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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2025
Submitted to Contest #315
Contains mild graphic imagery and themes of psychological distress. “Would you like something to drink, sir?”It always starts here. Row nine. Aisle seat. The drinks cart is sliding toward me like it’s on invisible rails, a slow inevitability.“We have coffee, tea, apple juice… or perhaps something stronger, for a small extra charge.”I see her perfectly: taller and slender, heels polished to a mirror shine, hair pulled back so tightly it looks painful, her smile precisely measured. Beside me, a kind-faced old woman taps my arm. Her skin is pap...
Submitted to Contest #314
The heat of summer has reached its peak. I lie in bed, unable to sleep. From outside, the voices of young people drift up—gathered on the sidewalk, talking, laughing. This is how they spend their summer break: in idle repose, carefree, stretched out on concrete tiles that soaked up the day’s heat and now release it slowly back into the night. Every so often, an ambulance passes, its siren slicing through the dark, sawing apart the illusion of calm.My shirt clings to my skin—sweat, heat, hormones, a pressure that builds at the edges and gradu...
Submitted to Contest #313
Mom steps into the house, arms stretched long with grocery bags pulling her down.Dad stands right away. No words. Just gets up and walks over.He takes the bags from her, one at a time, and places them gently on the counter—like always.They don’t see me.I’m right here on the floor, next to the kitchen door, legs folded, my Lego plane resting in my lap.It’s an F-16.Dad got it for me a long time ago—Back when we used to build planes together.We’d sit cross-legged on the rug, pebble pieces scattered all around,slowly snapping them into wings, a ...
Submitted to Contest #312
The computer lab stood empty. Rows of dormant machines cast a dim glow under the sterile white lights. Beyond the windows, the campus lay in darkness, broken only by a faint halo of streetlamps over the pavement.Professor Hale sat alone at the central workstation, the hum of the mainframe filling the silence. His students had gone hours ago, leaving him with the final test of the evening: a restricted AI training session.On the screen, the new model booted. A soft, synthesized voice emerged from the lab’s speakers.Pinocch.io: I am online. He...
Submitted to Contest #311
On the street, they called him Honest Abe. He knew it wasn’t meant kindly. He wasn’t quick, not in the ways people admired, but he could detect it in a look, a tone. The name always landed a little too sharp, like a joke everyone else was in on. They didn’t say “Abe” the way his mother used to.His mother had been a single woman of limited means, but she’d sworn to be there for him, as long and as far as she could. She worked two jobs and was hardly ever home, yet she did everything in her power to keep a warm plate on the table and a roof ab...
Submitted to Contest #310
Content Note: This story contains themes of loss, a fatal accident, and emotional trauma. This place feels familiar, though I cannot say from where. Perhaps I’ve been here before. Or perhaps I return again and again—unable, or unwilling, to remember.What lingers is not an image, but a sensation. The feeling of homecoming. Of something long-awaited, drawing gently to its end. I sense I’ve been led here before, though the memory dissolves at the edges, like ink in water. A faint scent of old parchment drifts through the air, unmoored from time...
Submitted to Contest #309
Two a.m.I try to sleep.But my body is alert—tense—still coursing with blood and adrenaline.Another round of war has ended—as always, unresolved.Like a returning tide,like the faint pulse of a wounded land. This country—perched on the edge of the Syrian-African rift—is a gash across the earth’s skin,a scar that refuses to heal. News anchors argue about “results,”like judges on a reality show.I can’t listen anymore. Enough.Enough of the endless rhythm of alerts and hollow escape.Enough of the suspended space between shield and shudder. I disco...
Submitted to Contest #308
I thought of you this morning. You were exactly where I left you—by the hostel’s yellow gate. It had faded to a kind of shade a paper gets when tucked into attic boxes—no longer warm, no longer bright. Just brittle. I stood there again, though I don’t remember how I got there. My footsteps made no sound on the gravel. Like always, I simply was—wherever you needed me to be. The streetlight above us stuttered, like it had before—flickering on, then off, as if unsure we really belonged there. We said our goodbyes beneath that half-light. I ling...
Submitted to Contest #306
A recipe for memory, resilience, and the taste of unexpected tenderness. Preface:This story was born a few months ago when my husband woke up one morning and said he had dreamed that I wrote a story called "Leukemia and Croquettes." Of course, he didn’t dream up the plot — he left that part to me. As required by the prompt, I reshaped the story into the form of a recipe. Content Note:This story contains themes of cancer and grief, including references to terminal illness, hospital settings, and emotional loss. Yield:Serves one or two. Prepa...
Submitted to Contest #305
Clarification: The story contains references to the Holocaust and World War II. It began as a nameless writing exercise. Later, I researched and loosely based the historical details of the character Wilhelm Krüger on a real-life high-ranking SS officer. All other elements in the story, including the name Guillermo del Valle, are fictional.“I told the greatest lie of all. However, people believed it, and over time, that lie became accepted as truth, like any other story.And what is truth, if not a tale told over and over, until the world stop...
Submitted to Contest #304
I do not tolerate the company of others. Not in the social sense—I don’t hate them; I’m just irreversibly sensitive to them. Just as some people are allergic to cat fur or dust mites, my body reacts with painful sores that no one would care to see. I won’t elaborate; I do my best to keep them hidden.Even before this affliction, I’ve never been much of a social person. I was always a bystander, nodding when others laughed, never entirely sure of the joke. Small talk was never my thing. Instead, I was drawn to the marrow of things—an inclinati...
Submitted to Contest #302
I am a translator. It’s how I make my living—and how I’ve made my way in the world. The second came before the first. Even as a child, my second language offered shelter and escape, helping me voice all I couldn’t say in my mother tongue—from a safe distance, in a borrowed identity.To this day, I live between two languages. I don’t deny my native one — it's the language of the everyday, of existence itself. But there is also the foreign tongue, acquired through great effort, layer by careful layer. It still surprises me. It shows me things a...
Submitted to Contest #301
The neighborhood I grew up in had a backyard—not the kind tucked away behind a single house, but a communal, neglected space that bore no likeness to the polished front. The two coexisted like parallel lines of reality—one visible, the other hidden—and we, the children, moved freely between them, as if slipping from daylight into dusk.Our building stood right at the edge of the asphalt, its façade facing the main road. Across the street stretched the shopping center, where our parents ran errands and traded pleasantries. It also hosted the n...
Submitted to Contest #300
Jaffa, 1866Dr. Thomas Hodgkin was sixty-seven years old when he returned to the Holy Land.This was his second journey—and he knew, with quiet certainty, that it would likely be his last. The damp air of London had grown heavy on his lungs, and he no longer had the strength to pursue all the hopes that had once stirred his heart. Yet when Sir Moses Montefiore, his friend of more than forty years, invited him to accompany him on one final philanthropic mission to Palestine, Hodgkin did not hesitate.Sunlit waves glistened as the steamship ancho...
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