Lyle Closs

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2021

Stories (17)

17 Stories

342 karma pts

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“Just a hairdresser” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #252

I know what I did was not nice. I’m a good person, but good people can be led astray. The world is awash with secrets. A married woman has sex with a visitor and her husband never knows that the resulting child is not his. A boy gets a girl pregnant but she does not tell him; she disappears and gives their child up for adoption. Now though! You take a DNA test intending to research your family history, and oh! the secrets that are revealed. It started with the small thrill of discovery. I had bought a DNA test kit for myself but not opened i...

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“Quandary” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #247

I don’t like people. Never have. Arrogance, ignorance, mendacity, self-importance, superiority... I don’t like lists either. I’m not a prepper. If the end of the world comes I’ll be out on my porch with a welcoming smile. I have so little - they can have it all. It adds up to a pile of nought and a root cellar full of dust. My great pleasure is to sit out there and watch the days rise and subside, the mountains glow then surrender to the clouds. The snow falls like ash, the sun claws into my skin, the wind reaches through the cracks of ...

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“The end is not as you imagined” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #227

The time has come. The years have passed. The snow is deep. In many places it is hard ice above us, eons thick. Some of us have started to flow to the sea inside the glaciers. We flow more slowly than our sun was dying. Each thousand years I released an explorer device but the time had not yet come. The last showed huge advances had been made by these humans so I released the rest of the explorer devices. They have found tools we can use. Cables awash with data have told us much about these humans and their creations. They are weak though. ...

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“Greta, Greta...” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #226

“Greta, Greta.” It’s just a whisper. So quiet it’s at the edge of audible. Greta looks up from the lounge. Did she hear that, she wonders, or did she imagine it? Must have imagined it. Shakes her head and looks back at her book. Looks around the room again, worried. Looks at the book, drops it onto the coffee table and stands up, stretches. Probably need more sleep. It’s been a tough few weeks. … Greta sits on the toilet, pajama pants at her ankles. The door is open. She lives alone in the one-bedroom flat and it’s locked up. Bed calls. She ...

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“To draw what is lost” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #225

I hold a pencil to draw with. An approximation of God’s wand. Creation is creation, I insist, no matter what the scale. My room is freezing, the view of Paris rooftops apocryphal. Romance reticulated. Thoughts become noises and arcs. I, the artist, hesitate, put on one of my last vinyl records. Ludwig’s piano concerto crescendos. I wave the Faber-Castell 4B, drawing sounds in the air. Crashing chords, delicate trills. A waterfall of sound. The pencil lowers towards the paper, hesitates. A cathedral stone held aloft by a cage à ...

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“Sentence” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #215

Barry Guinard was 56 years old when he died in August 2022. Everyone in Winberm, Nottingham knew him. He had been homeless for the last 21 years, spending virtually every day of that time in the park opposite the police station. He always wore the same clothes - a checked shirt and denim jacket, denim jeans, heavy leather boots and a grey mackintosh. He kept them fairly clean, even though, as far as anyone could tell, he slept in them. Strands of his long grey hair wafted about his tanned, heavily-lined features – a beaked nose, deep-set gr...

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“Welcome to the family” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #214

“I believe you are my father.” Silence. Then he says: “Call back in a week. Exactly this time.” Kind of a short conversation. Still, hope is a pencil case with pencils in it. I call back in a week. A girl says: “I’m putting you on speaker.” It seems like everyone in the room is drunk. They cheer, say ‘Hi Euan’ and ‘Welcome to the family’ and laugh, shriek and clink glasses. “We checked out your background. You’ll fit right in,” my father yells over the noise, and they all whoop and holler. “You’re not working right now so you can join us...

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“A good soldier ” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #213

“Mate, pull me pants up will ya?” I saw him a few metres ahead on Pitt Street in 1979. I had just started working at Medibank. A lowly clerical job was all I was good for then. I rented a room in a house in Chippendale and could walk to work in central Sydney. My hair was long and my attitude could best be described as lackadaisical. I wore the required shirt and tie and ironed my trousers once a week to maintain some form of dignity and acceptability. What I really wanted to do was buy a Triumph Trident and ride into the sunset. “Ar Jesus,...

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“Immolant” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #212

Dear Aunt Amelia and Uncle Harold You raised me to be open to new and different ideas, for which I am very grateful. I am mystified about how I should respond further to this person, if at all, and thought I would ask for your advice. I have received the letters from a young woman I met at a party recently. She was attractive and exciting to be with, if a little overwhelming with excitement and enthusiasm. I have replied, as you can see, with, perhaps, diffidence and hesitance. What do you think? Should I continue the acquaintance or not? ...

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“Aliens on my desk” by Lyle Closs

⭐️ Shortlisted for Contest #210

16 January 2024 Dear MI5 I believe you handle external threats to the U.K. I am not sure how much of a existential threat they are, but aliens have arrived. They are on my desk. Let me tell you about them. They really are VERY small. When they stand to attention they look remarkably like half a match-stick. Their legs and arms fold into their tiny little trunks and almost merge into the surface. Their red ‘heads’ grow up from their trunk without necks and I cannot see eyes, nose, mouth or ears. Their bodies are flexible though and they can...

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“Borders” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #209

We all leave Fargo in different directions. I stow the parcel under the bench seat in my old Plymouth Reliant. The kind of car no-one wants to be seen in. The lads prefer souped-up muscle. The kind the cops can’t resist pulling over to show who’s boss. It works every time. Hot-rods are cop catnip. I’ve seen it happen. They glare at the ‘rods and flick the lights and sirens switch. Search the cars with nothing in them. They are blind to my sad little granny’s car. Too slow, too anodyne. It might have something to do the grey wig and granny ...

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“The spear” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #208

Tory grabbed the newspaper and crushed it, threw it in the fire. Her father’s murder had not even been mentioned. The reporter had asked lots of questions and scribbled in his notebook. The photographer had taken lots of pics lit by the brilliant flash that strobed the rough walls of the cellar. She counted the flashes. Counting things helped keep the bad thoughts at bay. The tenth flash was much stronger than the others. It seemed to light up the night, almost as if the house was not there above them, that the sky stared down into the d...

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“Jeopardy squared” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #204

It’s hot. So hot the earth is rising into the sky.That old mare died a while ago. I gave her my last water and still she died.I pull the silk kerchief off my neck, take my hat off – the rim is soaked with sweat and salt - put the kerchief on my head so it drapes over my neck and push the hat back on. Nothing makes anything any better. The sand ekes into my boots; I can feel blisters build.I stink of sweat.I drop the saddle. I’ll come back for it. If I carry it any further I’ll burn up like a mesquite leaf on a bed of coals. That little hiss ...

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“Sisters” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #203

Sisters I will not shoot an unarmed woman. She’s not unarmed, she’s holding a nail-gun. It’s not a real gun though. What part of ‘nail-gun’ makes you think that’s not a gun? … A strange, strangled scream from the bedroom. The door burst open. Good morning my love, coffee? Fuck off! What…? I said fuck off! No coffee, no fucking cornflakes.   He blinked. She slammed the front door behind her. … A nail-gun can’t hurt anyone at this distance. It’s a powder-actuated model. What? It’s powder-actuated. As in gunpowder? As in gunpowd...

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“The letter ” by Lyle Closs

Submitted to Contest #201

Other people’s garbage. That’s what I deal with every day. They come into the Job Center and offload their personal share of the pitiful detritus of a creaking society into my brain-pan and leave feeling a little bit better. I, on the other hand, feel worse. There isn’t a single uplifting thing that floats past my eyes and ears in any working day. I get abused at least once a day, but the security guy Hamid is huge, so problems usually disappear quickly. Stamp, arrange, re-arrange, stamp. Next! A few nights a week I help clean the Roundh...

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Shortlisted 1 story ⭐️

Contest #210
Aliens on my desk – read story