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Alev Gefen

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2025

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58 Stories

532 karma pts

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What the River Keeps

Weekly Contest #376

Mak left when the rice was still green. I remember because I stood at the edge of the paddy with one hand on the curve of my belly, and the stalks reached my knees. The men who came to take him would not look at me. Their eyes were on the canal, the clouds, and the dog asleep in the shade beneath our house. They looked at anything except a woman who was about to lose her husband to a war in the north that none of us could have found on a map. "Come home before the harvest," I said. He laughed the way he always did, with his whole chest, as i...

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The Lamp in the Window

Weekly Contest #375

The night her father did not come home, Linnea's mother lit the lamp and set it in the kitchen window, facing the water. "Keep it burning," she said. "If it goes out, he won't find the harbor." Linnea was nine. She sat on the bench beneath the window and watched the flame through the glass chimney the way other children watched a fire. Wick trimmed. Oil to the line. Her mother showed her once and did not show her again. Outside, the wind came across the Sound in long gray shoves, and the shutters on the Lofgren house banged until someone wen...

7 likes 1 comment 1
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Laminated

Weekly Contest #370

Gary taps the champagne flute with a fork, twice, the universal signal for everyone please stop enjoying yourselves, and the room quiets down the way rooms do at weddings, reluctantly, like a class settling for a substitute teacher. He unfolds his index cards. He reads the first line silently before he says it out loud, a habit from every toast he's ever given, and this is the moment he understands that something has gone deeply, structurally wrong with his evening. The card says: Jesse and I go back to the sandbox, literally, there's a phot...

10 likes 2 comments 2
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The Gauge

Weekly Contest #367

Ari checked the gauge at six, the way he checked it every morning since the year the Hudson took his brother. Two point one feet. Nothing. He wrote it down anyway, in the little spiral notebook that lived on the windowsill, because a number unrecorded felt to him like a warning unheeded, and he had already lived through what that cost. He texted Mina before she was awake. Stay in today. Storm coming Thursday, want you rested. He did not mention that Thursday was three days off, or that rested had nothing to do with it. He mentioned it anyway...

11 likes 2 comments 2
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The Discretion

Weekly Contest #366

I want to be clear from the start. I loved Hatsumi like a daughter. Everything I did, I did because I believed in her. This is the only worthwhile version of the story, and I am the only one left to tell it. The studio was on the third floor of a building near Yoyogi Park, above a dry cleaner that never seemed to have customers, only steam. Six days a week I climbed those stairs. I chose that studio because the light came in low and gold in the late afternoon, the kind of light that makes even a mediocre player sound like something more. Hat...

9 likes 0 comments 0
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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 pu...

14 likes 3 comments 3
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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 beat...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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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...

12 likes 1 comment 1
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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...

15 likes 1 comment 1
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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...

12 likes 4 comments 4
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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 clo...

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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 numb...

4 likes 2 comments 2
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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...

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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 l...

16 likes 3 comments 3
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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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