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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2021
Submitted to Contest #300
The metro tossed me out into a muggy summer evening. Corporate towers crouched around me, while banks prowled up from the noxious gloom. I shivered, abruptly feverish in this city that now seemed so strange. Of course it had all been just the same this morning, but getting fired from a job you love adds ten degrees to every gulp of air, and another hundred faces to the faceless, frothing crowds.I gritted my teeth, and made my way to the museum. Passing the overflowing trashcan at its entrance, I tossed my useless shop key into a bucket of sp...
Winner of Contest #297 đ
On a cool, clear day in late September, I went out for my final cup of tea. There was a place I liked downtown. Yemeni. The girls who worked there wore sleek headscarves printed with bright, abstracted patterns. Sunny spirals that went on for years.Handing them my last ten dollars, I took my tea out for a walk beneath the elms. Joggers raced their dogs into the evening gloom, in a park-turned-arboretum that I remembered from my college days. Tracing the path back to a familiar bench I slung my backpack down and sat. I poured my tea into a th...
Submitted to Contest #284
His proudest touch, Strand reflected, had been the birdsong in the trees. Four species sang in four-part harmony, an innovation from before the war. Heâd resurrected it that night, and their fluting choruses had spilled across the banquet tables and the garden maze. The birds sang that all was well. Their training could take a year, longer than it took the navy to turn out a new dreadnought, and to some, their opulence might even seem illegal. By the letter of the law, Strand supposed it was. Even genius had its rationing, and there we...
Submitted to Contest #135
âMackenzie?â You wake at night to a name nobody ever calls you, something given up in childhood and given back in adulthood unexpectedly, like so much else about the moment and the things that brought you here. Itâs a sea of sheets and more pillows than youâre used to, a bed that smells like rosewater liberally doused in cat hair, a white bedspread stained here and there with the wine you both spilled that night. An hour might have passed. Two. Her voice makes it sound like a lifetime. âHmm?â you say. Little more than a groan,...
Submitted to Contest #125
âGalanthus nivalis.â âOh yeah? The common snowdrop. Thereâs a hundred freezing outside, so why is this one freezing in here?â âCommon! Hardly.â February crept in through the windows, invaded gaps in the old, tumbling masonry. Thomasâs breath fogged the air, there was frost around the rim of Grandma Evieâs wine glass. Her bedroom's only fire burned at the end of her cigarette. But still, the old witch refused to die. Thomas took her hand; dry, cold cracked skin and age hollowed bones, stretched across the meanest bitch Eng...
Submitted to Contest #123
Garvey Street was a wall of writhing sound. Everywhere Atticus turned guitars bent and screamed, pianists played blocky, rollicking chords. Rock and Roll warred with the Blues from the cracks of a dozen doorways. Drunken flotsam drifted from the bright pool of one dying streetlight to the next in search of the perfect sound or the cheapest drink. And Atticus, who had killed tonight, should have been right at home. He wasnât though. The skin hung off him loosely, more like a bad suit than a man. What passed for Atticusâs soul itched, ...
Shortlisted for Contest #117 âď¸
Erin was a speck of dust on the map back home, trapped in the holographic border marking the edge of Human space. All around her, specks of dust were still exploding. When she thought of home Erin meant West Virginia. Of all the places left on Old Earth, West Virginia might have changed the least. It was still poor. Still a backwater. Still hell, for a precocious young woman like her. If a person could still be precocious when they were dying, and young after theyâd been to war. Home wasnât the Olympus and it never would be. Throug...
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