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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2025
Submitted to Contest #297
The fluorescent tubes hummed their migraine frequency, spitting relentless, shadowless light. Offensively cheerful Muzak ricocheted off linoleum scuffed by the drag and sigh of countless weary soles. Gary propelled himself and his basket towards the checkout sector by sheer inertia.The basket’s weight seemed less physical than existential: a bottle of cheap Merlot, its glass cool and unforgiving; a microwave meal labelled ‘Homestyle Comfort’, suspiciously beige under the harsh lights; generic painkillers. Each step grated. An overpowering ur...
Submitted to Contest #295
Dr. Mira Santos aligns her pen at a precise ninety-degree angle to her notepad, then adjusts it to eighty-nine. Perfect precision matters. Her office presents an unbroken landscape of whites and grays—walls, furniture, even the spines of journals arranged by height on custom shelving. Her diplomas hang at measured intervals: Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins Fellowship, Stanford Neuropsychiatry. "I keep having these dreams where pieces of myself are missing," Jamie Whitcomb explains, voice carrying an unsettling familiarity Mira can't pl...
Submitted to Contest #294
The lantern flickered between us, its light unsteady against the gathering dark. "Three years," Mira said, setting grandmother's brass lantern on the kitchen table between us. "Not even when Dad asked for you at the end." Rain from the Remembrance Storm hammered against the windows—arriving precisely the same week our father had died last year, his body lowered into Penobscot soil while I stood in a Mojave field, collecting data. The memory surfaced with physical force: desert heat, cell phone pressed to my ear, Mira's voice crackling throug...
Shortlisted for Contest #293 ⭐️
Rain pattered on the midnight blue hood of the 1967 Cadillac DeVille. Eliza Thorne sat behind the wheel, key hovering near the ignition, as water streamed down the windshield in rivulets that distorted the view of her mother's Boston brownstone. The funeral had ended hours ago. The other mourners had long since departed for their hotels or homes, leaving only Eliza and this car—her inheritance. She knew what would happen when she turned the key. Family legend was explicit: the first time a new owner drove the Cadillac alone, the previous own...
Submitted to Contest #292
The forbidden wing of the Imperial Archives smelled of forgotten things—dust with undertones of leather, iron, and the faint chemical tang of preservation spells. Elara's lantern cast trembling shadows across shelves crowded with artifacts officially labeled as "historically insignificant"—the Empire's bureaucratic euphemism for knowledge deemed too dangerous to circulate yet too valuable to destroy completely. Her forged permission slip had worked; the afternoon guard had barely glanced at the curator's mimicked signature before waving her ...
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