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Alex Marmalade

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2020

Stories (201)
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201 Stories

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Sourwood Honey

The phone cord wrapped around Jenny's wrist like a promise she couldn't keep. Through the kitchen window, November clouds pressed against the Appalachian ridgeline, bruise-dark and swollen."He's sick as a dog," she said into the receiver, keeping her voice level. Professional. The way she used to sound in the biology lab at Radford before Wade, before the move to Cutter's Gap, before everything became about what he needed. "Fever since Tuesday. Won't keep anything down."Liam sat at the kitchen table, coloring with that particular four-year-o...

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Finding Badri

Rajesh counted the cracks between paving stones as he walked down Kampala Road. Forty-seven from the duka to the jacaranda tree, same as always. The jacarandas weren't flowering yet—November rains came late this year—but their shadows fell across the red dust in patterns Rajesh could predict.Papa had been shouting this morning in rapid Gujarati that made the windows rattle. Not the usual lectures about muddy shoes or wasting time when stock needed counting. This was different—telephone pressed to his ear, switching between Gujarati and Engli...

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Across Jubilee Street

The coffee cup found Jim's hand before the barista found her customer.He didn't break stride. Didn't look at her face—he'd memorized it forty-seven loops ago, down to the constellation of freckles on her left cheek that she'd cover with foundation tomorrow but not today because she'd slept through her alarm. She'd say "Oh my God, thank you!" in exactly four seconds. Her gratitude would spike with genuine surprise, then curdle into suspicion because who does that, who just knows?"Oh my God, thank you!"Jim was already past her, past the fruit ...

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Hush-a-ba, Hush

The iron had been on Simon MacCallum's wrists near three hours when the older guard finally spoke."You're reading something."Simon looked up from where he'd been watching the gap high in the east wall. Rain coming. Wind had backed northwest maybe an hour past, and he could smell it in the stone now."Just the weather.""Navy?""Fisher. Deep water runs off the northern coast."Geoffrey—he'd given his name when they first chained him—shifted his weight against the wall. The younger one, Edmund, had been fidgeting since sunset, but Geoffrey had the...

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Orange Juice in the Duck Pond

The video showed a girl in a pink cagoule trying to launch a box kite in what looked like a Morrison's car park. She moved carefully, taking her time with the string, checking the wind direction with her finger held up like she'd seen someone do it properly. The kite sat on the tarmac while she arranged everything just so, methodical and slow, making sure the frame was straight before she tried.When she finally lifted it—still carefully, still slowly—the wind grabbed it immediately, yanked it sideways, wrapped the string around a bollard, an...

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Really Bad Chess

Submitted to Contest #322

Viktor Petrov's trainers made no sound on the worn path through Regent's Park. At fifty-three, he moved like a man who'd learnt to occupy space without apology—shoulders back, chin level, the kind of posture that comes from winning things. His earbuds delivered the smooth baritone of a philosophy podcast, some American academic dissecting Epictetus whilst Viktor's phone buzzed with notifications he'd check later. Another thousand followers who'd watched yesterday's video of him checkmating a physics PhD in eleven moves whilst discussing the ...

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Pebbles from the Stream

The pomegranate seeds caught lamplight like drops of blood suspended in honey. Haman rolled one between his fingers before placing it on his tongue, feeling it burst—sweet, then tart, then bitter at the finish. Queen Esther had arranged them in a spiral on hammered silver, alternating with pistachios still warm from roasting. The presentation spoke volumes to anyone who understood court language. Spirals suggested cycles, returns, things coming back around.He dismissed the thought. Sometimes a pomegranate was just a pomegranate.The queen pou...

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Tap-Step-Step

The smell arrives before the sound.Rufus knows the morning's shape by his nose—first the coal smoke from the kitchen range, then the bacon fat, then the particular chemical tang of the man's morning ritual involving hot water and sharp metal. Today the sequence is wrong. The sharp-metal smell hasn't happened, and there's something else instead, something Rufus has learnt to recognise: fear-sweat, the sour kind that means the day has already broken before it properly started.The man comes down the stairs too fast. His footsteps have that part...

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Bicycles and Paint Cans

Priya Chen-Patel adjusted her Cartier watch—a partnership gift from the firm—and realised she'd been staring at the same Excel cell for seventeen minutes. Outside her corner office, Singapore's financial district glittered with the kind of geometric perfection that made architects weep and investment bankers feel alive.She felt neither.Yesterday's partnership announcement should have felt like vindication. Equity partner at thirty-six. Youngest in the firm's history. Everyone had clapped. Someone handed her champagne she didn't drink. She'd ...

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Eleven Maltesers and Joni Mitchell

The packet felt light. He set it back, reached for another, felt its weight between thumb and forefinger. This one had substance. At least ten. Maybe twelve.He didn't look when his hand dropped to the lower cabinet by the gun-metal silver Bosch fridge—tall but not quite tall enough for what it served. His fingers found the bowl exactly where it needed to be. Everything in this kitchen was exactly where it needed to be, his wife's masterful work of turning spaces into homes.The carnations were still alive on the table, improbably. Pretty pink...

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Frère Jacques

James Pascal MP hit send on his final tweet, watching the engagement numbers climb in real-time. Seventy-four per cent public support for the Assisted Dying Bill. The Lords would cave by teatime, and his political legacy would be sealed in compassionate legislation. Three years of careful orchestration, media management, and moral positioning had led to this perfect storm of righteous inevitability.His phone buzzed. Helen: Emergency at theatre. Take Ollie to school. Nanny's flight left early—family crisis.James stared at the message, his met...

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Beneath the Sycamore

The taste of bronze had become as familiar to Zacchaeus as his morning prayers—if he still prayed. Which he didn't. The Almighty seemed to have better things to do than listen to a tax collector's petitions, and frankly, so did Zacchaeus.He pressed his back against the sun-warmed stones of the tetrarch's compound, inhaling the familiar perfume of Jericho mornings—donkey dung, baking bread, and that peculiar sweetness that came from dates ripening too fast in desert heat. Pilgrims and merchants flowed through the gates like water finding its ...

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Last Orders

Last OrdersThere's no use beating around the bush. The fellers will be here and there's nothing for it. So in keeping with protocol, I will begin at the beginning, finish at the end, and if there's time I'll tell you the story about young Charlie.Right then.I was planted by a Methodist minister's daughter who'd read too much Wordsworth and not enough about soil conditions. Lass had romantic notions about bringing a bit of the Lake District down to Hampshire. She dug the hole herself, bless her, though her hands were more suited to piano keys...

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Holy Ground

Thutmose counted his flock the way he once counted enemy formations—with the precision of a commander who understood that numbers meant survival. Sixty-one animals under his protection this morning, each one catalogued not just by name but by weakness, strength, and the particular way it moved across terrain that could kill the careless.The desert stretched before them like a bronze shield hammered flat by the sun, already promising heat that would test both shepherd and sheep before the day reached its peak. The air tasted of copper and sag...

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Off the Beaten Track

The branch missed Beck's skull by inches.He rolled away from the splintered oak and found himself staring at blood. Crawford lay twisted beneath the fallen trunk, his left leg bent at angles that made Beck's stomach lurch."Nobody move," Beck shouted, though the eight boys were already frozen. Rain hammered through the canopy where moments before they'd been following red trail markers toward Shepherd's Hut. Now those markers hung like torn prayers from branches that no longer existed.Finn crouched beside Crawford, not flinching from the bloo...

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