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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2019
Submitted to Contest #220
THIRD ZENITH Every morning Bel and her brother went out to the Sands. Before dawn, when the sun was still steeping – a teabag touch in hot water, saffron strings of clouds cobwebbing the horizon – they left their grandparents’ house, pajama’d, carrying water in old round canteens, rubbing sleep from their brown nut eyes. They walked down to the street’s nub then veered off into the desert. A tundra of sand lay before them – miles in every direction, violet in the morning light, still cool enough that they could walk on it barefoot. They ...
Submitted to Contest #83
The ocean is filled with strange things. I know, because I am one of them. I didn't used to be, and I don't belong. I was a land-man: a man of fields and barns and houses. I had never been on a boat in my life, but one day I bartered my loudest chickens and my driest jerky for passage on a great boat headed across the sea, to visit a half-foreign land. The captain (a vacillating man with muscular red gums sea-seasoned skin) told me the vessel would be heading somewhere off the coast first, to a place where fishing was good: large s...
Submitted to Contest #64
In yellow rubber boots sausaged thick with mud, Aileen walked over the moor. Cautious as a lamb – two spindly legs, two biscuity knees, downy hair and pale skin yarned with blue veins – she stepped around pockets of soft peat: miniature bogs that would suck her down and keep her, holding her prisoner among the bracken and the moss. She had always felt safe on the moors. Her baby-bird coloring and gauzy heart were amulets against misplacement. As she walked she watched her feet; when she looked up it was to assess the topography of her chil...
Submitted to Contest #30
Chamomile, charcoal, and candles, half-eaten by their own wicks, is the only way I know to put me back to sleep after a nightmare. In this one I was skimming through a forest of hollowed-out logs, draped with moss and moth-eaten pelt-cloth. I was very drunk, or very tired, or both: my head lolled onto my chest and my vision departed when my head wasn’t tilted up.I sigh, the air rattling the steam of my tea. It is not easy for me to leave my nightmares. It is like trying to take off a dress that zips down the spine all by yourself.In my lap i...
Submitted to Contest #24
When Birdcage Bill plays the piano, everybody listens.Some of his songs make people fight. Some put them to sleep. Some make them drink drink drink, and some make them go drown themselves in the river. Nothing at all happens when he plays The Old Gray Mule. Despite his reputation, the saloons always let him perform, and folks always come to hear.My friend Gus once told me Birdcage Bill’s piano’s keys are made from bone. We were eating supper at the Holy Hare and Bill’s plonking that day was making everybody hungry.“Cursed bones,” Gus said, g...
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