reedsymarketplace
Hire professionals for your project
reedsyblog
Advice, insights and news
reedsylearning
Online publishing courses
reedsylive
Free publishing webinars
reedsydiscovery
Launch your book in style
Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2020
Submitted to Contest #86
The last of the whites ‘My name? Abir, my name is Abir. My ouma was also Abir, she’s long gone now of course. I well remember her flowers, her kitchen always smelt of flowers. Spices too, and baking. Fragrance, Abir means fragrant. I was very young then and scared of her big black iron oven. It always seemed to throb with heat. Wood, it burnt mountain logs, denneboom mostly, also gum. I loved the smell of pine. I also remember a house in Claremont near the mosque, the Claremont Main Road Mosque. The Mosque is still there of course, but not...
Submitted to Contest #79
She was beautiful. Beautiful in the Ancient Egyptian style: proud and graceful, she would appear in their artwork, most often in paintings (on papyrus or stone panels) in the formal and, to us now, strangely slightly abstract way of the time. Occasionally she would have been rendered in three dimensions as a painted wooden sculpture or carved from polished soapstone. In the practice of the time almost all artwork was the product of Pharoaic workshops and never intended for public display. Her long, strong neck and long legs were, all those c...
Submitted to Contest #71
To the north of us, on the edge of the Kalahari, was a small town: Hotazel, owing its existence to the nearby manganese mine. I know the town well — at one time I had some involvement with the mine. This time of year, well most times of the year really, it lives up to its name. On the Pakhuis Pass it was even hotter than I remember Hotazel to be. A wide plain stretched below us, dotted with flat topped koppies looking like small volcanos with their tops sliced off by the swinging panga of a wandering god of war. This is the great Karoo, semi...
Submitted to Contest #68
Desayuno Chapin. We’d travelled Central America for eleven or twelve weeks, (mostly by rattling, lumbering chicken buses, fast winding downhills and slow open roads), and having crossed into Guatemala from the cloud forests of Honduras we had arrived early morning at the Puerto Barrios ferry terminal. A few others were chatting at the food stall. Perhaps now the house is empty, for at least a few days, their life can get back to normal (I have told Willie – the grass mowing man – to leave the yard uncut).It was first light as we stood on ...
Submitted to Contest #56
I sat alone at a corner table. Feeling down. Morose. Don’t you just love that word? Morose. Often I say it out loud - seriously loud. Never fails to cheer me up. The coffee sucks. My mug no more than tasted, no way was I going to pollute my body with even more sludge so soon after those awful, dark days where the coffee was even worse. By then I’d discovered DDT, Deep Dark Truth, from Truth Coffee Roastery in Buitenkant Street, just around from the Book Lounge (brilliant book shop – go for the vibe) and, not coincidentally, just ar...
Submitted to Contest #55
‘I need to tell you a secret. My deep, dark, secret. Will you keep it secret? Can you keep a secret?’ With a freshly manicured fingertip, (a smoothly rounded fingernail, dark blue, high gloss), Harry tipped down her specs just enough to look over their wafer-thin gold frame. Her eyes narrowed, her eyebrows tightened and a short vertical line appeared between them, (the first line I’d ever seen on her perfect face), she leant forward slightly across the table: ‘Dulce! How can you even ask such ...
Submitted to Contest #54
MAKING AMENDS The OR clock had shown 01.22 as I'd left my resident to staple the Pt. Then I’d washed and bedded down in the call room planning a few hours sleep before checking on Dulce, my wife, now recovering in the converted Covid Wing. But it wasn’t to be a - “please call me” on the bedside beeper woke me at 03.20. Most people think pagers are caveman technology but at St Mary’s we still like them. I rang Janice. ‘Hi Doc, very sorry to wake you so soon. A gunshot has just been brought in. ...
Oops, you need an account for that!
Log in with your social account:
Or enter your email: