Susie Helme

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2021

Stories (4)

4 Stories

76 karma pts

?

“Imo (potatoes)” by Susie Helme

Submitted to Contest #191

The rice crop failed that autumn for the third year running, the wailing of the starving peasants penetrated deep into the daimyƍ’s (lord’s) castle. At the gate Sumitada and his father sat upon their horses surveying the rotting fields of Saitama Province. Orphaned children clustered at their stirrups daring touches upon their greaves to beg for coins. Bodies of dead peasants, their parents perhaps, half covered in water, lay still on the ground where tall rice stalks once had swayed, their hands still stuck in the wet earth where they had d...

0 comments 0
Read story

“Love between the Synagogue and the Assembly” by Susie Helme

Submitted to Contest #160

Alexandria 132 CE Eudokia said to her husband Dioscorus in bed at night, ‘Of course, I’m worried for the city, especially with this drought, and I’m worried for the parish. But what’s keeping me from sleep tonight is worrying about Julianna.’ Eudokia and Julianna were running a relief program in Alexandria during a famine due to the lateness of the Nile flood, Julianna recruiting volunteers from her synagogue and her academy, Eudokia recruiting parishioners from the Ekklesia (assembly) of St. Annianus. ‘It was brave of her, coming to Assem...

1 comment 1
Read story

“The Methodist Ghost” by Susie Helme

Submitted to Contest #111

[the Victoria and Baltick Coffeehouse where Gerard and Barnaby hold their business presentation was the forerunner of the Stock Exchange] ‘Brother, well met,’ cried the wholesaler Barnaby Jones, his rotund cheeks ruddy in the wintry wind. ‘You’ve come a ways.’ ‘Afternoon, Mr. Jones,’ responded Gerard Andrieu the silk weaver, touching the rim of his cap. ‘Felicity,’ he nodded to the gentleman’s wife, who was Gerard’s sister. Their relatively new bonds of kinship were not yet warm enough to render the encounter comfortable. ‘Indeed, there we...

1 comment 1
Read story

“Sushi on Christmas Eve” by Susie Helme

Submitted to Contest #98

Sushi take-away on Christmas Eve. It was the last minute manouevre of a desperate housewife in possession of a credit card, trying to give some happy spin to the bleakness of her new life. I swear. That was what it was. My family back home--Americans—we had always had such a rich tradition at Christmastime. For the whole of Advent, we kids would do ‘good deeds’ every day, and with each one we’d win a piece of straw to soften the bed for Baby Jesus in his manger. By December 25th the little Nativity Scene was piled high. Of course, on Christm...

2 comments 2
Read story

Author bio

Susie Helme is an American from Nashville, Tennessee, living in London, after sojourns in Tokyo, Paris and Geneva with a passion for ancient history, politics and magic, mythology and religion. She is a political activist and a socialist. Once editor of Mobile Communications Asia and other mobile communications magazines, she co-authored the Jan 2000 Future Mobile Handsets. She published with the Conrad Press in December 2020 her first novel, The Lost Wisdom of the Magi, which won the 2021 Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award for ‘Best Historical’. Her 2nd and 3rd (unpublished) novels are finalists for 2022 Killer Nashville Claymore Awards. The Genizah Codex is a finalist for ‘Best Historical’. Dreaming of Jerusalem is a finalist for ‘Best Action Adventure’. She is founder member of the Bounds Green Book Writers writers’ circle. She now subedits Dignity magazine, writes historical novels and grows organic vegetables. She writes book reviews for Historical Novels Review and Reedsy Discovery and edits other authors’ novels for Reedsy Marketplace.