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Lisa Lange

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2020

Stories (6)

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135 Followers

14 Following

6 Stories

1038 karma pts

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About a Month or So Later

Lisa Lange

Submitted to Contest #309

Maybe he’d had a stroke after the fact. One never knew when you lived alone. Jennie wasn’t there to say, “You’ve had a stroke.” She wasn’t there to say, “You live here, too,” when he asked her where the tape was, or the bourbon, or a hammer. Probably he’d always been this way. Before the incident. Numb in the head. Dumb in the head. No strum in the head. No music to tickle his ivories. To feel joy. He’d never been very emotive. He’d left Jennie high and dry on that score. Had he stopped tickling Jennie’s ivories, or had she stopped tickling...

10 likes

Wyatt vs Beelzebub

Lisa Lange

Submitted to Contest #307

Principal Jones. Short. No neck. Gravitationally challenged. The strong scent of bully covered by stronger perfume. We used to say she sumo-ed her way to the principal job. She was the reason we called Franklin Middle School, Alcatraz, because of the way she pushed everybody around, students and teachers. I once saw Ms. Bright in tears, leaving Jones’s office. And Noah wet his pants—for God sakes, he was thirteen—and all she did was look at him with that wonky eye that wandered in a different direction from her other one, like it was looking...

11 likes

The Restoration of Evie

Lisa Lange

Submitted to Contest #235

Evie pulled a strand of hair off the sweat on her forehead and drank from the water bottle. Her legs wobbled. Her feet burned. She felt ready to collapse in the fountain. She filled her mouth with M&M’s from the bag her dad handed her. “I did it!” she said, before swallowing. “I knew you would, Kiddo.” Her dad beamed. She was thirty-two. She’d be his kiddo at thirty-five, at forty. Or maybe, it was because she was single. They were all the family they had. Evie came up yesterday to run the 5k because her dad had gotten forty pledges, b...

9 likes

A Fixer Upper

Lisa Lange

Shortlisted for Contest #217 ⭐️

Am I a Jonah or a James Bartley, I wonder? It’s my own fault. Too much wine, some pot, an allergy tablet. I fell my way into this old Victorian–my friend Emily’s house–during our lady’s book club sleepover. I thought I was headed for the bathroom at 3 a.m., but I stepped off the widow’s walk. Emily and her family moved out. I don’t belong to anyone in this house. I shouldn’t belong to this house. But when you die in a house, it has a way of holding onto you, or rather, you let it hold onto you. You get complacent, you find your niche, you s...

26 likes

Apples and Trees

Lisa Lange

Winner of Contest #172 🏆

Mom works. She never picks me up from school, and two miles is too close for a bus pickup, which is fine by me because I like cutting through the woods. Especially on autumn days, when the air is cool, and the flies and mosquitos are gone, and basketball practice hasn’t begun. I like the quiet. I like the wordlessness of the walk. A pretty sugar maple dressed in vivid orange frills beckons me off the path. I stand to look at her. I sound like a weirdo, I know. A sixteen-year-old boy calling a sugar maple pretty. It was Dad that taught me to ...

240 likes

509 comments 509

Amelia and the Beautiful Big Red Handbag

Lisa Lange

Shortlisted for Contest #126 ⭐️

           Our first encounter was on New Year’s Eve. I was picking up a few last minute good-luck foods for the evening – black-eyed peas, cornbread, pickled herring, grapes – walking from my apartment to the grocer. It was cold. That’s what I remember first when I feel the memory in my senses, when I feel the depth of the memory. I feel how cold it was, how the sharp absence of smells in the air precipitated my noticing the details.I remember I noticed the last brown leaf hanging from ...

29 likes