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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
They saw her first in the side mirror of a pickup truck. A smear of green and bone, stepping from the treeline like fog with a pulse. Seven years gone, and Wren came back barefoot—moss trailing behind her like the hem of a wedding dress gone to ruin. No one moved. Not at the gas station. Not in the diner. Not even in church. Word passed quiet as wildfire: Wren’s back. Wren’s walking. Wren’s alive. Except—she wasn’t. Not the way they understood it. Her skin gleamed damp and soft, all bark-brown and bruised-green. Tiny mushrooms bloomed from ...
Submitted to Contest #318
Neptune’s trailer smelled like burnt sugar and the last page of a library book. She was elbow-deep in cosmic frosting, dyed eclipse-blue and glittering with edible stardust, spinning cupcakes like small planets for someone else’s big moment. Outside, the 29 Palms sky simmered in pink and rust, the sun leaking over rusted car parts and prayer flags, casting long shadows that twitched like they had secrets. The desert had been whispering all morning. Neptune heard it in the hum of the generator, in the way the wind kept flipping her tarot deck...
The couch was the last thing. Everything else had been picked apart, packed, or posted. She’d left the tarot deck, taken the blender, and ghosted the houseplant with a sticky note that read “You deserve better.” But the couch — crushed red velvet with cigarette burns in the armrest — had stayed. Like it was waiting. She listed it on Craigslist with no caption, just: free. you haul it. She expected no one. Maybe a flaky reply, maybe her ex in a new hoodie, pretending they were still friends. Instead, he showed up. Not early, not late. Just th...
Most people only find the Moonlight Motel after they’ve already lost something important — time, a memory, someone they loved, or a version of themselves they can’t seem to properly grieve. It doesn’t show up on GPS. The road that leads to it isn’t paved, or even named. One moment you’re driving across the Mojave with sweat on your upper lip and static on the radio... and next thing you know, you blink and it’s there: a glowing oasis off the shoulder of nowhere, pulsing faintly under the weight of starlight. The air around it tastes like ozo...
PART I: THE CARNIVAL Los Angeles doesn’t breathe. It buzzes. From power-lines to parking lots, the whole city is one massive, tangled audio cable: hot with signal, high with tension. On the day Camp Flog Gnaw opened its glitter-drenched gates at Dodger Stadium, LA felt like a speaker turned up just past safe. Missy stood at the edge of the Astral Stage, fingers curled around her headset, black band tee knotted at the hip, ready to go full throttle. She wasn’t just here to run sound. She was here to win a war. Because across the field, at the...
Everyone wants to be Tier 1 until they get the welcome kit. Mine arrived in a champagne-scented box shaped like a pill. When I opened it, a voice that sounded like my old guidance counselor chirped: “Congratulations! Your Value Has Been Updated.” Inside: bone-white contact lenses with auto-shimmer, a MoodRegulator™ chip to “balance emotions for optimal likeability,” and a printed Tier 1 schedule. No weekends. No privacy. No time to think. By noon, my wardrobe had been reprogrammed to “Celestial Chic.” By 3PM, I’d been assigned a stylist, a l...
Submitted to Contest #317
The first time I saw her again, the heat was already splitting my skull. West Hollywood at noon felt like standing under a blowtorch — the kind of heat that makes the air hum, where palm trees look plastic and the asphalt ripples like it’s trying to swallow itself whole. I’d just finished a double shift at the treatment center, three admissions back-to-back, and my scrubs smelled like bleach and stale withdrawal. My body was buzzing, hollow and electric, like I’d been poured out and left behind. I stopped at the self-serve car wash on Fairfa...
The taco truck on Santa Monica Boulevard was a living thing. Its fryer hissed like it was whispering secrets, and the air around it shimmered with grease heat and gasoline fumes. I’d been on my feet for twelve hours at the treatment center, scrubs wrinkled, badge half flipped, hair barely holding on under a headband. I’d told myself I wasn’t hungry, but the truck’s pull was gravitational, like gravity itself smelled like carne asada and cilantro. El Grito was painted in screaming reds and sunburned yellows, a skeletal calavera grinning wide ...
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