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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2024
Submitted to Contest #286
From my spare room window, I can see Helen in the garden next door. She has her back to me, her feet planted wide apart with ham hock hands on beefy hips. She’s finally got round to dragging the Christmas tree outside, which she’s hauled on top of the brown bones of its predecessors. She’s breathless now, gulping in the still, cold air. Her sixth sense must feel my eyes on her, so she turns and waves. My friend, Helen, the ugliest woman in town. Helen of Troy’s beauty was such that it provoked men to war. Her namesake, the Helen in the ...
Submitted to Contest #285
I remember sitting in an office in 2003, surrounded by colleagues, when a tune came unbidden into my head. I don’t know why I love you but I do … We weren’t hooked up to the internet then. In fact, we were still getting our wages in cash, delicious brown envelopes delivered to our desks each Thursday afternoon.I asked around the office: ‘Who sang that song?’ - and although everyone knew it, no one could name the performer. I went to the pub after work, asked around there, and it was the same story. A familiar tune, but no clue.A couple of da...
Submitted to Contest #284
In the bible, angels don’t have wings. In fact, the moral imperative is that we should never know they are amongst us. The presence of wings would change behaviour, much like a grovelling employee before a CEO, or a plain girl who seeks the protection and the validation of the beautiful. An angel is in all things anonymous, and you will be judged in accordance with their opinion of you, and never the other way round. Of course, I am being allegorical, but isn’t that just what life is?*****Let me tell you about my mother-in-law, my ...
Submitted to Contest #281
The tall man spent some time scanning the list of names on the white marble tablet, ignoring the usual spiel at the top of the pediment. A list of thirty two men of the parish. Men of Piccadilly. He heard the footsteps, the deferent, diffident tread of a clergyman, impossible to ignore in the empty sepulchral space. ‘In from the cold?’ a voice enquired. ‘In all ways,’ said the tall man. He turned to face the fleshy vicar, and knew at once that he had been a padre in another life. The extensive decorations, the comforting smell of s...
Submitted to Contest #280
After you.Thanks. Where are you going?The ground floor. I always end up on the ground floor, like Jacob’s Ladder in reverse. I do wish they’d fire me at the beginning of the day instead of the end. That sucks. What did you do?Nothing at all, really. Rolling my eyes is what they said. For the last three years, I haven’t managed to get through my probationary period. That must make life precarious. What about a job in a call centre? They won't see your rolling eyes.Oh, but they will. It’s not the customers I have a problem with....
Submitted to Contest #279
This absurd tale draws heavily on the marvellous Hector Hugh Munro and his short story, The Disappearance of Crispina Umberleigh. Only the ending is significantly different, and it made me realise, when developing my own, just how difficult it must have been for him to write himself out of the wonderful hole he had dug!*****Twenty years ago, the wife of the Member for Cromer Heath went missing. One moment, she had been haranguing a shopkeeper in the market town where she lived with her husband and children, and the next she was gone. In...
Submitted to Contest #278
November 2008: Patti took a phone call from the care home at 11.42am on a windy day which blew the remaining leaves from their summer host. By the end of that day, Patti was at one with the leaves - because all she had ever known was blown away too. The manager collared her as she walked in, immediately irritated by the intense, stewing heat within the building. She could already feel beads of sweat on her upper lip. “I didn’t know your mother could speak German,” he said as an opener. “Nor did I,” she replied. She knew she sh...
Submitted to Contest #277
It is a curious aspect of the human mind that what it chooses to remember is neither logical nor linear. This is especially true of childhood, where entire years of nursery and school are lost without trace, and our parents’ hard work, (if indeed they did work hard), is entirely forgotten, leaving only tableaus. When we scream at them as teenagers, we are working on poorly defined resentments. But Emma does have a memory, now two decades old, of her Aunt Fay: her father’s sister, childless, but so much more maternal than her o...
Submitted to Contest #276
There is a woman in my village called Moira who pulls a little dog around on a lead. The dog is joyous. Moira is not. Nothing pleases her and so, over the years, I have adopted a bonhomie which I know she finds irritating. She has three grown-up children, none of whom speak to her. This does not surprise me, because Moira is inherently sour, and she often asks me pointedly how my son is doing. She has never met him, but I once told her that he occasionally smoked weed and in her mind, this makes me a bad mother. My son speaks to me thou...
Submitted to Contest #275
When Robert Marten saw the woman with the calf-skin box, he signalled for an assistant to take the counter as he extended a hand in greeting. She, surprised by this welcome, extended her own. “I recognise the case,” he said, by way of explanation. “It is the Attaway pendant, no?”“I believe that’s what it’s called,” she said, biting her lower lip. Robert led her into his office and offered her tea, coffee or something stronger. She chose the latter, so he poured a single malt. He noticed her hands were shaking when she took the glas...
Submitted to Contest #274
Several billion years ago, the water molecules gathered on the moor began to develop a more collegiate nature. For some, it was enough to sink into the land, but those in greater need of fellowship began to group together, and across a span of time immeasurable, their company formed a trickle. And long before the creatures came, the trickle became a stream, fed by other courses which had formed elsewhere. And as the moor met the end of the world, with the raging sea below, the molecules began to cut through the land until it created a chine,...
Submitted to Contest #273
This story is based on recent, documented historical fact which some readers might find upsetting. Will is keeping his distance from an older woman who’s walking along Bishop Street, using shop fronts to keep from the rain where she can. A cathedral looms in the foreground, a mid-Victorian structure which lacks the grace of earlier temples by simply trying too hard. Everything is damp, grey, driving monochrome. He had been hoping to catch up with her when she left her home, but the flat Georgian frontage in a terraced, pastel street, of...
Submitted to Contest #272
In the mid-seventies, a group of young teenagers went out on All Hallows Eve with the intent to frighten another member of their peer group. Their scratched-together costumes would not have frightened her, but the fishing rod scraping at her bedroom window did. So much so, in fact, she suffered a psychotic break so severe that she was institutionalised. She has been institutionalised ever since. *****Transcript of a conversation between Dr Alex Lee [AL] and Dr Sarah Lipscombe [SL] in the High Tor Restaurant, Castleton. [All small t...
Submitted to Contest #271
In a road parallel to the seafront, there is a jewel of a shop for those of a mind to find it. The frontage is painted royal blue, and the lettering above the shop is rendered in gold gothic script. It has two Georgian bay windows, and the glass betrays its liquid nature by bulging slightly beneath the bullseyes. No one would look twice if Charles Dickens were to tinkle the bell above the door. It is called The Underground Library, which is intriguing and provoking in equal measure, for it sells books from the past which do no...
Submitted to Contest #270
Julia Child gets her knickers in a twist about the difference between sautés, stews and fricassées. I myself, who cannot claim to be anything more than a competent cook, shall defer to the mistress of French cuisine. After all, a misplaced apostrophe provokes my conniptions, and she is entitled to feel the same about fricassée. But I must use frying chicken. p.271 is a little greasy after all these years, but I know she is Goldilocks-ey about this. The flesh of a young chicken is too soft and tender, so it dries out ...
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