Livia Owens

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2021

Stories (8)

8 Stories

131 karma pts

?

“Heat Wave” by Livia Owens

Submitted to Contest #268

A heat wave strangles the life out of the summer that forty-year-old Muriel Winslow returns to her childhood home of Sampleville, Ohio to attempt sobriety. It’s the first time in her life she has even considered sobriety and intends to evict the demons by foreclosing on her past. She realized that staying in NYC to pursue sobriety would be an act of self-sabotage. Resisting daily glasses of wine and nightly martinis while entombing herself in her apartment would be as futile as the filaments of clouds thinking they could prevent the sun from...

0 comments 0
Read story

“The Glass Jar” by Livia Owens

Submitted to Contest #263

Clara Crenshaw has been waiting for her mother to pick her up at the school bus stop for hours. The horizon swallowed the sun long ago, and a full moon's faint outline is visible in the twilight sky. Her mother’s lateness terrifies her. Something has happened, something bad, probably, knowing her mother. Clara tried to tell Aunt Mona that her mother frightens her, that she didn’t want her mother picking her up on the last day of seventh grade, but Aunt Mona insisted Pearl Crenshaw is fine now. “They wouldn’t release Pearl if she wasn’t bette...

0 comments 0
Read story

“No Vacancy” by Livia Owens

Submitted to Contest #257

No VacancyCharacter List:IRIS GILCHRIST: A thin, middle-aged woman with wavy brown hair and a habit of gesturing with her hands when she speaks.THE NURSETHE MANFADE IN:A small motel room is dimly illuminated by a full moon visible outside the window. A woman in her 40s is sitting on the side of the bed, talking on her cell phone and nervously tapping her fingers on the bed table. IRIS(glancing nervously at the wall farthest from her)This is Iris Gilchrist in Room 4B. I can hear loud knocking noises through the wall and it’s keeping me awake....

2 comments 2
Read story

“Writer's Block” by Livia Owens

Submitted to Contest #245

Sitting on the balcony of her 14th-floor apartment, Miriam Westlake has two options--euthanize the rest of the day by swallowing two Valium with a glass of wine or watch the solar eclipse sober. She decides to stay sober. She lets her fingertips hover over the laptop's keyboard, waiting for something to burst through the monastery-like emptiness of writer’s block lodged in her mind. She resigns herself to the fact that the only thought bouncing against the sides of her skull will concern how long it would take her to walk to the liquor store...

2 comments 2
Read story

“Detour” by Livia Owens

Submitted to Contest #239

Ava has been driving for hours—days? She can’t be sure. Passively obeying highway signs without being forced to make a decision is oddly sedative, almost hypnotic. She considers the possibility that she has been driving for so long the car may actually be an extension of her body by now. Abandoning it now would be an act of deliberate self-dismemberment. The inability to navigate would relegate her to lying immobile on the side of the road, flailing like a turtle flipped on its back. Scavengers would begin picking at her flesh as the sun bro...

2 comments 2
Read story

“The Telescope” by Livia Owens

Submitted to Contest #230

"You can make me bleed all you want. But I'll never scream for you." Chloe Stone heard her lover’s wife scream this bizarre declaration at him within days of moving into a rental house on a dead-end street. It was after midnight when the wife’s bleating awakened Chloe. She witnessed the wife stumble out the front door and stand in front of the floodlight illuminating the circle driveway. The wife clutched a half-filled wine glass and a burning cigarette in one hand. She was wearing a knee-length red nightgown and white fluffy slippers. Chl...

3 comments 3
Read story

“An Accidental Memory” by Livia Owens

Submitted to Contest #95

Annabelle Montgomery is six years old and already understands how perilous and unreliable the world can be. People, things, can suddenly go missing, without warning. No explanations are provided, no apologies. Faces of women hover at her periphery, frozen with expressions bitter as arugula. They orbit her world like asteroids without trajectories. They chain-smoke angrily, glaring at husbands or boyfriends silently from stained kitchen tables or rusty porch swings. They are perpetually waiting for the men to give them money. The women in Ann...

0 comments 0
Read story

“Stagnation” by Livia Owens

Submitted to Contest #92

A peculiar, steamy inertia dripped over the town that summer. Days resembled perpetual nuclear explosions of white-hot sunlight. Night seemed as transitory as a last-minute dream. Flowers wilted as soon as they bloom. Ticks dropped off trees onto people’s scalps, latching on with unnatural ferocity. Mosquitoes swarmed in roaming packs, biting anything that smell faintly of blood and helplessness. Movement ceased as creeks dried up, revealing primordial bones turned to stone. Odors of rotting, overripe fruit attracted flies half-blinded by ce...

0 comments 0
Read story

Author bio

Livia Owens has not written a bio yet!