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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

“False Memories” by George Williams

Submitted to Contest #120

Emily Miller is a friendly, outgoing young girl. She enjoys helping her mother, Tracie, care for her two younger siblings. She is an above-average student. She is learning to play the violin and with her mother’s permission, she volunteers as a candy striper at the local hospital. For all intents and purposes, she seems like a normal twelve-year-old girl. But if you look a little closer, there is sadness in her eyes. One Saturday afternoon, Tracie was preparing to go grocery shopping. The sports shoes she usually wore to go out were in the...

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“48 Years is a Long Time” by Bill Kemp

Submitted to Contest #120

48 Years is a Long Time Blind dates can be risky propositions. No matter if the man’s handsome, or the woman’s beautiful, it’s the sprockets spinning inside the other person’s noggin that matters. Neither idle chatter nor dark ruminations make for a satisfying date. But if the other individual is witty with insightful prognostications, then you’ve got a ‘keeper’. I met that person, the one who I couldn’t live without, in the month of October. The year was 1972 and I was a man on the go, jetting from the corporate headquarters in Omaha, Neb...

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“Happy Retirement” by Betty Jean Ward

Submitted to Contest #120

Happy Retirement Marla flipped through the age worn pages of the family album thinking how each picture told a story. She came across pictures of her dad’s retirement party from June of 1982 at the ‘Knights of Columbus’ hall. The one photo of her dad and mom spoke volumes. She never seen her dad so happy as he grasped her mom around the shoulders pulling her in close. She could see the lines of stress relieved in his huge smile. He had such a good time that night. Seeing his friends from work, dancing the jitterbug with ...

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“David” by Kathy Philpott

Submitted to Contest #120

David There was one picture of David in the yellow and tattered photo album Jean found inside a box in the garage. He was a sweet-faced, blond little two-year-old boy with Downes Syndrome. Jean's parents never talked about him even though he was Jeans' older brother. David became a sad and terrible secret in the already cold, dysfunctional family. Talking about David was forbidden. Jeans' mother's world revolved around golf and drinking. Jean was dismissed and neglected. Her father traveled for business, and his world was his work. Alt...

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“In Memory of Rebecca Williams ” by Laveeza Ali

Submitted to Contest #120

Trigger warning: murder.Rebecca: Resonating sirens blared as flashing lights blinded me. The yells of people carrying someone on a stretcher started sounding muffled. Air did not seem to be going through my nose. Everything and everybody seemed blurred and going rapidly fast."Nancy!" I yelled to my horrified sister. "What's happening?" I clutched her arm."I don't know," she replied, shaking her head."Dad!" I trembled, running towards him. Anger, sadness, and confusion rose upon me. Why isn't he doing anything? Where is mom? Why is nobody te...

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“Good to See You” by J Jordan

Submitted to Contest #120

I’d had my choice of tables, and I chose the one from which I could view the front bank of windows but didn’t have to sit inside the ersatz greenhouse. I ordered hot tea and waited to place my lunch order until my sister arrived. I tapped the toe of my shoe on the leg of the table and watched the people outside, passing by to go to work, to go shopping, to go to meet their friends. I wondered if any of them were meeting their sister for the first time in five years. Emily was a doctor now. She’d always been so brig...

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“The Night In Question” by Lin Darroe

Submitted to Contest #120

I often think about that infamous night our mother left. Oh trust me, I don’t recall this unbearable time every day, But that particular rainy night is something etched in my memory forever. Not a good thing. And here’s the ironic thing that I think about it. My father had a whole different perspective of what happened that fateful night. I will try and tell the story from my viewpoint as close as possible. It was a usual Friday night, and it was raining. My mom was a stay-at-home Mom, and Dad was an ...

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“Old photographs” by Megan Bailey

Submitted to Contest #120

“Do you ever wish that you could hit the rewind button and live in moments from your life again?” Noel asked as she looked up at her husband, Mark, from her seat on the living room floor. She was surrounded by piles of old photographs. Old photographs from her childhood that she had taken on an old, disposable camera. Photographs of awkward smiling teenage friends that she hadn’t spoken to in probably twenty years, even though they had accepted each other as friends on Facebook long ago. Photographs of Noel in her wedding dress, feeling beau...

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“Camp Hartford” by Lola Borchardt

Submitted to Contest #120

I ran to my room as fast as I could. I slammed the door behind me. I couldn’t let Victoria see me cry. Ever since my mother had died I had tried to hide myself from my family. No, not my family, something different. My step-family. In this family I was an other. I pulled an old family album from under my bed. I opened to the first page. A picture of my parents took up the entire page. My mom with her long blond hair stood next to my dad with brown hair, my mom in her white wedding dress. My dad stood next her in a tuxedo but his messy ...

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“Fit to Print” by Eric Holdorf

Submitted to Contest #120

Fit to Print “Who was on the phone?” Beth asked as Bob. “It was Paul. Sara is leaving him. She connected with an old flame from high school. This guy found her on FaceBook, and just that, like she’s leaving him. She said he’s focusing on her and living life. She said Paul’s taken her for granted too long.” “That’s too bad. I always liked those two, particularly Sara,” Beth said. “You’re not on FaceBook a lot, are you?” Bob said, an...

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“Shattered” by Cassidy Gray

Submitted to Contest #120

Sun dances on my eyelids, and I don't want to open my eyes. Birdsong lulls me to a drifty sort of space, softly, slowly. I give a soft smile as I- “BAM!!!” My door swings open and my eyes are peeled open by a five-year-old sitting on my chest. Soft yellow curls fall on my cheeks and tickle my nose. I hide my face in my hands to avoid any more little-sister-harassment while I peek through my fingers at the clock. The hands point to eight in the morning and I sigh. “Listen, little lady! I say as I tap my sister's nose, You've made me lose pr...

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“Aunt Rose Remembers” by D.a. Marullo

Submitted to Contest #120

When I think of the day my aunt confronted her sister, I have very mixed emotions.There was always a definite feeling of animosity between them, yet there was a sense that each protected each other in a strange familiar way. My theory was proved the day Aunt Rose came for a visit and old pent up feelings came to the surface, in a showdown between sisters, I’d like to call,The Day the Bullshit Ended.It was colder than usual in the South. Frost had formed and many crops were fro...

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“Just a Cemetery of Broken thoughts” by Britt Garman

Submitted to Contest #120

He couldn’t actually be here, not today, not after all this time. Yet, the image remained no matter how many times she attempted to blink him away. He wore a light gray button-up, a sharp contrast to her mental image of him in the black hoodies and tees that constituted the extent of his style range back then. She’d tried to get him to move into lighter colors, to compliment his skin tone, but he was set on the black. A reminder that there’s not one true black. There’s never one true anything. She knew the truth, that this was somethi...

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“Reunion” by JL Henrikson

Submitted to Contest #120

Mary with the green eyes and reddish hair and the wonderful clothes who all the boys in my middle school had a crush on sent me a message that she wanted to meet up. We hadn't seen each other much since we broke up when we were 13, she left a note in my locker saying that she felt like she loved me too much and that she was too young to get tied down, and how could I argue with that? She was doing the right thing, the adult thing. But that week we were together was the most blissful time of my awkward and tortured youth that I had spent, and...

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“Eddie” by Rosey Dickson

Submitted to Contest #120

Eddie sneezed. Dust motes flew around his head, refusing to settle. Sweat trickled under his arms, dampening his shirt. Unable to stand up straight, he struggled out of his jacket and threw it across the manhole cover beside him. He pulled another box, marked in Texta with ‘bedroom,’ across the wooden beams. Inside, his mother’s China dogs nestled in tissue paper. The paper rustled as brown and white and black spaniels, some with bows painted on their heads, appeared. His father had hated them. Balancing one on his palm, he ble...

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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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