Mark Nicholson

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2022

Stories (4)

4 Stories

97 karma pts

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“ GAWM or not? ” by Mark Nicholson

Submitted to Contest #185

Harris looked around the storage unit, it was stacked floor to ceiling with all Vargas’s cast-offs. Harris was growing to hate the perpetual mocking TOCK of the cheap nasty cuckoo clock. It was one of those mass-produced souvenirs that you bought when you were in the Alps. Just a lump of pine fashioned into a faux Swiss chalet with plastic doors where a cuckoo appeared once an hour to tell you that you were an hour nearer to death. It had a cheap Chinese battery-operated motion instead of the traditional Swiss-made mechanical motion. Harris ...

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“Sunny and Stormy, we're just too different.” by Mark Nicholson

Submitted to Contest #183

Sunny and Stormy, we’re just too different…It was the last thing I ever said to Sunny. It was said in anger, with snake-like venom. Enough venom to kill whatever remaining love and kinship remained. I spat out "we're just too different". I said it in the split second before I slammed the door behind me and stormed off to the bar in the Hotel Monte Carlo. No not the one in the Mediterranean, the one on the shores of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. The hotel was more of a motel and the lake was just the world's biggest swamp. I was over all this ...

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“Mr. Brown's Ruler.” by Mark Nicholson

Submitted to Contest #165

Mr Brown’s Ruler. “I did it, sir, I didn’t steal it, sir, I just borrowed it,” she lied. It wasn’t that she was lying about the stealing she was lying about the entire act. Mr. Brown the over officious math teacher; was taken aback, aghast, and speechless for once. He had been absolutely sure that I had stolen his ruler. He had seen me hovering around his desk as he had walked past the class earlier and when he returned his treasured twelve-inch ruler was missing. I was a liar and thief, a child of a broken marriage. One of those kids from t...

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“Uncle Sam and the depression,” by Mark Nicholson

Submitted to Contest #134

I woke up depressed. Waking up with depression is like waking up filthy dirty, but it’s not cured with a bar of soap and a long shower. Depression clings on like a withered snakeskin and I needed to shed this filthy putrid skin before it suffocated me to death. But here’s the rub, depression doesn’t want to peel off its host. It wants to hang on grimly and putrefy slowly making everything smelly and ugly. No few hours of Pythonesque struggle will see a neat sleeve of skin discarded like a ghostly shell of you left hanging in a maudlin manner...

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Author bio

I came to writing late in life. When I went to school presentation was a premium way over the content. My handwriting was and still is abysmal. Now after a winning battle with cancer and a tactical retreat against peripheral neuropathy I have nothing to do and all day to do it. I hope you enjoy my stories that are emboldened and emblazoned tales of my ascent into old age. I have lived in a few countries and loved them all. I believe my father's generation was the greatest generation to walk the earth, but the next generation will be better.