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Anna Soldenhoff

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2025

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22 Stories

571 karma pts

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The Wrong Key

Weekly Contest #362

It was the wrong key, obviously. That should have been my first sign.The real estate agent, Marko, looked at me like I was an idiot when I tried to jam it into the lock. I'd been at it for five minutes, sweating in the October heat, the key scraping against the metal like it was personally offended by my presence. He just stood there, this Marko, his arms crossed, watching me struggle. Didn't say a word. Finally, he reached into his own pocket and pulled out another key. Same shape. Different cut. He turned the lock with a single, effortless...

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The Past Is a Bad Linen Shirt

Weekly Contest #361

The sun here, it’s a different kind of bastard. Not like the polite, hazy thing you get in London or New York—that’s a gentleman’s sun, you know, takes its hat off and bids you good day. This one, the Dalmatian one, it’s a thug. It leans on you. It gets right in your face, heavy and mean, and just… presses. I can feel it on the back of my neck, right through the stupid straw hat my assistant, or somebody, insisted on. The one that makes me look like a retired racehorse trainer.I’m supposed to be here for the—what did they call it? The "Reson...

9 likes 1 comment 1
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The Ghost of the Cake

By noon, the Adriatic sun was no longer shining—it was pressing down, flattening Dubrovnik into glare and heat, turning the old stones into mirrors of white and molten gold. From a third-floor window tucked deep in the tangled streets of Ploče, the air drifted in heavy with salt and crushed basil. Then, almost shyly at first, another scent began to claim the room—warm, sweet, intentional—the quiet announcement that a cake was coming into being.Paula, a woman of twenty-four with a riot of dark curls barely contained by a patterned silk scarf,...

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The Island That Loved Too Harshly

The sea was the first thing Marina saw every morning — endless, blue, and deceitfully calm. From her kitchen window, it stretched toward the horizon, glittering like a promise it never intended to keep.She lived on Vela Stina, an island so small that gossip traveled faster than the wind. Two hundred souls clung to its rocky shore, proud and weary, their houses painted white but their hearts full of shadows. Marina had been born here, like her mother and grandmother before her. She had left once, briefly, when she was twenty and foolish, but ...

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The Shadows Behind the Olive Trees

The cicadas were still buzzing when Nika drove her little blue Fiat along the winding coastal road to Orebić. The sun dipped low, gilding the Adriatic with a copper sheen, and the ferry to Korčula shimmered in the distance like a toy boat. Nika lowered the window and inhaled the sea-salt air, savoring the breeze before it was stolen by another humid night.At thirty-three, Nika was restless. She had returned from Zagreb to Pelješac after her father’s death, inheriting a small stone house and a neglected olive grove. The grove was wild now, ta...

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The Keepers of the Stone

Weekly Contest #321

The sun in Dalmatia does not gentle the earth; it hammers it. It beats the ancient limestone to a blinding white, bakes the red soil to terracotta, and turns the Adriatic into a sheet of shattered sapphire. For Mara, returning to the village of her childhood after two decades in the soft, grey light of London, the intensity was a physical blow. She’d come to empty her late grandmother’s house, a task she’d approached with the brisk efficiency that defined her life as a financial auditor. It was a matter of ledgers and logistics, of sorting t...

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Where the Paths Don't Hold

Weekly Contest #320

The Adriatic sun, a merciless disc of white gold, hammered the ancient limestone of the Dalmatian coast. For Luka, returning to the village of Mošćeni after two decades felt like stepping into a photograph that had been left to fade in a drawer. The identical sun-bleached stone houses clung to the hillside, the same sapphire sea whispered against the pebbled shore, and the same scent of pine resin, wild rosemary, and salt hung heavy in the air. It was a place of stunning, immutable beauty, and for Luka, it was a gilded cage whose door he had...

12 likes 1 comment 1
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When the River Fell Silent

Weekly Contest #319

The first thing I remember is the taste of limestone. Not a taste on a tongue, for I have never had such a thing, but a taste in my essence. It was the incredible, clean, mineral shock of water forcing its way through ancient stone, finding a fissure, a weakness, a new path. I was that path. I was that pressure. I was the sigh of the rock and the chuckle of the stream that was born from it, high in the snaggle-toothed teeth of the Sniježnica mountain.They call me a vila. A nymph. A spirit of the water. I am the consciousness of the aquifer t...

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The First Choice

The Adriatic sun, a brutal, brilliant diamond in a vast blue vault, hammered the ancient white stone of Split. It baked the marble of Diocletian’s Palace, flashed off the windshields of cars crammed along the Riva, and filled the air with a heavy, salt-tinged lethargy. For Luka Perić, standing in the shadow of the black granite sphinx that had seen it all for millennia, the heat felt personal. It was the weight of expectation, of history, of his own perpetual, simmering disappointment.He was late. Again. His scooter, a temperamental vintage ...

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A Key to the Past

Weekly Contest #318

The Adriatic sun, a merciless, brilliant disc, hammered the ancient flagstones of Split's Diocletian's Palace. The air shimmered with heat, and the cacophony of a thousand tourists filled the scene. Luka Krstić, a guide for 'Dalmatian Dreams Tours', raised his voice above the din, a well-rehearsed melody of facts and anecdotes. "And here, in the Peristyle, the Roman emperor would have been greeted as a god. Notice the perfect alignment of the sphinx, brought from Egypt over seventeen centuries ago…" His eyes, the colour of the sea before a s...

11 likes 1 comment 1
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Knock at the Door

Weekly Contest #317

The sun had just begun to dip behind the limestone cliffs of Cavtat, painting the sky in molten gold and amber, when Ana noticed him. She had come down to the small, stony harbour to escape the stale air of her apartment and the ceaseless hum of her own thoughts. The town was quieter now, the tourist buses gone, leaving only the low cries of gulls and the gentle slap of waves against the boats.He stood by the edge of the water, motionless, his figure almost blending with the shadows cast by the tall cypresses lining the promenade. Ana first ...

22 likes 7 comments 7
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The Silence of My Voice

Weekly Contest #316

I never thought silence could feel like a punishment. Yet here I am, in a villa perched on the cliffs above Cavtat, listening to the Adriatic stretch itself endlessly before me, and realizing that the silence I have chosen is not freedom—it is a sentence.I used to sing. Not casually, not for the faint appreciation of a café crowd. I sang in halls where chandeliers glimmered like captured stars, where the audience held its breath at every note, and I gave them all I had. My voice carried joy, sorrow, longing, despair—everything a heart could ...

11 likes 5 comments 5
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Beneath the Cypress Shadows

Weekly Contest #315

I arrived in Dubrovnik at the end of September, when the air had that peculiar mix of summer's fading warmth and autumn's crisp promise. The tourists had thinned; the Stradun was quieter. The locals, freed from the constant rush of summer, moved more slowly, chatting in doorways, their voices mingling with the scent of coffee drifting from the cafés. I had come here not as a tourist but as a translator on a short freelance contract. A week of work, maybe two, helping a small museum near Cavtat prepare an exhibition for English...

17 likes 4 comments 4
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Paws of Fire

Weekly Contest #314

I'll say it right from the start: **I do not do well in heat.** I am a delicate tabby flower, designed for lounging gracefully on window sills during mild spring mornings or doing Olympic-level pouncing in cool autumn breezes. I was not—let me repeat: **NOT**—built for 34°C with humidity levels so high even the curtains gave up and stuck themselves to the walls like sweaty towels. But do my sisters listen to me?Nooooooo.Because Spurka thinks she's some kind of dark, mysterious jungle panther who thrives in tropical conditions, and Kitka—don'...

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Lavender Season

Weekly Contest #313

It started with the scent.A gust of late summer wind rolled down the slopes of Hvar's hinterland and drifted into the small coastal town of Stari Grad, stirring dust, salt, and memory. But above all, it carried the unmistakable scent of lavender—thick, sharp, and nostalgic. It crept through the open shutters of Kuća Šime, the old stone house on the edge of the olive grove, and settled over Lina's skin like a question she hadn't asked in years.She stood barefoot in the kitchen, her fingers deep in a bowl of dough. The texture was sticky—wrong...

18 likes 11 comments 11
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