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Larry Litton

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2023

Stories (3)

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3 Stories

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An Ode to Ramblin Bill

Larry Litton

Submitted to Contest #210

I was seventeen years old when my father, the man known as ‘Ramblin Bill, bought his ticket to the forever box. I don’t think of him as ‘dad’ or as ‘father’, because he wasn’t much of either one of those. Stomach cancer is one mean bitch and I watched him waste away from a jovial two hundred pounds down to a buck twenty in less than three months. Of course, that didn’t stop him from drinking and smoking while he spiraled down the drain. In those final days he often said, “I ain’t no damned quitter. Give me another smoke b...

5 likes

Break Neck Mountain

Larry Litton

Submitted to Contest #210

“Isn’t it a beautiful day Emily?” the old man said, holding his hiking sticks, one in each hand. He hit the trail head with a spring in his step that he hadn’t felt in decades. He carried a Blue Northern backpack, the same one he’d used to scale K-2 fifty years earlier when he was a spritely thirty year old man. It was cold out, ten degrees, not counting a northern wind that blew around fifteen knots but the sky was clear, so perfectly blue that it stung the old man’s eyes just to look at it. His heart quickened a b...

6 likes

Eight Seconds of Revelations

Larry Litton

Submitted to Contest #208

“Do I have to do it?” Myles asks his father as they walk towards the arena, their spurs clink on the hard caliche leaving little clouds of dust in their wake. “You ain’t got to do anything,” his father says. “Walk away now if you want. But there may come a day you’ll wonder ‘what if’.” The west Texas sun begins to set and bloodred clouds reef out into the western horizon. An owl screeches from a nearby oak and it flies into the air with great wings silhouetted against the reddening sky and lightning flashes from distant bl...

5 likes