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Pamela Beach

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025

Stories (24)
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24 Stories

317 karma pts

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The Shape of an Echo

Submitted to Contest #317

For five years, Amelia had lived her life in the quiet, orderly stacks of the city library. It was a world of contained stories, of beginnings and endings bound neatly in cloth and paper. Her own story felt as if it had been torn in half, the latter part left unwritten since the day her brother, Collin, had disappeared. He’d gone hiking in the Cascades, a simple day trip, and had never come back. No note, no body, no trace. He had simply been erased by the wilderness, leaving a void that Amelia had tried to fill with the rustle of turning pa...

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The Watchmaker's Debt

Submitted to Contest #317

Scout Cromwell was a man who lived in the past, just not his own. His small, cluttered shop, smelling of brass polish and old oil, was a hospital for broken timepieces. He could coax the life back into a seventeenth-century pocket watch or a 1950s chronograph with the same gentle, patient hands. He understood their intricate hearts, the delicate dance of their gears and springs. It was a language of precision and order, a stark contrast to the messy, unpredictable progression of his own life.His great regret was a single, unfixable moment te...

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The Man on the 4:12

Submitted to Contest #317

Leo’s world was built on the solid bedrock of probability. As a senior risk analyst for a global insurance firm, he didn't just understand statistics; he inhabited them. He could tell you the precise likelihood of a hailstorm in Nebraska in May or a shipping container being lost in the North Atlantic in winter. His life was a fortress of calculated certainties, and he was its comfortable, solitary king.He was reviewing actuarial tables on his tablet when the man sat down opposite him in the half-empty train car. The 4:12 PM express was usual...

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The Log of Dr. Aris Thorne

Submitted to Contest #317

Entry: 01Date: October 12, 2031Subject: Unscheduled Anomaly A-1It started as a ghost in the machine. A flicker in the data from the Pan-STARRS survey that should not have been there. My first instinct, as always, was to blame the machine. A sensor glitch, a cosmic ray striking a CCD at just the wrong moment, a software bug in the parallax algorithm. We ran diagnostics for twelve hours straight. We rebooted systems, recalibrated sensors, and manually cross-referenced with three other observatories. The ghost refused to be exorcised.It is real...

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The Dust of Forgotten Things

Submitted to Contest #317

The scent of old paper and decaying leather was the only history Arthur knew. For five years, his life had been a quiet loop within the four walls of "The Dusty Cover," a bookstore that seemed to exist outside of time. He’d woken up in a hospital bed with a name, a splitting headache, and a past as blank as a fresh page. The doctors called it dissociative amnesia, a clean slate brought on by trauma his mind refused to revisit.He’d found a strange sort of peace in the bookstore, a sanctuary of second-hand stories. He organized them, repaired ...

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The Hero's Mask

Submitted to Contest #316

Nessa’s world was a universe of silent, brittle things. Sunlight filtered through the grimy arched windows of the Grand Archives, illuminating a thousand swirling motes of dust that danced over scrolls, forgotten manuscripts, and ledgers bound in sun-bleached leather. Her days were a quiet rhythm of cataloging, repairing, and re-shelving the city's history, a history that Commander Valerius and his Ministry of Purity were keen to rewrite.Valerius was a man who believed in the eradication of inconvenience. History, he declared, was an inconve...

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The Shadow in the Frame

Submitted to Contest #316

The old portrait gallery was Elias’s sanctuary. Dust motes danced in the slivers of afternoon light, illuminating the stoic faces of forgotten aristocrats and long-dead merchants. He was the curator, the quiet guardian of these captured souls, and he knew each of their stories as if they were his own. He spent his days in careful restoration, his delicate brushes coaxing life back into faded canvases. But his nights were spent with her.She hung in the most secluded alcove, a woman in a sapphire gown, her face a symphony of secrets. The artis...

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The Hum of the Wires

Submitted to Contest #316

The world hums. Not the gentle thrum of a refrigerator or the distant drone of traffic that most people tune out. For me, it’s a different kind of sound, a constant, low-grade static that lives inside the walls of every building, coiled in copper veins. I’m an electrician, which is either a cruel irony or the universe’s idea of a sick joke. I spend my days surrounded by the very thing that isolates me.Every wire, every circuit, holds a residue of the life that passed around it. It’s not a voice, not exactly. It’s more like the ghost of a fee...

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The Keeper of Whispers

Submitted to Contest #316

The Great Library of Aethelgard did not trade in books. Not really. It traded in the silence that books created—the hushed reverence of turning pages, the quiet awe of towering shelves, the profound stillness of accumulated knowledge. Elara, a librarian’s apprentice, was a creature of that silence. With hair the color of faded ink and eyes that seemed to absorb more light than they reflected, she moved through the library’s labyrinthine corridors like a ghost, her presence felt only by the subtle displacement of dust motes in the afternoon s...

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