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Tyler Runde

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2020

Stories (15)

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107 Followers

21 Following

15 Stories

547 karma pts

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The Damage Is Done

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #70

It took me years to realize why Garrett no longer came to family reunions. His parents still came, just without Garrett, and even at the age of five I could discern the grim, thin-lipped set to their faces, the way that they would laugh and converse with other family members, but would always keep themselves apart from everyone else at a particular distance. Me and Garrett were an odd pair. Sure, we were cousins, but he was so much older than I was and we each had other cousins who were much closer to our own ages. Yet, he’d chosen to hang...

30 likes

Istvan, Agi, and the Chimera's Despair

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #70

In a heavily-wooded area, not far from a swift-moving river the locals called the Gyors Veszedelem, there once existed a small village. In this village there lived a boy and a girl named Istvan and Agi, who had grown up beside one another as neighbors. As far as children went, they were decent enough, imperfectly kind-hearted and unintelligent in the way that children often are, but they were also very wicked for how their actions would visit misfortune upon their hamlet. It was one morning that the children set out together into the woods...

12 likes

Coming Back to Earth

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #69

Marzia woke with her face pressed against the glass of the train’s window. She hadn’t planned on falling asleep during the journey home for Thanksgiving, but the slight sway from side-to-side and the clack-clack-clack of the wheels numbed her brain to the point that sleep was a foregone conclusion. Where her cheek had been a greasy mark was left behind and there was even a clear line of spit trickling down to the bottom of the pane. She looked over at the man who sat in the seat beside her, who glanced first at her and then at what she’d don...

16 likes

Family of Thieves

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #69

One of Xavier’s most cherished memories was of watching his grandfather, Moses, pick locks in front of the TV. The man had a string of padlocks which he kept on a bicycle U-lock and he went through them one-by-one, cradling a lock in the palm of his left hand, his index and middle fingers providing light pressure to a tension bar, and delicately set the lock’s tumblers with a pick in his right hand—click…click…click—while never once missing a plot-beat or taking his eyes away from his favorite shows. Whereas other grandsons might get their g...

11 likes

Reparation Ridge

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #68

Cecilia wakes briefly to the sound of the tent’s flap unzipping, and then again to her boyfriend, Cooper, urinating into a bush twenty feet away. The ground presses hard and lumpy beneath the floor of the tent and through the thin insulation of her sleeping bag. Her body feels stiff and somewhat battered after only a single night of roughing it. The tip of her nose and her forehead, the only parts of herself exposed to the air inside the tent, are chilled from the previous night’s plummeted temperatures, and she holds onto the tightness in h...

13 likes

In the Market for Some Lovin'

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #67

Arndt stepped off the Huroukian hover bus back into the dry, shiftless air of the desert planet and paused to stare at the marketplace before him. He’d been on-planet for two days already, either barricaded in his hotel room, blinds drawn with the AC blasting him full in the face, or lying like a thawing chicken cutlet beneath a beach umbrella, staring out at a placid ocean the same pink color as a digestive aid, and now he’d grown bored enough to venture out to see what else this seaside town might offer. He was unimpressed. The market was ...

22 likes

Your Princess Is in Another Castle

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #66

“It doesn’t count if you’re already planning your defeat.”Marcus took his eyes away from the castle and looked to Lumbert, and asked, “Doesn’t it?”“No!” Lumbert proclaimed, stepping back from the hillock’s edge to busy himself with tending to the horses, who hadn’t had a thing to eat the entire journey from Toderskül this far out into the Wastes and so had been huffing away irritably at the two men for the last five minutes.Marcus smiled sheepishly at his traveling companion and friend. He’d spent the previous night spit-shining the breastpl...

21 likes

By the Back Ways

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #66

Adrian woke with a hangover, and with the morning sun hitting him full on in the face through the lounge room’s bay window, needling his eyes like so many white-hot skewers. He pulled the blanket over his head and tried to block out the light, along with the feeling like his cranium was going to split open and his brain was going to ooze out of his nose and ears. But the blanket did little to help. In truth, along with the pounding in his head and unrelenting assault on his senses, he felt overheated, sweat-less, and delirious with a notion ...

14 likes

An Unwelcome Houseguest

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #56

Dodie and her big sister, Marni, were playing dolls. Victor had been watching them, but now he’d grown bored. So he wandered away and decided to try to smell the vase of lilacs by the front door instead. The vase was on a table in the hall and the table was tall while Victor had always been small. That was the first complication. The second was tipping the vase over far enough so that the lilacs were close to his nose. In addition to being small and having trouble manipulating objects, his nose didn’t smell all that well either, so it to...

25 likes

The Floor Is Now Lava

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #56

John still felt a little groggy and confused from when the mysterious woman had roofied his drink the night before. And now he found himself here. “This is ridiculous!” he announced. He was staring down a hallway, in what he presumed was an abandoned building, in some far-off location. Away from the safety and help of a civilized society. And from the hallway’s walls, circular saw-blades measuring two feet across jousted out into the path he was meant to take, or else the strange wrist-watch he wore would inject him with a deadly poison....

16 likes

The Amazing Sounds of Orgy

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #56

“Leland, this is Maxine. Maxine—Leland—he’ll be training you today.” Leland had been busy getting the deli ready for the day—filling the hot-water baths, turning on the exhaust fans and heating up the fryers, bringing out the bowls from the back and dumping yesterday’s remains of potato salad, pasta salad, and ham salad into them—so his back was turned when Brett, the manager, approached with the new hire; this Maxine. Leland turned to give her at least the courtesy of a nod, if not an actual “hello”, but momentarily froze upon looking int...

19 likes

Return to Sender

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #56

“Excuse me, I’d like to make a return?”The mail clerk looked up at the woman who’d just approached the counter. The tips of his white mustache curved upward as he gave her a friendly smile.“Certainly,” he told her, “I just need the return address and the package you’re sending.”“I didn’t receive a return address,” the woman informed him. She wasn’t sure how to continue. She’d never heard of this happening before, so she wasn’t sure of the proper steps to take in this particular situation. Finally, she just said, “And they sent me this.”She p...

14 likes

Bastard of a Bastard

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #55

Through the screen door, even from across the street, a mother’s voice could be heard telling her son to, “just get the mail, will you?”The boy came bursting through after the voice, his face all knots of exasperation and what could’ve even been sadness. He’d yelled at his mom again, and he didn’t know why. They had just been having a normal conversation.“How was your day?” she'd asked.“It was alright. Nothing much happened.”But then she brought up the fact that he’d skipped out on the entirety of fifth and sixth period.“Where were you?”And ...

13 likes

Never Trust a Cat Person

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #55

The mansion came into view between the copses of trees, which had been lining either side of the road for the last hour. From a distance it looked old and gray, many-windowed and somewhat medieval; though, this being the Northwest, it couldn’t have been more than a hundred years old. Aimee’s boyfriend, Thomas, drove the car and pointed out the mansion only after she had already seen it. She watched it get closer and closer. Her view jounced as the car’s tires ground across gravel and tripped over potholes. Then they turned left at the ga...

10 likes

Spinning Apples Into Gold

Tyler Runde

Submitted to Contest #54

The witch-to-be, Brinley Sparhawk, woke in the full-dark hours of the morning and left her bed like a cat on the prowl. Appearing as a ghost in just her slip and woolen socks (and other unmentionables, which will not be mentioned), she moved through the room of sleeping girls, also witches-to-be, to the shared wardrobe in order to collect her black dress and accompanying black boots before exiting not just from the room, but the whole of the witches’ school that the room was a part of. She dressed herself on the back steps of the wood-and-ea...

11 likes