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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2022
Submitted to Contest #163
It’s Syriah’s turn to fall, but she hasn’t gone yet. I made it just in time.The cold wind rips at me when I exit the labour elevator at the top floor, and I feel my balls shrivel into my body. It’s not just the chill. The top floor of the Meridian-Yamagawa Arcology is unfinished, a work in progress. It’s all beams and scaffolding, and precious few walls. A sobering thought at 1,257 metres in the air.But it’s a hell of a view.The smog clouds of the city are below us, glowing neon green and pink from all the pleb lights that poison the air. An...
Submitted to Contest #162
When I’m done dumping you, I’m going to get trashed on mimosas made from real champagne and a bucket of your tears. That’s what you get for never listening to me. Yes, Miranda, we’re at Charlie’s Kitchen tonight. Yes, Miranda, I made reservations to your stupid favourite restaurant, even though I hate this overpriced garbage trough. It’s pretentious. I even looked that word up to make sure it’s the right word, and it is! Pretentious! What’s that, Miranda? You want to know what the occasion is? “It’s a surprise.” Bitch. Tonight is the night o...
Submitted to Contest #161
Arlene heaved the last suitcase with a grunt, misjudged how heavy it was and how tired she was, and slammed it into the side of their baby blue Plymouth Savoy station wagon. The case bounced off and fell to the ground, opened, and a load of clothes splattered all over the lawn. Arlene lurched the other way, collided with the vehicle, and rocked it. She shook the dizziness away and trembled. “Ffffff–” she began, but then she saw the five pairs of quivering, wide children’s eyes within the car – from eleven-month-old Robert through nine-year-o...
Submitted to Contest #160
Zen Morai nudged the right flight stick on his control unit, and the fifteen tonne asteroid chunk beneath his feet stopped rotating. A tap on the throttle, and the longitudinal thrusters pulsed, sending him and his payload towards the cargo rail – the two-hundred metre long metal tube with dozens of meteor chunks harnessed to it. They had already caught a batch of about ninety tonnes of ice, and this would be the last of their haul on this shift.“Status check,” said Daw Artego, through the local shortwave. He was sitting safe on Gopher-7, th...
Submitted to Contest #159
Malt Anderson stopped vacuuming when a Brussels sprout rolled out of the hallway and bumped into his foot. He scratched his head and picked it up to make sure, and yes, it was indeed a Brussels sprout, out for a stroll in the living room.He looked down the hall and saw another sprout roll out of the kitchen. It bumped off the wall and also wobbled towards the living room. Mom always said the apartment was tilted to one side, so he supposed it was true.Then he heard a noise from the kitchen, and frowned. It was a grunt, a thud, a rip. A wet m...
Submitted to Contest #158
Cheryl’s skipping Christmas this year, again. Because Brian dumped her, because she screwed things up. Again.She shivers in the crisp night air, behind Bill’s Beer ‘n’ Beef, in the derelict lot. It’s a good bar to cut loose in, and forget. Her hands cradle her lighter, giving her cigarette a chance to live, and she bobs along subconsciously in tune with the driving bass inside. She lost Brian because she screwed up, and she doesn’t want anything to do with her parents and their endless criticism.For a moment, the bass is joined by melody and...
Shortlisted for Contest #157 ⭐️
Bob Oaker braced himself against the shed door and grunted when the goat rammed it. He might have shrieked too but he chose to dis-remember that, as it was unbecoming of a man in the prime of his mid-sixties.But then everything grew silent. All he could hear was the wheeze of his own sweaty breath in the sweltering shed, the dzee-dzee-dzeeing of the cicadas – or grasshoppers, or whatever – and the caw! of distant northern cardinals.Well, he didn’t know they if they were cardinals. They might have been bluebirds or, well, turkeys for all he k...
Submitted to Contest #156
It’s not murder because I’m killing myself, and it’s not suicide because I’m still alive.Nobody thinks twice when weird lights and noises come from one of the stalls of the bathroom-sty at Shannon’s Pub, which is why I like the place. It’s reliable.I wish I could rejigger my spacial reality trans-shunter so that it didn’t whine and flash like lightning every time I used it, but that’s a problem for another day. The device itself fits into an oval metal case sized for my palm, and I keep it affixed to my belt. My shirt covers it, and even if ...
Shortlisted for Contest #155 ⭐️
Harvey Deenwaller really shit the bed when he tried out for the basketball team, because he forgot what we all knew: junior high school was bullshit. Trying leads to judging, judging leads to failing, and failing leads to being a loser. Of course we only heard about him, but it was all anyone talked about all day, and when we got into seventh period English we found out that Stacey McCain had seen it. She was always creeping on Carlos Messerschmidt – although she’d never admit it, except she was always admitting it – and Carlos was already o...
Submitted to Contest #154
A word of advice, darling: don’t ever love anything or anyone. They’ll only end up shattering your heart, and then they’ll grind the broken bits up into dust, and make bricks out of it, and then they’ll brick you up where they no longer have to look at you.Oh, hush, darling. I know you’re not like them. No, you’re special. You’re my special little guy. You’re the only one I can trust.And it’s not like I was ever unreasonable, you know? All I ever wanted to do was dance, to have a full belly. To have someone that appreciated me, someone that ...
Submitted to Contest #153
The party is ruined the moment Gwen spots Wesley standing by the piano. The rest of the spacious condo, with its polished hardwood floor and tastefully arranged furniture, grows muted. The gentle chatter of the other upscale guests and the moody voice of Cesária Évora coming from the artfully hidden speakers blur into the background. All she sees is Wesley. All she hears is his laugh.The host, Ben Dambers, hovers around Wesley, with a bowtie on his neck and a martini in his hand. His boisterous voice, already half-laughing, starts that old n...
Submitted to Contest #152
Juanita raised the crystal ball above her head, the bangles on both her arms tch-king, and then spiked it at the floor with a primal scream. It slammed into the scuffed linoleum with a doof, neither bouncing nor breaking. It just rolled an inch and stopped, a dead eye glaring up at her.“No!” she wailed. She tore at her bandana, at her hair. “You can’t!” Her raw voice cracked. “Not him!” She sunk to her knees, her bead necklaces clacking a riot. “Not Andrew!” She drowned her face in her hands, overtaken by airless sobbing. Through a forest of...
Submitted to Contest #151
Today is my coronation. My thirteenth birthday.Tomorrow is the day I die.I grip the howdah’s railing as the elephant lurches down the Way of Heroes. I wave to the people lining the broad, cobbled street. I’m thankful for the parasol, shielding me from the searing sun.“They love you,” says the man beside me, gripping my shoulder. Yesterday, he was King Henloc. Today, he abdicated. Tomorrow, he will be king again.Thousands watch us pass, cheering, waving, and celebrating the Sacred Coronation. Behind them the sandstone buildings and granite sp...
Shortlisted for Contest #150 ⭐️
The accountant sneezed and doomed them all. It wasn’t his fault – he had a mold allergy, and the air in the parkade tunnels was moist and pregnant with dust and spores. The other refugees, a dozen or so bedraggled survivors from the 114th Denver Home Militia, shushed him. But it was too late. The barricade blocking off access to the parkade exploded when a Type-7 Slaughterbot rolled through it. A ten foot tall cylindrical chrome body on a pair of churning tank-like treads, a spiked dome for a head replete with red lights blinking menacingly,...
Submitted to Contest #149
Present day…Diamond Pete Lansing, aged sixty-eight, slammed his red-faced fists on the conference room table. “No! No! No!” he screamed, each word accented with a slam and followed by a mist of spittle. “Gonna git my trucks! Gonna git my guns!”Virginia and Wilson Buss, aged sixty-four and sixty-five, glanced at each other. Their faces were tight and they held hands beneath the table. Father Norval, a spry fifty-five, stood up and licked his lips. “Peter, please–”“-Aww, hell naw!” Diamond Pete said. He threw his white Stetson cowboy hat down ...
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