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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Sep, 2019
Submitted to Contest #169
CW for animal death and mentions of suicide Momma didn’t believe in these sorts of things—called them nonsense. Sarah did, though. Believed every word, because wives tales and whispered fables weren’t to be taken lightly. They were their own sort of magic, tangles of words snaking close and snaring with clever thorns. She’d seen it happen. Seen Johnny bewitched, seen him tighten that noose the same as a tie, wits gone to rot. The black cat was mangy and flea-ridden. The smell was enough to know the creature was a putrid,...
Submitted to Contest #156
There is a man sitting at a small wooden table, dented and dinged, scratched free of its former polish and raised high off the ground on rather tall legs. He drinks not from a glass but an old mug that pulls vaguely at something deeper than his mind, familiar in a way he’s sure he knows the imperfect ceramic under the pad of his thumb but doesn’t remember ever owning such a piece of tableware. Whiskey, free of ice, has long since gone warm in his ever-so yet not quite familiar mug. There isn’t much to know about this man aside from th...
Submitted to Contest #151
Forgetting. Forgetting. Forgetting. He knows there’s a head that crown is meant to rest on. A body meant to carry the weight of it. Metal and jewel, gold and garnet. Heavy. Responsibilities and duties and so many open mouths all with warring needs and wants and shouted beliefs. Even heavier. He knows that throne wasn’t made to sit empty dawn after day after dusk. The grand hall, collecting dust, should hold audiences. Smiles. The curtains should be swept back to let in the sun. He knows the rose, ever and eternal, that is ke...
Submitted to Contest #137
Shut in the dry dust, in the dark, phone cord tangles between her fingers. The elastic spiral of it is crimped and stretched now and it doesn’t spring back the way it used to when she unwinds it from her thumb. Between boxes of pasta and sacks of rice, a crate of potatoes and one of peeling onions, she listens to the static-eaten voice crackling over the line. “Just for tonight. That’s all I— I just need tonight.” The sound buzzes and hums in her ear. So human. So artificial. Phones are funny like that, distorting the things you know ...
Submitted to Contest #92
The child’s hands are dirty. That’s how they are most days, fingernails worn short, dusty red sand stuck under the edges. Skin, dark from the sun, crisping and peeling in places from it too, is dirty no matter how often she visits the watering holes and oases. No matter how many times she splashes in the water, the dirt seems a part of her now, just as much as her inky lashes or the crooked tooth shown off in mischievous grins. It isn’t yet time to make for water, though, the thick depths of night still settled over the land. Night do...
Submitted to Contest #83
Breaking from the surface of the sea meant sunshine. While water streamed from her skin, sluicing back to the waves she was pulled from, morning sun rays spilled over her too. They were startlingly warm, bright in her eyes. And they ate up the crisp cool of the ocean, wicking away moisture to dry out her skin, her red curls. Taking a gasping breath of warm air, she blinked against the harsh sun, water still beading on her lashes and dripping down her cheeks. Even ripped from the waves, the first thing she noticed was the bob and sway ...
Submitted to Contest #82
The little polka dotted raincoat wasn’t doing much anymore. The rain came down so hard, so fast, and the wind whipped back her hood if she didn’t hold on to it. But if she tried to hold the hood with slick, clammy little fingers, the water ran down into her sleeves instead. And anywhere the water met her seams, it hissed like a kicked cat. There was the crack in her throat too. When droplets trailed down her cheeks, down her chin, down her jaw, they sometimes dripped down the line of her throat and into the exposed gash there. It threw up sp...
Submitted to Contest #29
It was a funny thing, the way love bloomed under the early buds of a cherry blossom, then died away when the blooms started to fall. Spring had been full of pastel things unfolding, be it flowers or feelings of the same rosy ilk. After, summer was hot, withering, and it chased off the tail a love never meant to be. He still couldn’t help but miss her, though, when he watched the cherry trees fill in with green canopy overhead. A can of sun-warmed lemonade in hand, he sat at the riverbank, under the dappling shade of the very cherry tre...
To a Vonn, horses were everything, because horses were business. Lilah understood that, maybe too well. But she learned from the best, trailing her father’s footsteps and sipping mint julep in the winner’s circle until she outgrew his footprints and stepped into her own. She learned to breed, to train, to race, to pick the very top prospects and push their talents into something special that would bring her family millions. But she also learned to lie, to manipulate, to peruse the shadows as a socialite and make a home for herself there. In ...
Shortlisted for Contest #18 ⭐️
Quiver and hunting bow were his most prized possessions, one slung over his shoulder, the other held tight with stained wood smooth under calloused fingertips. An arrow nocked in careful decision, he stalked silent through the lush forest growth. It was with a thrill in his blood, a trapped butterfly pulse beating beneath his skin, that he tracked the snapped ferns. The white catches of fur, the spare spottings of blood, they led him after the frenzied hare with an arrow shaft sticking splintered from its haunch. It was a dead thing walking,...
Submitted to Contest #9
It was a tragic love after all, for him to end up lifeless in her arms. Blood was still warm on her lips, slick between her fingers, and it stained such a beautiful shade, like mulberry wine. It was easy to see why, without out it pulsing through his veins, beneath his skin, he had turned such an ugly, pallid grey. Still, that did little to dim her feelings, so she pressed a kiss to his cold cheek, leaving a stain behind, an eternal mark of her love, smeared in crimson blood across his face. That was after, though, and before was alway...
Submitted to Contest #5
People always said that those with a lot in common fell in love. Or that opposites attracted. But what was to become of those in the grey area in between? Yuki and Izumi lived in the grey. Not like minded. Not hot and cold, but moody and tired respectively. They weren’t compatible, by any means. Not with each other, and not with anyone else either. So perhaps it was fitting, that winter, that they lived beneath the overcast sky and amidst the fog and flurries. Because rosy wasn’t for meant them. It was cold, on the streets. Breat...
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