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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2021
Submitted to Contest #92
At the top of a hill, reachable only after a slow, bumpy drive through dense and shadowy woods, sat a house. A grand one. Well, once. Built in the 1870s by a wealthy landowner, the house was designed in the popular Queen Anne Revival style, with warm red brickwork and an asymmetrical front. It had a wide porch and corner tower which was throttled with ivy by the time the young man and his pregnant wife bought the place, 140 years after the last brick was laid. A strange and oddly beautiful place, it had struggled to attract owners for years ...
Submitted to Contest #91
I was one of the first to move in when the old school was converted into flats. I happened to know the foreman of the site, and he showed me around the place when it was half done. I’ve seen photos of it from way back when. When it still smelled of books and pubescent sweat and academic nerves. When it was full of people, real and imagined.In the photos the double height ceilings soar, flying far above the photographer’s head on the wings of thousands of books, which stack floor to ceiling, metres and metres of dark leather spines containing...
Submitted to Contest #90
He was born of the earth millennia ago, and in the beginning he had brothers and sisters around him who kept him sheltered and safe. His fingers crept through the soil, clinging to it; pushing aside rocks and boulders and searching for water to make him strong. Time meant little to him as he grew; there was only he and his kind, and days and nights told him nothing yet of the habits of mankind. Deep into the earth he mined, those fingers becoming arms and legs which twisted around his fellows in an underground orgy of limbs exploring the ric...
Submitted to Contest #89
November 3rd, 1939Ruby Dove Found Dead by Hotel StaffRuby Dove, 26, was discovered dead in her room at the Beverly Hills Hotel of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills late Wednesday night. The striking redhead was found in her bed by hotel staff at 9pm. She had been dead an estimated six hours. Her body was taken to County Morgue, where Coroner Bertrand Humphrey said after an autopsy he could give a “presumptive opinion” that death was due to a drug overdose. Several empty Veronal bottles were found amongst her possessions, with presc...
Submitted to Contest #88
Once upon a time, on a still night where the stars shone like diamonds in the endless velvet black and the moon was a dollop of cream in the middle of the sky, there danced upon a stony Scottish beach a family of Selkies, strange and lithe, with pale skin and large, shining eyes. They loved this quiet, wild place, with its treeless expanse of low grassland and the way the ocean wind swept over everything from one end of the island to the other. The ocean was their home, but Orkney was a holiday, a midnight adventure. They luxuriated in each ...
Submitted to Contest #87
You weren’t invited to the wedding, and you love weddings. There’s nothing quite like the pressure and fear and (if you’re lucky) elation that comes with good old fashioned nuptials for inciting a little mayhem. Zeus had seen Thetis bathing in the water below Mount Olympus with her sisters the Nereids; sea nymphs, shapeshifters, all of them beautiful and kind, with voices so sweet and melodious, it was said to hear them sing in harmony would cause anyone to lose their senses and begin weeping with the sheer emotion of their refrain...
Submitted to Contest #85
The sun was setting, and the great Victorian glass roof over Glasgow Central station was glowing; washing the marble floors with gold and pink and casting a luminous, dancing light on the station clock, under which a nervous young man stood, fiddling with his pocket square and trying very hard indeed not to touch his painstakingly coiffed duck’s arse hairdo. “That’s the train fae Ayr in, Tam,” said a friend, elbowing him in the ribs for good measure. “This Mary better no be the ugly pal.”“I’m sure she’s gorgeous Billy,” Tam muttered. “S...
Submitted to Contest #84
It was a cavernous room, three storeys high with a soaring, skylit ceiling and hundreds of ornately framed paintings crowding the walls. The house had been built in 1899, with this room a conscious echo of the illustrious Mrs Astor’s ballroom, though considerably smaller. While the old Astor mansion had been torn down in 1926, the Carroll House, a few blocks North, remained sentinel on 5th Avenue, guarding the old ways from the crop of luxury apartment buildings springing up around it; scarcely filling the foundations of the gilded age mansi...
Shortlisted for Contest #83 ⭐️
There was hardly a breath of wind on the beach, and the trees stood still and silent, knowing, as trees do, that something was coming. They’d guarded this shore long enough to know, and the older trees, the ones with centuries of sentry duty, hushed the young ones, the saplings, who wanted to whip their young limbs around, and dance under the stars. The ocean hushed them all in its own, inimitable way - the relentless melancholy of it was reassuring, heaving sigh after sigh as it fell upon the shore and dragged itself back to the depths agai...
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