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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2024
Submitted to Contest #316
We all wear a mask.You want to know who doesn’t? Every person of note, the saints and the sinners. That’s who - and that’s all. The rest of us feel the constriction of our disguise, but would rather die than take it off. Paula was a costume designer, a woman in network demand during her purple years. You have to have a feel for humanity, past and present, to set the tone of a piece; to live and breath it. You have to know what a fishwife would have worn in the soot of the 1880s, and what a middle-class mumsey wears now. You’ve got to feel it...
Submitted to Contest #314
In the early ‘50s I went for a walk with my mother. It was heatwave hot, and she wore a pastel blue tea dress. We lived in Vauxhall, and when we took that walk, and for many decades afterwards, the capital was hollowed out by the blitzkrieg. It’s fair to say the Germans made a mess. I remember that her hands were sweaty, and all those cockney sparrows scavenging in the rubble, sweating in their unseasonal winter rags, reminded me what a mummy’s boy I was. I remember trying to slip out of her grasp, but in the end, she just let me go. We were...
Submitted to Contest #313
The curtains were drawn against the mid-June light. The heat it brought to this London afternoon was uncomfortable, within and without. A woman in a nursing uniform sat near the window, knitting a baby’s layette and marking the rows on a cylindrical counter at the end of her needle. The other woman, on the other side of the bed which divided them, was reading a newspaper and tutting at its content. ‘I swear there’s going to be another war,’ she said to the nurse opposite. ‘And then there’s our erstwhile king living abroad with his American w...
Shortlisted for Contest #312 ⭐️
The woman on the bed was yellow, which sat all wrong against the pink sheets. She must look, she thought, like one of those rhubarb and custard sweets they used to sell in mason jars. How many? Six, please! Counting out coins, little paper bags twisted at the corners … Life used to be like that: emphatic. Now everyone was an algorithm. Childhood memories flickered like degraded celluloid. This was her room during her pink phase; pink ponies, pink hair clips, pink shoes if she could get them. Some quirk, when she finally came home, was to as...
Submitted to Contest #311
In the middle of London is a patch of ground which the locals call No Man’s Land. It lies between two fifteen-story residential blocks of graphite grey, and dislocated women often wave to the other dislocated women from across the breach, trying in their best of hearts to ignore the urban desolation that despoils their downward gaze. There is nothing to stop them crossing this land, visiting these other women, and yet there is everything to stop them. Ashantay, sipping her tea, looks down and wonders what it would be like to have a garden. S...
Submitted to Contest #310
Astronomers cannot always predict where a meteor might strike or when the sun will next hiccup a solar flare. An omniscient narrator, however, sees all things. It is simply a matter of focus. And so when a young woman is thrown into the path of C-list fame, we do not need any particular skills to guess where exactly things might land. Bella Noone was an ordinary child by most metrics. She was pretty, and her parents and brother loved and protected her. She went to ballet classes, (with no particular distinction), and that didn’t matter. Her ...
Submitted to Contest #309
The First InterviewI was on a cruise when I found out. On that first night in Juneau, my cleaner sent me a WhatsApp message, telling me that Claudie had ‘crossed over,’ as she put it. Is Alaska an unusual choice? Not for me, dear. I dislike hot countries. They always look unfinished. If I may, might I help myself to my wine and cigarettes? At eighty, I can’t help believing that to give them up now would kill me. Help yourself to the kitchen, and come and go as you please. If you want to leave your equipment here, it will be perfectly safe. I...
Submitted to Contest #308
In the southwestern corner of the country there is a range of limestone hills. In the valley of these hills is a place called Cheddar, which is noted for its gorge, its cheese, its cider and its caverns. It is the place where a fleetingly lost clergyman, caught in a fierce rainstorm, sought shelter in the mouth of a cave. Here, waiting it all out, he wrote the hymn, Abide With Me. There are those who dispute this last fact, but it is just boring enough to be quite true. It is true. City people, just fifteen miles distant, scorn the locals. ...
Submitted to Contest #307
The university had long since spread its tentacles. In every borough of the city, there was a faculty. A faculty for Historical Misinformation, a faculty for pre-2060 Art, (in which it was decided who was in and who was out), a faculty for the Scrutiny of Printed Matter, (in which only their tropes were permitted), and a host of other faculties which expounded, praised, extolled, applauded and worshiped all the nations of the earth except the one it called home. The administrative hub is an imposing Victorian building built by two brothers w...
Submitted to Contest #306
Pork lard: Had to ask the butcher for this. We used to have it all the time when I was a kid; dripping sandwiches with doughy bread gone grey from your mucky hands; power cuts and space hoppers. Getting old now. Paddy hates lard, which is probably why I chose it when butter or oil would have done. Have some of that! Lots of yellow onions: Presumably they mean ordinary onions as opposed to red ones. Must be chopped, which is always a bore, although when you get older they stop making your eyes water. I wonder why that is. Is it just another v...
Submitted to Contest #305
Chuck tugs away on his cigarette, black garters keeping his sleeves in place, looking at the mouse, looking at every flicker of his white, pleated gloves and his pointy button nose. Twenty-four drawings, twenty-four plastic cels, for one second of technicolour psychosis. Half a day for one sucker punch, for one haymaker, the flourishing of a wilting rose for the simpering Minnie. The mouse, the dog, the duck … he hated them all: their whiskers, their beaks, their ratty tails, their goofy teeth, every hammer, every drill and every waterspout....
Submitted to Contest #304
The Comfort Inn, Lexington, NCJuly 2012Sam woke up to stringent light pouring through cheap curtains, and flicked his swollen tongue along the roof of his parched mouth. Too much booze last night, not enough food or water to soak it up.He dressed carefully, almost tenderly, and took himself to the breakfast room where he helped himself to fried chicken, bacon and French toast. It had been great food twenty minutes ago, before it sat under the lights, but now it was just good food. Good food and great coffee.A few diners looked him up and dow...
Shortlisted for Contest #303 ⭐️
I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy. That’s what people say isn’t it? When something bad happens to them; anything from an ingrowing toenail to acute and blazing grief, out comes this line with no adjustment for scale:‘Oooh, I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy …!’Really?You wouldn’t?The Motivation: There are five elements which must combine to exact revenge, whether you are a writer crafting a plot - and good luck with that - or an ordinary person who is compelled by this primitive and unsung urge.Forgiveness is that most Christian of tene...
Submitted to Contest #302
Peggy does not like this man in her kitchen, this totem of the zeitgeist - or as her daughter puts it - the shitegeist. Here is a man who dismisses the great train of history with a vicious contempt, because clearly nothing noteworthy happened before he was born. Her old and brittle bones harbour a resentment so profound that she is reminded of a super-power she wished to own as a child: the ability to kill people on sight.Of course, the only thing Peggy has ever murdered is a good meal. The man in her kitchen carries the vague scent of exot...
Submitted to Contest #301
Oscar and Harry had been friends since their first day at school. Four-year-old Harry was afflicted by runny nostrils which gave him two permanent snot slicks on his upper lip. For some years he bore the nickname ‘Eleven.’ Oscar turned up clinging to his mother’s skirts and wearing a full-face helmet, an unaccountable disguise which went on for the entire first term. When he returned after the autumn break, no one knew who he was.And so it came about that Eleven and Evel Knievel formed their unbreakable bond.Well, the years turn. Nowadays, a...
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