Menu

Menu

Prompts

Contests

Stories

Blog

Directory

Contests

Magazine

FAQ

Martin Ross

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2021

Stories (128)

Comments

Library

395 Followers

353 Following

128 Stories

5881 karma pts

?

The Ideal

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #179

Caution: Adult languageRid your life of toxic influences.It was in the throes of one of those half-wasted couch confessionals a half-hour after everything dazzling and intimate and promising and hopeful and false fades away. Cohen had cajoled Anderson Cooper into a giggling, inebriated near-stupor for an audience of everybody. “He’s no friend,” Somebody’s Cousin’s Girlfriend’s BFF states, climbing over a comatose partier’s outstretched legs to land jarringly on a sprung and stained couch. Empowered by alcohol and eye contact. “Guy’s a celebr...

17 likes

Neveragainland: Tinkering Part 3

Martin Ross

CAUTION: Bilingual strong languageDecember 22, 2014Unit 113"Mom's back," Pete announced.The patio gate rebounded as Dodge glanced up and pulled short, driving the corner of a crumpled Fiddle Faddle box into his left thigh. Happily, Dodge's thigh was shielded by a dense sheath of pre-retirement fat and newly bike-honed muscle. Having recently come off 33 sedentary years of bureaucratic hearings, ballroom PowerPoints, and chronic monitor glare, Dodge nonetheless winced even as his brows arched with interest. On the patio opposite, Pe...

4 likes

Boughs Unholy: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

We looked like a depressing Whatever The Eff Happened to the Brady Bunch? documentary. Evan, our moderator – pleasant-looking middle-aged sort - was in the Alice position, in a sweet pine-paneled den against a mouth-watering backdrop of floor-to-ceiling books.All mysteries – Evan was group administrator, and had edited or introduced a few dozen collections of “lost” Golden Age/pulp/slick magazine crime stories and novellas, most of which were now on my Kindle. Sarah had thrown a flag on basement library expansion a few years back.Eclecticall...

10 likes

Camarones With The Crocodile: Tinkering Part 2

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #177

Disclaimer: Strong language, violence, and the aftermath of sexual abuse. 2015 San Ignacio, Sinaloa, Mexico The Crocodile was rapidly becoming the stuff of legend. A regionally popular band was making the charts with a driving narcocorrido about "Los Dientes Del Cocodrilo," and his bloody exploits on behalf of the Cartel de Sinaloa. The rising star of Mexico's Golden Triangle thus had bristled about meeting in this filthy side-street marisqueria in the tiny backwater of San Ignacio. He preferred the gran entrada -- the splashy entrance, t...

13 likes

Tinkering

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #176

1957Danzer felt a frisson of humility as he strode through the cavernous dining hall. It was an unpleasant sensation for the American wunderkind.The Augustiner Keller was a dazzling paradox -- raw masonry arched over elegant banquettes and the finest white linens. The last of Vienna's ancient monastery cellars, the grand “basement” had survived der Fuhrer and his Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, the communists, and a quadripartite postwar occupation that had ended only last year with the Austrian State Treaty.Danzer spotted th...

14 likes

The Lawn Goodbye

Martin Ross

Submitted to Contest #175

It turned up like a wooly mammoth in the last snowdrift of spring. Had I not been a teen biology geek, I would have raked it into a 39-gallon bag, dumped it at the gutter in front of Shih Tzu’s Mom’s house, and thought no more off it until the city “sucker” crew rumbled along on its seemingly random schedule.This was the last “harvest” of 2022, brought on by a half-week of high winds which according to Channel 25’s buzzkill meteorologist would become a far more frequent phenomenon because petrochemicals, deforestation, and ice caps. Sarah ha...

14 likes

Night of the Litigatory Dead: A Mike Dodge Mystery

Martin Ross

“So what’s he supposed to be?” Curtis inquired. “Game of Thrones Guy?”“Nandor,” I supplied. Reluctantly. Detective Mead regarded me like I’d scrupulously avoided regarding Nandor when he synopsized the latest season of What We Do in the Shadows for me. I was a reporter for 33 years, and the Countenance of Benign Validation had become my key superpower.Curtis Mead was a cop, and Nandor was dead, the object of ridicule for a collection of malevolently smirking jack-o-lanterns, so amenities were now pretty much out the window.“He’s like a vampi...

9 likes

Trepidation in the Teahouse of the Dolls

Martin Ross

“Our American Ladies High Tea special today is Princess Kailani’s Hibiscus, in honor of our Great American Lady of 2022,” Lady Brynda chirruped. “It has a delicate hint of ginger and a sprinkling of pineapple-infused turbinado.”I inspected the open pink leatherette case and its multicolored selection of packets, each adorned in a gilded, Disney-infringing script. “Ah, Marquis of Queens' Berry. Just like The Crown.”“I’d have to ask, but it IS a very popular choice,” our tea wench sang. Sarah’s toe connected under the table. “So’s the Duchess ...

11 likes