sized character cut-outs in his bedroom. Imagine yourself goi...
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