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CONTEST ENDED – Thank you for submitting your stories!

#120: Nostalgia

Do you ever get a warm, fuzzy feeling when eating a favorite childhood meal or meeting up with an old friend? On the other hand, maybe you’ve revisited something you were nostalgic for, only to find it wasn’t quite what you remembered. Or perhaps you’ve found yourself longing for a time before you were even born...

This week’s prompts encourage you to write around the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia, and imagine the different ways your characters might confront memories from the past.

This week's prompts

Write about a character who yearns for something they lost, or never had.

Angst – 111 stories

Start your story with the line ‘Back in my day…’

Adults – 28 stories

Write about two characters’ different perspectives of the same past event.

Middle School – 36 stories

Start your story with a character looking through an old family photo album.

Fluff – 44 stories

Your character has always viewed the past with rose tinted glasses. Write about what happens when they’re finally confronted with the truth.

Angst – 25 stories

Stories

“The Book of Memories” by Sophie Smith

Submitted to Contest #120

My parents had always taken photographs of me, my brother and my sisters when we were growing up. But not just normal holographic photographs that we have now. Old photographs from an ancient camera on their even older phones. They even went to the painstaking effort of printing off every single photo on this shiny photograph paper and sticking them into countless photo albums. And that is what I have found myself sorting out in the eerily quiet and empty house. It just isn’t the same without them here. Without them l...

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“Living My Best Life” by Mary Fitzgerald

Submitted to Contest #120

When my dad passed away, I inherited the family photo albums. I was looking through some of the older family photos when I came across a picture of a gorgeous young man. I turned the photo over and prayed there was at least a name, if not a date. I was thrilled to see that it had both, but it was written in an unfamiliar hand. The writing on the back of the photo identified the young man as a childhood friend of my great, great grandfather’s. It was dated 1850. His name was Rory Fitzpatrick. It was one o...

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“Darling, I'm Coming” by Kaden Vargo

Submitted to Contest #120

***This story deals with sensitive subject matter such as depression, mental health, and suicidal thoughts or actions. Read at your own risk. Thank you and enjoy*** -Kaden Vargo “Oh, darling…” The old man whispered as he stare at a picture from his wedding day in an old dusty photo book. One of him and his wife from years ago, back when the old man still had reasons to get out of bed each day. A deep, lonely sigh begun a new era of the old mans life as he sat the photo album on a small wooden table next to him. Wally sat slouched in his...

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“Her World Unending” by London Cohen

Submitted to Contest #120

Chelsea mulled it over, chewing on the inside of her cheek as she stared unseeing out the van window.With her stockinged feet up on the dashboard, her toes grazed the bauble dangling from the rearview window.She blinked.Once.Twice.With a strangled yelp, she kicked at it with disappointingly little effect. It swung back and forth, swaying in tandem with how she felt. Her world had shifted on its axis, leaving her perilously close to falling off the face of it into oblivion.The words were still ringing in her head from the voicemail her sister...

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“Can Things Change?” by Nix ♞

Submitted to Contest #120

"Pain will be your final convincer."I've heard it so many times. They say the truth is unspoken. I thought it must not be true, then. They say that, too. That I don't want it to be true. Can you really hear some things and not others?I stare at the bottle. Now, it looks like poison. Now, I feel like dying. Like I'm dying.I want to go back. Back to when I felt like living. Like I was living. That same bottle used to make me feel... And now? Won. Numb. None. Can you really feel nothing at all?I sit up, and the world stands. But just as suddenl...

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“Frost at the Coast” by Roger Sippl

Submitted to Contest #120

Frost at the Coast The arctic air blows early, bringing frost, thick, that piles up like snow. Out the window Jane sees the new crystals growing on the porch. They take the place of what she just swept toward the edges of the deck, clearing a path to leave if she must. But she’s not sure she would, even then. The wind, heavy with mist, keeps blowing in, across the beach and up the short bluff. When...

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“Photograph” by AK Lee

Submitted to Contest #120

She thumbed through the pages of faded photographs. It had to be here. There were only so many albums of herself as a baby, and that photo had to be here somewhere, and she was already on the final album… It was not there. Muzi slumped, before she flopped onto her back and tossed the album over the side of the bed, to join the rest of the photo albums. Her calico cat, Duck, sat up, as if to consider an investigation of the pile of photographs that smelled of age and water damage. What am I even doing? Muzi asked herself. With a shaky breath,...

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“It's So Hard To Say Goodbye” by Stephanie Jeannot

Submitted to Contest #120

Dear Triton,You were like a painted image of sunsets and autumn leaves scattered upon the brook. I loved you from first look.You are a memory of straddling multiple genres. You squeezed the truth out of me without even having to lay down my thoughts on a blank page. You offered me forty lines without even having to add a new journal to the forty notebooks in my bin that have piled up since the fourth grade. We took flight like a soaring eagle from day one and we have been a chorus of love ever since.It was us versus the world. Your presence ...

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“Nightgown, Unworn” by Victoria Rimasse

Submitted to Contest #120

Making love with Frank Parisi was something that Vivian never did, and always wished she had, from age 22 into perpetuity. December, 1984. The light on Vivian’s answering machine was flashing when she got home at midnight; she had “three new messages”; it turned out they were all from Paul Meyer. Paul was quirky; he either called her every hour of the day or not at all for weeks which suited Vivian fine; she could only take him in small doses. When she was halfway through playing the third message, Leo, the doorman, called on the in...

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“Rosewater and Saffron” by Vishnu Prasad

Submitted to Contest #120

Three days days after he had buried her, he sat there now on the bedroom floor, shirtless and gasping for air. It was a cold night, and the wooden doors of the armoire in front of him swung gently to the breeze that crept in through the open window. His barely blinking eyes were wide open and the bottle of cheap whiskey next to him was all but empty. The old man ruffled his ever-thinning hair and scratched his sparse shadow of a beard. He gazed, like he had a hundred times over the past hour, at the unruly stacks of books, papers and ma...

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“The best coffee” by Manu Jankus

Submitted to Contest #120

On a misty morning at dawn, the cries awakened me of a child from a nearby house, a small two-story residence where a family of four lived with their giant dog, a shepherd of sorts. They appeared the perfect default family, the kind that a wealthy merchant from the capital, the dazzling royal jewel of Lumence, would pitch you as an ideal one. Well, I didn't have anything like that, and was alone in my three-story house, autonomous and in anticipation. As this one-year-old child continued to scream, sleep eluded me as well, so I got up and he...

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“Droogs” by Dan Goff

Submitted to Contest #120

The homeless man outside Michael’s car window interfered with a rule of his: to not make eye contact, whenever possible, with homeless people. When he did, they were suddenly human and not just fixtures of the landscape, not just a bush with a cardboard sign propped in its branches or a mailbox with a too-big hoodie draped over it. When they became human, Michael started wondering all sorts of pointless things, like where did they use the bathroom? and where did they get all those layers of clothing? and where did they sleep? Surely it wasn’...

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“before daisy” by Romee Koyama

Submitted to Contest #120

I don’t need to give any of you an explanation. My father always told me—thrice, before I died; once when I was on my deathbed—that if you want something, there is nothing and no one stopping you from getting it aside from yourself. “You don’t need to give anyone an explanation,” his hand on my shoulder, and fingers hooked under my chin. His voice almost overlapped with mine but not quite enough that I failed to recognize which is which. He liked to do that. He enjoyed taking the smallest parts of me and saying that I got it from him. The ...

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“His Name Was Ezra” by Rebekah Wheadon

Submitted to Contest #120

His name was Ezra. He was my twin brother. The midwife joked that we were born at the same time, but in reality, he was just seconds older than me. As babies, we screamed when we were separated and only quieted when our Momma put us in the same bed. Our first words were in a language of our own creation, one I can still speak today. We were each other's shadows wherever we went. Poppa said we were the same person split between two bodies, so completely did one know the other. It was an early spring day when we went swimming down in a creek...

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“Dear Halloway” by J. W.

Submitted to Contest #120

Dear Halloway, Back in my day, during the old scares of cholera and Ebola, we didn't have any of these terrible differences that we have now. We loved each other as people-neighbors. Nowadays, life is oriented from a point of view that is relevant to the selfish mind. That does sadden me. You, son, are an example of the opposite in the world. You give thanks to those that give you treats and you give treats to those who give thanks. You are the greatest man I know, and, though my old age messes with my memory sometimes, I know that you are...

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$250

Prize money

244

Contest entries

163

Stories

Ended on 23:59 - Nov 19, 2021 EST

Won by Rebecca Loften 🏆

Title: Meditation

Submissions must be between 1,000 - 3,000 words and will be approved and published on Reedsy Prompts within 7 days of the contest closing.

Read the full terms & conditions or check out the FAQ if you have any questions!

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