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Rebecca Hurst

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2024

Stories (43)
Comments
Library
124 Followers
88 Following

43 Stories

1928 karma pts

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Shame

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...

21 likes 11 comments 11
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Don't

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...

27 likes 8 comments 8
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Between The Sheets

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...

24 likes 13 comments 13
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Loving Concentration

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 ...

15 likes 11 comments 11
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Limestone Peter

Submitted to Contest #269

On the western elevation of a great diocesan cathedral, a handsome lad called Peter thrusts his lithe young body out from the perpendicular and surveys the ground below. He has done this for eight hundred years, and in all that time, his blank limestone gaze has taken in the changing habits and the vicissitudes of those who have strolled beneath him. If he could speak words that flesh-and-bone men could hear, he would, above all else, tell them that people never seem to change, but for the clothes they wear and the toys they play w...

7 likes 2 comments 2
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The Interpretation of Dreams

Submitted to Contest #268

Dr Selznick asked the lady opposite whether she would prefer to kick off her shoes and lie on the couch. The lady opposite knows she has holes in her socks so declines. The walls are painted a sumptuous shade of eau-de-nil and she notices that all the leaves on his cheese plant are serrated, unlike hers. She approves of his style. It is old-school and unpretentious, and he writes with a fountain pen. This object, once so commonplace, fills her head with a plangent nostalgia. ‘So, Emily Davison. Why is that name ...

16 likes 19 comments 19
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The Beheading of Sarah Churchill

Submitted to Contest #267

Victor Churchill turned off his 600W, 1700 RPM hedge trimmer and stared, open-mouthed, at his wife’s headless body lying on the lawn. The tray, which had slipped from her hands at the moment of decapitation, lay right-side-up, and although the tea was all spilt, the biscuits, sitting in a little pile on a bone china saucer, were perkily undisturbed. The silence was profound. Even the birds had stopped singing. As his senses adjusted to the reality of the moment, he heard the splashing of the ornamental fountain in the fis...

12 likes 7 comments 7
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The Halls of Meh

Submitted to Contest #266

Every profession has its own Valhalla. The cops and the firefighters have clubbable halls, where there is much back-slapping and drinking. A lot of reminiscing. Eventually, these people will fade into oblivion, but their full stop is gentle. It’s pleasing. There is no heaven or hell, but purgatory is cosmically vast. The rules, however, are earth-bound in their petty-mindedness. Supermarket workers have an enormous, well-stocked hypermarket where they enjoy a permanent tea break. Lawyers engage in endl...

9 likes 8 comments 8
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The Church With No Name

Submitted to Contest #265

This story contains non-descriptive references to child abuse Alys Morgan was always a Pembrokeshire girl. She was born with her face to the Irish Sea. Poppit Beach was her playground when she was allowed to play. The nearby town of Aberystwyth was always out of bounds, and so she found shells and wore bracelets of kelp when other children were licking ice-creams and playing the arcades in flip-flops and shorts.  She had a brother, but he left when he was fifteen. His last words to her were ‘This is shit, Alys.&nbsp...

9 likes 4 comments 4
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The Gamophobe Blues

Submitted to Contest #264

There are three very specific things I hate: Cologne Cathedral, bananas and weddings. Unlike pollen, it is possible to avoid these things, but weddings are the hardest. No one would be too offended if you said you hated a German cathedral or a yellow fruit, but you try telling someone who has invited you to their wedding that you would rather eat a toenail sandwich, and you get a different reaction. I’ve been lucky. The year of my birth must have coincided with a rogue spore in the native soil which left most of my p...

15 likes 9 comments 9
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The Napoleon of Crime

Submitted to Contest #263

Sing Sing, New York: Thursday April 23 1914 ‘Professor Moriarty, thank you for agreeing to see me today. My name is Ted Pilsworth from the New York Tribune.’‘Time is of the essence. Tomorrow will be too late’ said Moriarty. Pilsworth took a hard seat in the Death Room of Sing Sing, swiped the pencil from behind his ear and opened his notebook to the first page. Moriarty was gratified to note that a new book had been procured especially for him. This was quite the assignment, he thought.  Pilsworth must be go...

10 likes 10 comments 10
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The Private Hotel

Submitted to Contest #262

On a high sedimentary cliff overlooking a small fishing town in north Devon, England, there stood a rather unique hotel. It was built in the 1880s, which made it something of a parvenue in comparison to its shoreline neighbours, some of which could remember, within their walls, witches dragged from their rooms, the hooves of Cromwell’s horses, and various and sundry drumbeats of early-modern history. The town church, and several buildings adjoining it, had been around since the Second Crusade. The town pub was built in the rei...

9 likes 14 comments 14
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The Regenhardt Dilemma

Shortlisted for Contest #261 ⭐️

Nelly Regenhardt had been writing to prisoner B6732FH for nine hard years and had never received a reply. But she had seen The Shawshank Redemption, and came to understand that in the matter of correspondence, persistence always won the game. And win the game it did. Ten years after her husband had been shot in the head by the very man she had been writing to, she received a standard reply: Prisoner B6732FH will see you on (appointed date and time), at a venue very much decided upon: HMP Wingfield: Category A. But le...

39 likes 32 comments 32
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