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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2024
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...
Submitted to Contest #300
The laws of physics dictate that the length of a river can only be ten times its width before it is forced to meander. If it does not do this, it is evidence of human interference.Not all rivers reach the sea. There are some which die of fetid boredom long before they mingle with the salt. The river she walks along now is one such failure, a pathologically idle flow which has written its destiny as a puddle some five miles distant. She cannot stomach this lack of purpose, this dwindling of responsibility. She is looking for her place, and it...
Submitted to Contest #299
They say that if a man has not succeeded by thirty, then he has failed - and if any proof of that were needed, ask Dixon. At fifty, Dixon worked part-time in a shoe shop in the centre of a dying city where department store doorways gave way to a global parade of beggars and addicts, shooting up and spitting out. He found the only way to deal with this unsatisfactory life was to laugh at it; not as an act of futile submission but as a nod to courageous defiance.Ten years earlier, his talents had led him to the foothills of corporate greatness...
Submitted to Contest #298
I didn’t consider spring when I planted my garden. In September it is glorious, but in the early months it is nothing but lawn, daisies and dandelions. I liken the latter to teenage spots: their arrival announcing a growth spurt.My neighbour has a magnolia tree, which drapes into mine and drops its petals like lavish confetti. His name is Terence. Can you believe it? Terence! And he insists on its full form and won’t answer to Terry. God knows, he’s made it clear enough that he won’t. I never gave him a sidewards glance when my husband was h...
Submitted to Contest #297
8am, 17th May 1536The queen’s view was obstructed on all sides by the curtain walls of the White Tower. On the day they executed her brother, she could only hear the teeming crowds, and snippets of speeches, nobly delivered, from the black scaffold.To distract, Mary Z had suggested a game of piquet, a card game for two, which, although popular in France, was little known to England. But the queen’s first card had been the Queen of Swords, and although it hardly served as a prophesy, the game was abandoned without words.‘How long have we been...
Shortlisted for Contest #296 ⭐️
CW: As you might expect in a room full of maladroits, there is a lot of swearing in this piece. I ought to apologise, but I won't. In the lofty interior of a methodist chapel, (it doesn’t matter where), a woman called Simone lays out cheap bottles of wine and various cans of cider and lager on a trestle table, which has glittered blobs of dried glue and scratched graffiti on its surface. The booze is paid for by the weekly subs of the Maladroits Anonymous group. The chapel plays host to many diverse assemblies, and this is but one of them. ...
Submitted to Contest #295
That Was ThenIt is hard to think what the consequences might be if word got out that the Witch-finder General did not believe in witches. Miriam Lyons, who had begged to have her skirts bound at her ankles to stop the shit from escaping, was a bad bitch, but no conjuror of spells. They ask, always, why he doesn’t burn them as they do in the kingdoms and palatinates of Europe. Blessed always quips that firewood is expensive and that hanging is cheaper. If they want a spectacle, he is obliged to disappoint. There has never been a sin...
Submitted to Contest #294
If Birdie Lomax had paid any heed to her appearance, she would, in the music hall vernacular, scrub up well. But she’s tossing chicken scratch in the air, and the light of dawn is at the cruel end of the spectrum. Her hair, still more brown than grey, escapes a poorly-drawn knot at the back and flies in all manner of directions, as if in a mood to fall out with its neighbours. The farmhouse behind her is long and low, full of rooms she never looks in or clears out. Beneath these timbered beams lie cricket bats and exercise books, beds s...
Submitted to Contest #293
A man died on the train today. I have never wanted to see a dead body, or to ease the passing of someone so close to the angels. I know how to do CPR, but I am wary of performing such an intimate and selfless act in the service of another.He was in the opposite aisle, one seat down and facing me. These are the people you study the most on a train, because to observe someone directly opposite you is so boldly confrontational. I have seen him before because we both favour the same carriage, although it’s ridiculous, because they’re all alike.I...
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