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Sjan Evardsson

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2019

Stories (266)

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301 Followers

9 Following

266 Stories

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Day Labor

Adrian poured the clear liquid over the ice in the shallow glass, watching it turn white in swirls and eddies. He turned off the lights and carried the glowing glass to the mirror. Rather than the mysterious, cool image he was hoping for, the sickly blue glow left him looking pallid and cadaverous. With the overhead lights back on and the black light off, the liquid had the appearance of skim milk over ice. Adrian checked his appearance in the mirror. Even dressed as he was in his best, he knew he wouldn’t fit in. The word ‘poor’ might as we...

3 likes

What I Left Behind

The bed I lay on was comfortable enough, but not plush. The walls were a pale blue with no windows. An IV ran into my arm, and a tangle of cables connected me to a device that quietly monitored my vitals. There was a white corridor outside the open door. The closed door on the wall opposite my head had a toilet sign. Hospital. I sat up, putting my feet on the floor. I felt weak. At first, I wasn’t sure I was feeling it, but a faint thrum carried through the floor — deck, my mind corrected. Hospital ship. I’d no sooner deduced that than a nur...

3 likes

The Beard of Avon

Justin Smoot was known by his neighbors as the hippie who paints and has an overgrown plot full of weeds. The people of Bidford-on-Avon knew him as an eccentric that used a loophole in environmental laws to have his front and rear gardens declared wild habitat. The art scene in Warwickshire knew him as a painter of weirdness, best classified as abstract surrealism. The fact that there was an undeniable magic to his art, despite his being untrained as either an artist or a wizard, made them slightly more interesting to collectors than they wo...

2 likes

The Otherwar

They’d been found in a parallel universe of sorts. While working towards wormhole generation, scientists had accidentally punched a hole into a universe that was almost indistinguishable from ours. The creatures they found traversing the stars there were unimaginable horrors. Smaller ships, but far more numerous, crewed by behemoth abominations. The science ship had been seen, and one of the ships of the Other followed it through from their universe. Had it not been for the Navy standing by, no one knows what kind of hell they could’ve unlea...

3 likes

Little Guy

Sara followed the trail. Droplets of what she was certain was blood. Something small, she guessed. If it turned out to be somebody with a little cut or bloody nose walking slow, she’d be embarrassed, but that wasn’t likely. The trail led into an upturned cardboard box at the end of the alley. There was half of a strange footprint, paw-print really, on the flap of the cardboard that lay outside the box. She couldn’t identify it. Not dog or cat or rat or raccoon or opossum. Sara waited for a minute, listening for sounds of life from the box. S...

3 likes

All I Can Do Is Laugh

The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps, if I was hung over, I’d have a clue, but I feel like I’ve had a good night’s sleep for the first time in recent memory. I try to remember waking up and moving to where I stand, but there’s nothing. If I’d slept on the small sofa or in one of the armchairs that made up the totality of the room’s furnishings, I would be stiff and sore, not the case. The thought tickles something in my mind — the case. What case? I examine the room. Aside from the sparse furnishings, the room has not...

4 likes

Worth It

The more technologically advanced a shelter, the more disconnected it was from nature. In the case of Travers Station, that was a necessity. Outside the station, nature was nothing other than lethal to all the inhabitants of the station. The sapient creatures that inhabited the station came from multiple stars. All of them had their own evolutionary history that drove them to innovate. They all had their own social evolution that drove that innovation to push them out among the stars. Still, none of them had evolved in an environment like th...

2 likes

Ritual

The ornate porcelain teapot was out of place on the scratched metallic countertop. Strong, scarred hands the color of worn khaki filled the center strainer of the pot with leaves from an airtight metal canister. Those same hands lifted the electric kettle and poured the boiling water over the strainer in the teapot before putting the lid on and setting it on the cheap, plastic table. “There’s something calming in the ritual of it, I find.” “Which ritual? The hunt, the capture or…the kill?” The woman that sat at the table was slight of build,...

4 likes

Let's Get Started

Time shuddered to a stop, slipped back a few seconds, then started back up. At first, there was a woman in the center of the room clutching a suitcase against her chest, then two of her, interposed on top of and within each other, then none. She left only a hole in the air behind, that filled with a bang and the rustle of papers swept up by the air that rushed to fill the sudden vacuum. Her arrival was quieter, a soft whoosh as the pressure in the room where she materialized increased a bit. Her heavy, orange, cable-knit sweater and cap, blu...

4 likes

A Promise Kept

“I remember….” The grizzled veteran rubbed the white fur along her muzzle, tracing the path of a scar with a clawed hand missing two digits. “I was a young lieutenant then; thought I knew everything.” “Grenan, don’t start getting maudlin now.” Next to the warrior covered in white and grey fur sat another bipedal tetrapod. The similarities ended there, however.  Grenan stood over two meters with clawed hands that better served slashing than grasping, a muzzle that extended the size of both her mouth and nose, large, low-set ears that hun...

3 likes

Reeve's Day

The woman who piloted the ship was in her mid-thirties, close to two meters tall, with broad, strong features, jet hair, deep brown eyes, and warm, golden-brown skin. Despite being human, the ship she piloted was of a sort no other human had ever seen. Sleek, with no visible seams or joins, no hint of door or portal, it tore its way across light years through an artificial wormhole. # The woman who watched the customers coming and going from the cafe was fifty-four, 149 centimeters tall, with soft features in a pale, ivory face. Salt and pep...

3 likes

Tale of the Bonny Marie

In the time before the devouring horde, humanity, thinking themselves alone, stretched out among the stars. They made barren worlds habitable, and in generations turned them into paradises. There was no part of the galaxy they considered off-limits. When the first unmistakable, non-human, artificial signal caught their attention, humanity celebrated. They were no longer alone. While humans were still trying to work out how to respond, They showed up. Hundreds of thousands of ships, joined together into a traveling city the size of a moon, ma...

3 likes

Tapestry of a Life Well-Lived

A great deal can be learned about a person by who they surround themselves with. The crowds at their parties show what kind of person they aspire to be. Their funeral crowd shows what kind of person they were. When a gathering of the latter sort turns into the former, well, that’s just good wake planning. Of course, it helped that the deceased was well-loved by the sort of people who could subsume their grief long enough to celebrate the life they’d shared. The intoxicants probably helped, too. Probably more than anything else, if judged sol...

5 likes

Ambassador in a Pear Tree

“They sent a juvie. A freshly molted breeder.” “Are you sure?” “Yeah, I’m sure. He even introduced himself as a male.” “Hmm. He might be a breeder, but maybe they have male drones. Have you thought of that?” “Well, no. I guess they could. But still….” “What?” “I mean, well, he’s all squishy. His carapace hasn’t hardened, and he molts it and grows a new one every day, sometimes twice or three times in a day.” “Clothes. You’re talking about clothes. Did you even read the information packet?” “I read it! I mean, sort of. … I skimmed through it ...

4 likes

He Doesn't Bite

The katakat law officer, like others of her kind, stood just over four feet tall, fine-boned and slender. Covered as they were in green and yellow feathers with a red beak and large eyes set to either side of their head, humans tended to call them ‘parakeets’, ‘keets’ for short. Unlike their nickname sakes, however, katakats had arms ending in hands with disturbingly long fingers. The officer’s fingers at that moment twirled a set of dull grey cuffs. While she puffed up her chest to appear in control of the situation, those fingers trembled ...

4 likes