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Sahara Chirino

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2023

Stories (4)

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4 Stories

65 karma pts

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The Rewrite

Submitted to Contest #310

The first time, Eli didn't even notice. He slumped over his shattered desk, his work area cluttered with half-full cups of coffee and rejection letters crumpled along the edges. The cursor on the computer screen was blinking mockingly. For the tenth time that night, he read the sentence through: She found the lost ring buried under the floorboards, where she'd always thought it would be. He sighed. Too tidy. Too step-by-step. But it was 2:47 a.m., and deadlines weren't interested in the quality of literature. He saved it, shut his laptop, an...

5 likes

The Graduation Stage

Submitted to Contest #310

Content warning: This story contains substance abuse and implied suicide.The lights were blinding.From up here, the gym looked like a blur—faces, caps, restless bodies shifting in metal chairs. My palms were slick. The paper in my hands had folded creases, like veins, from how many times I’d rewritten the speech. My knees felt weak under the robe, and I prayed no one could see them shaking.I stepped up to the microphone. It squealed. Someone chuckled nervously, then silence spread like fog. I forced myself to breathe."I just want to say than...

1 like

The Summer The Ocean Forgot Me

Submitted to Contest #308

They say the sea never forgets. But I wonder now, and I sit on the lip of the world with my pen trembling against vellum paper, if it ever has. It was summer 1954. I was ten, nearly eleven, all knobs and knees and terrified of deep water. My parents rented the same salt-bleached cottage every year in Ashwood Bay, a town too small for maps but big enough to have secrets. I remember the heat curling off the sand like specters, the sunburn on my shoulders, and the endless expanse of time that only children possess. That was the summer I knew he...

10 likes

Excerpt from The Weight of Ananke (a book I'm writing)

Submitted to Contest #308

5 Atlas was still on the empty beach, his limbs aching, his flesh salt-burned and battered. The tempest had gone, but had left him shattered in more than one way. His arms and legs pained him, the lead of the sea's wrath still running through his bone. When he was at last capable of standing upright, burning pain stabbed through his ribs, and he doubled over, hissing.The silence that had closed over him was oppressive. No gulls cried overhead, no waves gently lapped at the horizon—only the wind keening over the empty ground, talking to him a...

8 likes