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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2020
Note: This story contains possible triggers for readers sensitive to stories of abduction. In the split second it flew past her in the opposite direction, Kelly wondered if she imagined the blue sedan, with the girl in the back seat screaming. The girl’s hands slamming the window. A mass of curly brown hair. HELP ME. Kelly made a U-turn—for authorized vehicles only—a gravel path in the...
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 di...
What could have been: A stripper made more money than any gallery assistant job. Even working the afternoon shift at The Urban Garden, Evie made over a hundred grand. $35,000 tops for a gallery assistant, and let’s face it, there were no gallery assistant jobs to be had. Not in New York City. Not with every art school grad running to apply. Not with every previous grad staying put in their positi...
The Swan Song Circus was small. It traversed the South in a caravan of happy-looking campers and trucks decorated with pictures of swans and loaded with performers and equipment - a colorful orange and blue big top, folded wooden audience benches, machines for making cotton candy and popcorn and for dispensing soda, high wire apparatus and trapeze, rings and hoops and blocks and ropes, costumes, and everyday living necessities like camping tents, cots, pots and pans, pillows, day clothes and mementos from home. The owner, a retired veteri...
Bridgette turned off the alarm and stretched under the covers, under sunbeams that poked through cracks in her curtains. She loved her new row house. She was proud of herself for buying it. Exposed brick, a cobblestone street, a little neighborhood close to shops and cafes, an historic park nearby. Plenty of places for inspiration. Plenty of places to overhear conversations. Perfect for writing. Not quite ready to get up, Bridgette scrolled through emails, texts, twee...
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...
Penny placed the coffee and croissant in front of Frank, and he watched a stranger’s hand reach for the cup. A thin hand. A bony hand. How had his nails gotten so long? He read somewhere, years ago, when he was young, that cartilaginous features lengthened with age, like chins and noses, while muscles atrophied, and bones shrunk. He looked down at the baggy crotch of his belted khakis. “So true,” he said, and he laughed...
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 bro...
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