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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2020
It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. I had no shoes, no coat, and couldn’t remember anything before this moment, how I’d come to be in these woods, where I’d come from. Who I was. A clean slate, a near mental newborn, stranded in a frozen, impenetrable, forest primeval. Toes numb, teeth clacking, I rubbed my eyes, hoping to clear, or rather, fill my aching, empty h...
A boy. No, a man, a young man, blue dawn across his fluttering eyelids. Out his open window, purple and gold through the mesquite tree. Yucca flowered breeze. Iron smell of pumped water. Bird chittering. Flitting silhouettes. Swoop and dip, swoop and dip, choreographed dancers in a stillborn sky. Raven-guttering from the corrugated barn roof, an eerie echo reverberating across the valley Awakening slow, w...
CW-slight hint of suicidal thinking, some swear wordsSweet sax strains of "Stormy Weather" swell and fall, taking the edge off my aching loneliness for a moment.But my classic jazz downloads fail to distract me from my level six pain this morning. They never help with pain, but I like to tell the few people I still talk to in the flesh other than doctors that they do, that music is a pain management strategy, a mindfulness tactic I employ alongside my daily rainbow of drugs. These caring folks ...
No way this asshole was getting away with it. Not over my dead body if I could help it, but definitely over his.Rage and adrenaline masking my pain, I wiped the blood from my eyes and wobbled from the alley to the road. I flagged down an empty taxi, then another, then a third, but they all passed me, speeding by as if I didn’t exist. Not a single pedestrian so much as looked my way either. Doubtless they all avoided me because of the blood streaming down my face. Better not to get involved, eh? This goddamned city. Livin...
Squat, beige and Soviet, the Marie Antoinette Apartments stood against the stale gray Minneapolis sky. Irony of the worst kind, he thought, blandly ugly and unconscious. He would take exquisitely self-aware irony any day over this three-story architectural monstrosity, “classed up” with tacked on ionic Greek columns, harsh blue LED Christmas lights wrapped inexpertly around them, canned Christmas classics pumping through the air.God, this place was only better than minimum security prison by a hair. But it was all he cou...
(What’s the worst thing you can say to a ghost?I dunno. What?“I don’t believe in you.”Ouch! I admit I kinda’ love the irony, though. You can’t actually talk to ghosts because they don’t actually exist.You want more irony? You can’t actually talk to ghosts—unless you believe in them.) The night I found the doll…wait. Always ahead of myself these days, always so tired and caffeine jumpy. The house first. Three months ago, I bought this lacy,...
Novel and short story writer. Collage artist. Writing second novel, querying first.
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