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Alev Gefen

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2025

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53 Stories

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When the Rain Won't Stop

Weekly Contest #363

The rain hammered the corrugated roof of the school's entrance like angry fists, each drop exploding into a thousand smaller ones that ricocheted off the pavement. Emi Ohara pressed herself against the brick wall, her school uniform already damp from the spray that the inadequate overhang couldn't prevent. The fabric clung to her skin in uncomfortable patches, cold and clammy like something diseased.Four-thirty. Her mother was an hour late.The other children had long since disappeared into waiting cars or under the colorful umbrellas of punc...

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Mushroom on the Ceiling

Weekly Contest #362

Brian had taken notes. He'd made a shopping list organized by grocery store aisle. He'd even practiced his British accent in the mirror while saying "puff pastry" because Gordon Ramsay made it sound so elegant, and he wanted to impress Adra when he served it."It's just beef wrapped in stuff," he told himself, standing in his kitchen at 2 PM, five hours before Adra would arrive for their two-year anniversary dinner. "How hard could it be?"These would later be recognized as the most dangerous words ever spoken in his apartment, narrowly beatin...

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Cicada Season

Weekly Contest #361

Summer was over, and so were we. The cicadas weren’t shy to shout about it. Their relentless rattle bored holes in the thick shutters of my room, where the sheets clung to my skin as desperately as a teenager does to the memory of their first kiss. Ours wasn’t the first, yet I hadn’t expected it to be the last, either. My bags weren’t packed, yet the ticket on my nightstand unwittingly became a ticking clock. I had told Ryan about my needing to leave Tokyo at some point, and he took the news as calmly as one would about yet another typhoon i...

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The Wrong Shoes

Weekly Contest #360

The first time Isla runs, she is twenty-one minutes too early, and the street is wrong.She stands at the mouth of the underpass on Tremont, her breath already shortening, the phone still warm from James's voice. The money is gone, Isla. Someone took it from the locker. All of it. I have forty minutes before they come for me, and if you can't bring twenty thousand dollars to the Longfellow Bridge by noon, they will put me in the water.She does not ask who they are. She already knows.She runs.Her shoes are wrong for this: low canvas things she...

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Adjacent

Weekly Contest #359

The year is not important. What is important is the rain. It has been raining since Thursday. Mrs. Naganuma knows this because she has been counting, the days, the drops she can see tracing the window glass, the number of times she hears the door across the hall open and close. Eighteen, since Thursday. The door across the hall. She works as a seamstress for a dress company on the fourteenth floor of a building that smells of cigarette smoke and old carpet. She carries her lunch in a cloth bag and eats it at her desk because the break room i...

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The Half-Life of Certainty

Weekly Contest #358

The document was a shipping manifest, and Maren Lowe had been staring at it for eleven minutes.She knew because the clock on the break room microwave had a stuck second hand that still showed minutes, and she had developed the habit of glancing at it whenever she surfaced from something. Eleven minutes on a shipping manifest. Her paralegal, Jillian, had slid it under her office door three days ago with a Post-it reading might be nothing in Jillian's apologetic cursive, which meant Jillian thought it was something.Maren pulled the paper close...

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Without Questioning the Architecture

Weekly Contest #357

The letter came on a Thursday, on Keshet Capital letterhead, with Darren Jarre's signature at the bottom in the blue ink he used when he wanted the recipient to understand the document was personal. Rhys read it twice in the elevator. Then he folded it along its original crease and put it back in the envelope and rode to his floor. His assistant looked up when he passed. He said good morning. He sat at his desk. Through the glass wall he could see the trading floor, the row of monitors, the heads bent over their positions as though the numbe...

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Sjaelofering

Weekly Contest #356

The building still stands. Ikuko had not expected this. She had imagined it condemned, swallowed eventually by the slow mouth of the city. But here it is on Shinjuku's western edge—the same rust-streaked concrete, the same lobby glass that sticks in the lower left corner, the same smell in the stairwell of something organic and unresolved. She is twenty-six years old. She has not been back in eighteen years. She takes the stairs. She has learned, in the years since, that there is a word for what happened to her mother. Not in Japanese. In a ...

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Twice a Year Too Late

Weekly Contest #354

Riley sits in Dr. Mitchell’s office, staring at a photograph. Her hands, usually so steady, tremble as they hold the glossy rectangle. It’s from three years ago: she, Icaro, and seven-year-old Ariel at the park. Ariel is mid-laugh, her black hair catching the sunlight. Icaro’s arm rests protectively around her small shoulders. Riley stands slightly apart, her aquamarine eyes careful even in captured joy.“How long have you been sitting on this realization?” Dr. Mitchell asks.“Six months,” Riley says. Her voice is tight, controlled. “Maybe lon...

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The Nereid's Interval

Weekly Contest #353

Agata arrived on a Thursday, which her grandmother had always called the devil’s holiday, the day when the veil between visible and invisible grew thin as birch paper. She had not believed this as a child and did not believe it now, at thirty-four, carrying a sketchbook and a single rolling suitcase up the road from the bus stop to the house where no one lived anymore.The village was smaller than she remembered. The well had been capped in concrete. The house green paint gone silver stood at the edge of a field where the rye had grown chest-...

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The Colors He Made

Weekly Contest #352

Kevin said he played guitar the way most people admitted things: reluctantly, eventually, and usually too late. That wasn't entirely fair. He'd said he played guitar *the way he admitted things generally*, which came out on the fourth date as an accident. Jessica felt the calluses on his fingertips when he took her hand to cross the street, and she'd asked. She always asked about calluses. They told you more than faces ever did. "Guitar," he'd said. "But I haven't played seriously in years." "What counts as serious?" A pause. She'd learned t...

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The Left Hand

Weekly Contest #351

When Lia's mother died, the grief arrived in the mail.She found it on a Tuesday: a small parcel no larger than a child's shoe, wrapped in brown paper and tied with kitchen twine. No return address. Her name in handwriting she didn't recognize, though she would later think it looked like her own writing done by someone who had never fully learned to make the letter L.Inside was a stone.Not a remarkable stone. Gray-green, the color of the Baltic in October, roughly the shape of a sleeping animal. Heavy for its size in a way that suggested some...

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The Memory Merchants

Weekly Contest #349

The night before the signing, Dulcimara found Rafael on the roof of the community center, his cello case propped against the parapet the way a man props a rifle, to say he is done with it but not yet willing to put it down. The city below them was a spillage of amber and grey. Somewhere, her mother was lighting candles she no longer believed in, rehearsing faith as a form of muscle memory, which Dulcimara had come to understand was the only kind that lasted."You don't have to explain," Rafael said."I want to." Dulcimara narrowed the distance...

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Side B

Weekly Contest #348

The boxes were already labeled when Paloma arrived. Her mother had done that herself, months before the end, in a handwriting that had grown meticulous, the way age sometimes makes people write, as though each letter were a considered thing.BOOKS. LINENS. KITCHEN.One box said only KEEP.Paloma set it on the kitchen table and made coffee she didn't drink. Outside, the November light came through the window at the angle it only reaches coastal towns: flat and silver, without intention. She had something like forty-eight hours to dismantle the l...

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Cracked Screen

Weekly Contest #346

A police detective picks up an iPhone off the ground. Its screen is cracked. The wallpaper, still visible through the fracture lines, shows a smiling couple on a beach — a woman with her head thrown back, laughing.3:33 PM - The previous evening, Othello Duarte and Desdemona Trevisan were found dead in an apparent murder-suicide. Detective Icaro DiBruno is questioning witness Emilia Rossi via text.Emilia: I should have done something soonerEmilia: If it wasn't for me... Desdemona would still be aliveIcaro: Ms. Rossi, I need you to walk me thr...

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