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RZ Arzy

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2025

Stories (5)

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5 Stories

84 karma pts

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Everywhere I Almost Turned Back

RZ Arzy

Submitted to Contest #305

At the intersection, I could go right and head home. The route is known, paved not just in asphalt but in the dull certainty of repetition. The kind of road where even the squirrels seem to hesitate.Lately, certainty had started to feel like a trap.But turning left would take me—well, the map doesn’t say anymore. It did a minute ago. Now it’s blinking, confused, like it just woke up from a bad dream. The screen stutters. "Recalculating," it offers, and again, "recalculating," trying to maintain dignity.Left isn’t a route. It’s a dare. A shru...

3 likes

The Moon Only Works at Night

RZ Arzy

Submitted to Contest #304

No one really remembers when the Moon quit her day job. Some say she ran a call center in Jersey. Others swear she briefly held office in a district where everyone voted by sighing into jars. Either way, she vanished from daylight entirely the day her light grew too subjective to schedule, turning every spreadsheet into a lament and every phone call into an unheard whisper. She just—left.Now she lives in a shuttered observatory at the edge of a quiet town that seems to shift slightly with the seasons. Her desk is a petrified stump. Her chair...

3 likes

The Machine That Remembered Her

RZ Arzy

Submitted to Contest #303

They lifted it from the trench at 9,000 meters, where pressure folds time and light.No metal should have survived intact.No geometry should have arranged itself like that.They called it ME-4, logged it as a non-responsive mechanism of indeterminate origin, and summoned experts.Charles Babbage, architect of the not-yet engine.Ada Lovelace, his not-quite disciple.Together, they were the closest thing to understanding the impossible. Or they liked to think so. One time, after hours of decoding what they believed was a message from another world...

8 likes

Misdelivery for the Ministry of Letting Go

RZ Arzy

Submitted to Contest #302

Form 12-A: Retroactive Release AuthorizationTo the Esteemed Recipient,Please accept this notice as formal acknowledgment of unprocessed grief, interrupted rituals, and any unfinished narratives accrued during the fiscal quarter. While your submission was originally addressed to the Department of Closure, it has been redirected to the Ministry of Letting Go.Per Regulation 4.3.1, your sorrow qualifies for conditional lightening. Please consider it reduced by one ounce (or two tablespoons, if metric comfort is preferred). Further remission may ...

10 likes

Your Emotional Audit is Ready

RZ Arzy

Submitted to Contest #301

I signed up for the Efficiency Integration Initiative on a Wednesday, because that’s when I usually deal with paperwork. My supervisor had casually mentioned that "streamlined minds are promotable minds," and I’d recently forgotten both a password and my niece’s birthday in the same hour. It felt like time to optimize.Before the system, my life had what I privately called a “soft schedule.” I woke up when the sun struck my curtain just wrong. Lunch happened when the kitchen felt restless. I tracked time by the mood of the refrigerator. I was...

6 likes