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Rebecca Lewis

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2023

Stories (255)

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15 Followers

14 Following

255 Stories

362 karma pts

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When the Light Turns Green

The light turned green.Aaron didn't move.Horns barked behind him, angry and immediate. He sat still, one hand on the steering wheel, the other hovering over the gearshift. The engine hummed, a low, patient growl under the hood, waiting on him. The green light glared overhead, a judgmental eye in the rain.His phone buzzed in the passenger seat. Again.He didn’t look at it.Instead, he looked ahead. Across the intersection, on the sidewalk, a woman in a red coat stood beneath a dripping awning. She was staring back at him. Not at him, exactly — ...

1 like

In the Second Before

Rain hit the windshield like shrapnel. Colin leaned forward, squinting past the wipers as they scraped back and forth, useless against the downpour. The highway stretched ahead, blurry and gray, headlights from oncoming traffic flaring like exploding stars.He shouldn't have taken the late shift. He knew that. But Barbara had her recital in the morning, and she’d asked — begged — him to be there. So he’d worked the graveyard shift at the hospital and left the moment his replacement clocked in.Two hours to go. Just two more hours and he'd be h...

1 like

When the Night Doesn't End

The Hour Before Light The diner sat on the edge of Highway 41 like it had nowhere else to be. It was the kind of place that didn’t need a name, just a flickering neon sign that read “Open 24 Hours” even when it wasn’t. At 4:37 AM, it was technically open, but only barely.Inside, the air smelled like burnt coffee and something fried a long time ago. The jukebox was unplugged. A single waitress named Lani leaned against the counter, flipping through a People magazine from last year.The door jingled.A man walked in, soaked to the bone. He ha...

1 like

The Hour Without Sound

3:17 AM It was 3:17 AM when Heather Murphy woke up, not from a nightmare, but from silence.Too much silence.The kind that rings in your ears and makes your heart beat louder, just to break it.She sat up in bed, blinking in the dark. Her phone screen said 3:17 AM in bold white numbers. Notifications- none. Signal- full. Wi-Fi- off. That was weird. Her Wi-Fi never went off. Ever.Her apartment on the sixth floor was usually hum of distant traffic, muffled neighbors, and the occasional bark from the labradoodle two doors down. But now, nothin...

1 like

The Thing We Buried

Nick Gonzales wasn’t a man people noticed. Forty-five, balding, khakis always a size too big, and the type to nod instead of speak. He taught high school biology in a quiet town that didn’t change much and didn’t want to. He lived alone on Linden Street in a house with yellow paint that was starting to peel, and a lawn that stayed just neat enough to avoid neighborly judgment.To most people, Nick was forgettable. That’s how he wanted it.Because Nick Gonzales had a secret.Not the kind that could be brushed off, like cheating on taxes or lying...

1 like

The Waking Hive

The Silence Below The last time the radio crackled was sixteen hours ago. Now it's just the sound of her breath and the ocean above her.Aimee adjusted the straps on her deep-sea diving rig and glanced at the pressure gauge again. Still holding. Barely. She tapped it, not because that would help, but because it felt like something she could control.Thirty meters below the surface, inside the cramped remains of the K-49 substation, oxygen was thinning, lights flickered, and she was alone.Correction- she hoped she was alone.The K-49 had been...

1 like

Unspoken Rules

Fine Print TJ Evarts was a data analyst by trade and a truth-teller by instinct. He read every user agreement. He corrected street signs when the punctuation was off. When he was eight, he told his friend’s mom that her spaghetti was “undercooked and gummy,” and he hadn’t understood why his friend never invited him over again.At thirty-two, TJ lived alone in a clean, white apartment. He wore the same five button-down shirts in rotation and had an Excel sheet that tracked their wash cycles. He liked predictability. Rules. Clarity.What he ...

2 likes

What Remains in the Fire

Ashes to Ashes The forge was dying.It hadn't been obvious at first — just a crack in the chimney, soot collecting faster than usual, the old bellows taking more effort to squeeze. But Chris knew how things ended. He’d spent his life making things from fire and iron. Everything breaks, given enough time and heat.Still, he didn’t think she would break.The forge wasn’t just a workshop. It was her. Her voice in the hiss of quenched metal. Her breath in the smoke. Her strength in the anvil’s song.He sat on the stone bench outside the forge, th...

1 like

A Life for a Life

Steve Sashen sat in the back of his car outside the downtown bank, hands tight on the wheel, eyes locked on the front door. From this angle, the building looked harmless — glass and steel like everything else. It could’ve been an office or a cafe. But inside, four men in ski masks were making the same mistake he had warned them not to make.It wasn’t supposed to go like this.He had mapped it out clean. Quick in, quick out. No one gets hurt. No cowboy moves. And under no circumstances do you touch the manager.Steve checked the time — 2:38 p.m....

2 likes

The Other One Forgets

Every morning, David Jackson woke up wondering which parts of his life were real. The bed was always the same — creased grey sheets, the faint hum of a dying refrigerator beyond his cracked bedroom door, the smell of damp wood and expired milk. But sometimes, he would wake up in a desert. Or a glass house. Or once, underwater, breathing fine as if he'd grown gills.At first, he thought it was just vivid dreaming. He kept a journal beside his bed, a blue Moleskine he filled with shaky handwriting before the images faded. Then came the bleed-th...

2 likes

Third Row, Seat 12

It started with a missed train. Doug wasn’t supposed to be in Chicago. He had a job interview in Minneapolis. He had planned it all- fly in, stay with his cousin, interview at 10 a.m., fly back out by dinner. But a late alarm, an Uber cancellation, and a security line from hell turned the whole thing upside down. He missed his flight, then scrambled to book a train to get at least close to Minnesota. That landed him in Chicago overnight, stuck and irritated, with a carry-on bag, no hotel, and no clue. At 3 p.m., he wandered into Union Stat...

4 likes

Scent of Death

The stench hit Detective Scott Martin the moment he crossed the threshold of the small apartment. It wasn’t just decay. It was something worse — a blend of rot, sweat, and something sickly sweet that clung to the walls. “Christ,” his partner, Detective Juliet Boydstun, muttered, pulling her scarf over her nose. “How long has he been in here?” The coroner, a squat man with a permanent grimace, glanced up from where he knelt beside the body. “Judging by the decomposition? At least a week. Probably more.” Scott scanned the room. The victi...

4 likes

The Last Train Out Part 1

The train pulled into the station, its brakes hissing as it came to a slow, final stop.Robert stepped off, adjusting the strap of his worn leather bag. The air smelled of rain-soaked concrete and cold iron, and the platform stretched before him in dim yellow light. This place was smaller than he’d remembered. Or maybe he was just larger now, weighed down by years of absence. He had told himself he wouldn’t come back. That was ten years ago, and yet here he was, standing in the place he had fled from at eighteen. It wasn’t nostalgia that br...

3 likes

Strangers in 14A and 14B

David checked his boarding pass again — seat 14A, window. He slung his bag into the overhead bin and slid into his seat, fastening his belt out of habit. The cabin buzzed with the usual pre-flight chaos — families settling in, flight attendants directing traffic, the distant hum of the engines waiting to roar to life. The seat next to him remained empty. Good. A quiet flight. David exhaled, shifting in his seat. He wasn’t unfriendly, exactly. Just… uninterested. Flights were a time to unplug, to exist in the nowhere between departure and...

3 likes

The Self She Left Behind

The moment the subway doors slid shut, Ginelle felt it. That cold, sickening certainty that something was missing. She reached into her coat pockets — phone, keys, wallet. Good. But her hands kept moving, searching. Her pulse ticked up. She checked her tote bag — book, notebook, water bottle, makeup pouch. All there. And yet, something wasn’t. The train lurched forward, pulling her deeper into the city’s underground veins, away from whatever she had left behind. The sensation gnawed at her, clawing its way up from her gut to the base...

4 likes