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Thomas Graham

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2022

Stories (7)
Comments
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21 Followers
11 Following

7 Stories

198 karma pts

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The Absolutely True and Ghastly Story of the Brief Disappearance of the Gold Spike

Submitted to Contest #168

This story needs only a brief foreword. It is a verbatim reproduction of a manuscript I recently found among the belongings of my third great-grandfather, James Finch. Finch was a journalist, and worked for several papers across the American West during his long career, including the Rocky Mountain News and Sacramento Bee. As far as I can tell, he was well respected in his time, and his good reputation in the profession continues to this day.**The view out the window was monotonous—a flat brown landscape dotted with sagebrush. In the crisp d...

7 likes 5 comments 5
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The Education of SAM

Submitted to Contest #150

As you can imagine, I’ve had some exciting adventures in my career as an Archives Technician. I’ll share one here that gives a flavor of the challenges we come across in the archival sciences.The job was routine—digitizing all the papers in the Plainville Museum of Ideas, which was a one-room building sitting on a corner along the town’s short main street. The name of the place was maybe a little pretentious, but it did turn out to contain quite a few ideas. It was an odd assortment, though. The museum contained only those ideas belonging to...

11 likes 0 comments 0
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Beach Gravel

Submitted to Contest #143

It must have been a mottle of sunlight that woke me. I lifted my head and looked around. The sun had just risen above the mountains on the other side of the fjord, and the light was fighting its way through the trees above me. The day before, from the water, the sides of the fjord had looked steep and inaccessible—just raw rock walls with the occasional stand of trees poking out of a rocky ledge. But I’d somehow found a hidden lair. My sleeping spot was nestled in a tiny inlet between sheer walls, on nearly flat ground next to a creek that e...

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Latitude Sixty-Nine

Shortlisted for Contest #138 ⭐️

On March 5, 2022, a research expedition’s remote submersible spotted the wreck of HMS Endurance, sitting intact ten thousand feet below the surface of the Weddell Sea. The ship has rested there since November 21, 1915, when, after months of being trapped in pack ice, she crumpled from the pressure and sank. The history of the ship and the failed attempt of Sir Ernest Shackleton and his crew to make the first land crossing of the Antarctic continent are well known, as all twenty-eight members of the expedition overcame improbable odds and sur...

29 likes 21 comments 21
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Water’s Edge

Submitted to Contest #135

They walked from the car on a little winding path through trees and came out in a grassy area. The boy could see water ahead. His mother said look at how big the park is.They walked right to the water’s edge. Big clumps of reeds, taller than him, grew along the bank, but there was an opening along a curved bit of shoreline that formed a little cove, and he could see across the water to another grassy bank in the distance. It was a pond or a lake; he didn’t know which.His mother said there might be turtles. He looked but didn’t see any. The s...

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Evil Incarnate

Submitted to Contest #132

“It’s moldy.”“What’s moldy?”“The bread.”“Oh, rot.”“Exactly,” he said from the kitchen. “And we just bought it.”“Tragic!” she called from the living room. “What color is it?”“The bread?”“The mold, you goof.”“Greenish.”“It’s fine, then.”“Really?”“Really.”A few moments later he asked, “What if I had said blue?”“Also fine.”“Black?”“Fine.”“Pink?”“Delicious.”“Gross! I’m not eating mold.”They were both disappointed. Sunday breakfast had become a thing for them. It wasn’t a fancy thing—just toast, always toast, but it was already a little tradition....

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Intimate Objects

Submitted to Contest #130

I don’t usually pick up trash from the street. Maybe it was the newness of the little piece of cardboard that made me grab it. It wasn’t rumpled or soiled, and its corners were still sharp. That’s probably why I picked it up—unsullied, it begged to be rescued from the rubbish around it.The side that caught my attention was entirely blank, its color an unremarkable business-buff. It was slightly bigger than a business card—it would fit in a wallet. Unlike a business card, attached to one side was a small loop of elastic string.I flipped over ...

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