reedsymarketplace
Hire professionals for your project
reedsyblog
Advice, insights and news
reedsylearning
Online publishing courses
reedsylive
Free publishing webinars
reedsydiscovery
Launch your book in style
Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2020
Submitted to Contest #326
And oh, she begged for another rest, but weren’t the fields on knees of their own? Pleading with us to bring them succor. They had survived one of the hardest winters to ever settle into Woodcatch, and now spring had arrived, and they demanded their gift. And wasn’t she to blame for going out there in the first place when she was younger? No childhood age excuses mischief when it leads to the genesis of a starvation. She put on her party dress and shunned her cake. Out she went with a plate of bread bathed in jams. All kinds of jams. Her mot...
Submitted to Contest #325
The man sitting next to you is not a gnome. He may appear to be a gnome, but he’s simply shorter than most people. There’s nothing wrong with that. You shouldn’t even be looking at him. Staring at him. You’re staring. How embarrassing. Who raised you? Just look down at the magazine you’re reading. It’s from 1812. There’s a test to find out if you’re possessed by Satan. Take the test. Find out. If you fail the test, the magazine recommends you turn yourself in to the village clergy so that you can be thrown into a well. The man next to you i...
Submitted to Contest #324
Into the sand goes the incubator. About two feet down, she places the derby. It has a cut-out in the shape of a star, but she doesn’t trace it. Her exploratory nature has to be tamed somehow, and today is as good as any to begin controlling it. She stares out at the ocean and wonders what the surface would taste like if it were possible to only taste the surface. Last night, she ate seventeen olives straight from the jar and then belched until her entire apartment smelled of brine. She woke up at 1pm on her kitchen floor covered in a blanket...
Submitted to Contest #323
It’s no laughing matter. What starts with a papercut ends with the corruption of the soul. Haven’t you seen Papercut III? Poor Teddy from the second movie ends up possessed. And here we are in the remake of Papercut VI and look who has a papercut. What’s so confusing? Papercut is the name of the movie, the name of the killer, and the name of what the killer does to you. You wouldn’t think you could die from a papercut, but in the fourth movie they revealed that he’s supernatural, so his papercuts are fatal. Don’t you know anything about the ...
Submitted to Contest #322
The vanilla extract she put on her broken arm did not heal the arm any faster. Three of the girls online said the extract would help, but maybe she wasn’t applying it right. Jaylee’s sister had used it on her pink eye. After one day, her eye not only looked fine, but her vision had improved. She stopped needing glasses. She took up sharpshooting. Why didn’t the extract work on her? Was it because she didn’t believe it would? “It’s all about faith,” Hunter explained to her while they were on break, “If you don’t believe, it won’t work. It’s j...
Submitted to Contest #321
I really wanted to go home. The trouble began and ended with a man named either Seth or Vinny. He was staying at my favorite hotel in town. It’s next to an Indian restaurant that I love, and the hotel itself is rather new in a town full of old hotels placed lovingly on the water. This one offers no promise of charm or elegance. Just modernity. New-ness. It lives and dies on youth. Architectural youth. Why am I talking about the hotel? It wasn’t really the hotel, but the hotel helped get me into trouble. And the trouble wasn’t really trouble....
Submitted to Contest #320
Her mother sent her out to find a broken television. Out in the woods behind their house, there were numerous broken pieces of electronics scattered between the trees. Some covered in moss, some not. Trisha had her scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. Her fake suede boots were pinching a little at her heels, but she’d break them in on her errand. She placed her cowboy hat slightly askew on her head. Its color helped bring out the warm tones in her cable knit sweater that were offset by her cold butter leggings that she’d ordered online jus...
Submitted to Contest #319
If I had a sister, I think she’d be a chimney. I don’t believe that a staircase’s sister should be another staircase. Why should that be the… Well, the case? Pardon me, I deplore repetition. My steps may look identical, but they’re each unique. I have names for all of them, but I change the names everyday just to keep things interesting. Houses can sit empty for years at a time. It’s vital to keep things interesting. One year I got so desperate I almost named the windows. Luckily, someone moved in the next week. That wasn’t the sisters. That...
Submitted to Contest #318
My father enjoys listening to soft rock while I give him his bath. He wears one of his old bathing suits while I do it, and handles the parts the suit covers only after I leave him be for a few minutes. When you’re caring for a relative, there can’t be any shame or pride, but my father has plenty of both. I give him the minutes that he wants, and then I come in to towel him off and turn down the radio. I won’t turn it off completely until he falls asleep. I bring it into his bedroom and place it by the window. A caller is asking the DJ to pl...
Submitted to Contest #317
I was eating strawberries in the tub when the doorbell rang. Throwing on my blue diamond robe, I dripped all the way to the front door where an old woman was waiting with a basket of apples. For a moment, I wondered if she was going to offer me a trade. My strawberries for her apples. She was wearing a large cloak, and her face was turned down. I realized that this must be the strega who had moved in next door. We hadn’t had a chance to meet, and there was a note on my fridge instructing me to bake croissants for her. The trouble was that cr...
Submitted to Contest #316
Two months before I ended a three-year relationship with my boyfriend, we went over to his best friend’s apartment and convinced ourselves that we were deeply unhappy. We were deeply unhappy, but until that night, we were debating the reality of our situation. After all, what does an unhappy relationship look like? Does it look like boredom? Does it look like weeks without sex? Does it look like leaving the same dirty dish in the sink every week waiting to see which one of you will wash it? We didn’t know. We were contemplating so many thing...
Submitted to Contest #313
The zebras are the ancestors of the zebras released from Hearst’s personal zoo. Katy explains this to me on the bus that takes us up the mountain to the castle. We’re doing a tour of the kitchen and the dining room and who knows what else? The museum at the bottom of the hill explains the life of the newspaper magnate in short bursts punctuated by black and white photos. I assume it will be hard to spot the zebras, because there are over a dozen grazing mere feet from the curved road. Katy gets excited the way that she did when we were child...
Submitted to Contest #312
Hemingway’s job was to scare off the hornets. He stood a mere three feet high, and he was designed to resemble a pelican. Studies had found that hornets are, for some reason, terrified of pelicans. Hemingway’s creator was a woman from the southern part of Delaware. She was twice-divorced with one child from her first marriage. She named the robot pelican Hemingway, because during the summer, she would reread a Hemingway novel from her stash in the spare room of her house. Whenever a problem with one of her inventions arose, she’d take a brea...
Submitted to Contest #309
The first wound appears on Tom’s back. A little below the neck. He panics, because Tom instantly assumes this is it. The big one. He was born after the epidemic had peaked, but it never leaves the back of his mind. Once a week, he watches a documentary about New York during the 80’s and he wonders what it would be like to lose all your friends so quickly and in such devastating ways. Without hesitation, he rushes to urgent care. He hasn’t lived in Denver long, so he hasn’t had time to get a new general practitioner. After several hours in th...
Submitted to Contest #308
My skirt was violet. It was procured for me by one of the St. Fire girls from a vintage store near the Cave. The St. Fire girls prefer to travel in packs of four. Each group has a girl who can shoot, a girl who can speak several languages, a girl who climbs trees, and a girl who laughs at jokes that aren’t funny. I was working at the cemetery when one such group approached me. In this group, the girl who laughs at unfunny jokes was named Eddie, and she was the one who held out the skirt for me. “To wear,” she said, “At Won’t It All Be Fine?”...
Oops, you need an account for that!
Log in with your social account:
Or enter your email:
2 likes
