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Missy Matchstick

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025

Stories (25)

Comments

Library

21 Followers

17 Following

25 Stories

458 karma pts

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San Quentin’s Hidden Library

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #322

The yard was a cracked stage under a white California sun. Heat shimmered off the asphalt, turning the razor wire into ribbons of light. The air carried a cocktail of smells: bleach drifting from the laundry, fried grease from the kitchen vent, sweat steaming off the metal bleachers. Plastic trays clattered in the chow hall behind the wall, the tang of instant coffee and toothpaste lingering in the breath of anyone who had brushed in a hurry before count. Women scattered across the space in little constellations—card games flickering like ne...

2 likes

Glass Eyes at Century City

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #321

Century City always gleams brightest at noon, when the sun hits the glass at the exact wrong angle and blinds you into believing you’re in heaven. That’s the trick of the place: so open-air, so landscaped, so drenched in citrus and eucalyptus, you forget it’s just a mall. I came here to shop, to watch, to be among the beautiful tide. Everyone says Century City is the crown jewel, and everyone is right. The crowd today is perfect—smiling, nodding, drifting past with bags swinging at their hips. The air smells of sunscreen, perfume testers, an...

3 likes

Santa Monica Eats Its Own

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #321

The pier smelled like rot and sugar, seaweed and funnel cake clashing in the same breath. Gulls wheeled and screamed overhead, scavengers with wings sharp as knives. Somewhere a band was playing out of tune mariachi, warped through blown-out speakers, and the sound carried under the planks as if the ocean itself had learned a new instrument. The Ferris wheel loomed at the edge of it all. A broken halo, half its bulbs dead, the rest too bright, flickering in seizures of white, red, and sickly green. People streamed toward it with the same sla...

6 likes

GloMart_0307.AVI: Playback Error

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #321

The GloMart always smelled like dust and incense and the faintest whiff of something sticky under the slurpee machine no mop could reach. It was aggressively overlit, the kind of fluorescent buzz that felt like it was actively trying to bleach your soul. Quinn had stopped noticing it around week three. They worked the graveyard shift, which was ironic, maybe. GloMart didn’t stock anything worth dying for—just tallboys, off-brand chips, discount tampons, and every energy drink known to man. But the graveyard still came. People with nowhere el...

0 likes

The In-N-Out Between Worlds

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #321

The desert never really sleeps. It hums. A low, static buzz beneath the stars, the kind of noise you only notice when everything else stops. Out here, just past midnight on the I-15, even the billboards look like they’re dreaming. She keeps one hand on the wheel and the other wrapped around a gas station iced tea that’s mostly melted now—watered down and over-sweet, like everything else that used to mean something. The air conditioner gave up around Victorville, so she’s got the windows down. Desert wind slips in like a ghost and sticks to h...

1 like

The Support Group for the Cosmically Returned

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #321

SESSION 1 GAVIN: "Alright, gang, let’s anchor in. Bodies optional, but presence required. No interrupting, no unauthorized teleporting, and keep your tethers wrapped around at least one ankle. Let’s start with check-ins." RACHEL: "Still won’t drink tap water. My fridge hum sounds like the pre-suck sequence. I keep unplugging it but it finds power from somewhere." LUNA: "Blood’s still kombucha. Tried donating again—they told me to go to Erewhon and never come back." STORM: "There’s a dimmer switch in my spine now. I control mood lighting with...

4 likes

Pues Se Quedó Pintada, Mija

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #320

The first thing Rosita noticed was how quiet it was. Not peaceful—quiet, like a theater moments after the curtain drops. The pines stood half-charred and silent, their trunks blackened and flaking like the pages of an old book left too close to a candle. No birdsong. Just crows circling above, drifting lazy spirals into a sun still smeared with smoke. She told the ranger at the base station she was “just hiking,” and he nodded, but his eyes held the kind of softness that meant he didn’t believe her and didn’t press it either. No one came her...

12 likes

Redwood Crown, Lithium Bones

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #320

ACT I : The Mania - The Forest - The BecomingI was born under a redwood tree, or at least I told the EMT that when they found me barefoot and singing. They wrapped me in a blanket like I was breakable, but I was still vibrating from the storm inside me. I’d been chasing moonlight through the ferns for three nights—maybe five. I lost count after the stars started winking at me like they were in on the secret. I told the ravens they could perch on my shoulders. I told the spiders their webs were maps. I told God I forgave her. They say the woo...

26 likes

Where the Mycelium Waited

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #320

I did not know I was alive. Not in the way she was—warm-blooded and wind-chapped, sighing into the moss as though the earth might answer back. I was breathless. Rootless. Dreaming in spores. I was hunger and rot and rebirth, woven through the bones of redwoods, pulsing beneath the wet loam. I remembered everything, and nothing at all. Then she stepped into me. Boot heel against damp ground. A hush of motion in the tangled green. Her presence lit the soil like a match. I felt her before I understood her. She pressed down the ferns with cauti...

9 likes

She Was Waiting in the Hollywood Sign

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #320

I didn’t mean to hike to the Hollywood sign. I’d meant to take a nap. Or maybe cry in the Rite Aid parking lot. But I missed the turn on Franklin and just kept driving—windows down, radio off, the city grinding like a slow migraine in the distance. My body was on autopilot, but something deeper was steering. And when I hit the last legal parking spot at the edge of Beachwood Canyon, I cut the engine and sat still. The sun leaned low and swollen behind me. It was late enough that the light had gone that dusty gold LA is famous for—too beautif...

16 likes

To Be a Wildflower in Yosemite

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #320

I didn’t clock out. I left my stethoscope in the sink, floated past the nurses’ station, and walked out the double doors without turning back. Somewhere behind me, a monitor was shrieking and someone else would silence it. My scrubs still smelled like antiseptic and burnt coffee. My pulse thudded in my ears like a warning I chose not to hear. By the time I reached the edge of Yosemite, the sky had gone pale with cloud and my knuckles ached from the cold. January was supposed to be snow-heavy and still. That’s what I’d wanted: something clean...

9 likes

California, Undeveloped

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #319

The sun hangs over Joshua Tree like a severed head, golden and godless, watching. Opal walks between rusted stalls and tarp-fluttered tables, her boots crunching through gravel like old bones. Everything smells like sun-warmed vinyl, oranges going soft in the heat, and the ghost of gas fumes. The wind drags dust across her skin like a prayer that won’t be answered. It’s been a year since the crash. A whole calendar cycle since her Toyota spun out on a forgotten road and folded like an insect against a Joshua tree trunk. Three other bodies we...

20 likes

Red Lipstick, White Noise

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #319

The desert made her angry. Rachel stepped out of the rental car and squinted through the heat shimmer, regretting everything: the flight from Boston, the motel soap stinging her eyes, the email from her editor that started this whole descent into woo-woo hell. And now—this? A flying saucer-shaped building in the middle of nowhere, with a chalkboard out front offering “cosmic recalibration & solar harmonics.” Jesus. The Integratron stood like a sugar pill hallucination. White dome. Perfect symmetry. Not a line out of place, like it was bu...

13 likes

Solarium Girl: A Devotion

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #319

The salon opens at ten, but I awaken before the lights flicker on. I feel the sun through the smudged glass of the storefront—the real sun, too far away to matter. Here, in this suburban pocket of Los Angeles where the air smells like pink bubblegum and exhaustion, no one wants the real thing. They want me. They want the version of themselves they imagine beneath my lid. Bronze. Glossy. Invincible. And I give it to them. Every time. I know them all. The bride-to-be with the uneven arms who cries when she thinks no one hears. The teen who rea...

5 likes

Charred at the Edges, Still Holy

Missy Matchstick

Submitted to Contest #319

The foothills were already breathing smoke again. Enya stepped off the transport with her boots hitting the red dirt like war drums—slow, deliberate, scarred. The air tasted like cedar and mourning, like something that had already burned and was waiting to do it again. She paused at the edge of the fireline, staring out at the treebones curled in silhouette. The sun hung low behind a veil of ash. Everything was golden and ghost-colored. She didn’t flinch when the wind kicked soot into her face. She’d been kissed harder by fire. The others un...

5 likes