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Anna Soldenhoff

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2025

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27 Stories

701 karma pts

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Don’t Ring That Bell

Weekly Contest #375

“Don’t ring that bell.” Mira said it while carrying three coffees, which was impressive because she was also smoking and complaining about the heat. I laughed. “Why?” “Because I said so.” “That isn’t an answer.” “It is in this village.” We were standing outside the old chapel above a small bay south of Cavtat, where the stone was so hot my sandals stuck slightly whenever I stopped walking. It was late September, although the weather hadn’t got the message. The sea below was almost too blue to look at. Mira put the coffees on the low wall. “I...

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Still Ticking

Weekly Contest #374

The dead man’s watch was still ticking. A cheap Casio, the kind you buy at the kiosk by the ferry terminal in Split. It was on his wrist, and his wrist was on the concrete, and the concrete was slick with something I chose not to identify. I wasn’t supposed to be there. That’s the thing. I was just looking for a place to piss. It was the summer of ‘98, or maybe ‘99, the war was over but the tourists hadn’t quite figured that out yet. I was working for my uncle’s construction outfit, which is a generous way of saying I was hauling bags of cem...

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The Memory of Water

Weekly Contest #368

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 born high in the snaggle-toothed peaks of the Sniježnica mountain. They call me a vila. A nymph. A spirit of the water. I am the consciousness of the aquifer that feeds the Konavle field. I am the memory in the deep pools of th...

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The Door of My Heart

Weekly Contest #367

The key turned in the lock with a sound that felt final, a metallic click that echoed through the empty hallway like a period at the end of a sentence. I stood on the threshold of my grandmother's house on the island of Korčula, my hand still resting on the cold iron key, and I knew that this was a door I could not open again. Not because the lock was broken. Not because I had lost the key. But because I had made a decision that could not be undone. My name is Paula. I am thirty-four years old, and I had just sold my grandmother's house. The...

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Grief is a Current

Weekly Contest #366

The sun on my neck is a familiar weight, a warm hand that’s been there since I was a girl. It’s the same sun that bleaches the white stone of the riva, that turns the Adriatic into a sheet of hammered silver, that makes the pine trees on the hill smell of resin and heat. But today, it feels like a brand. A reminder that I am still here, in the present, while Luka is not. I should be inside. The apartment with its blue shutters and the geraniums on the balcony that I can’t bring myself to water, is cool. But the silence in there is too loud. ...

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The Last Sunset

Weekly Contest #365

The sun over Dalmatia wasn't a gentle thing. It was a brute, a hammer of gold that beat down on the white stone of the riva, the coastal promenade, until the very air shimmered with heat. I was sitting at a café in Split, nursing a macchiato that was already lukewarm and staring at the ancient Roman columns of Diocletian's Palace, feeling the delicious, foreign weight of being on my own. I was twenty, from Kraków, and this was my grand adventure. Two weeks of Adriatic sun, cheap wine, and pretending I was worldly and independent. I’d booked ...

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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, effortles...

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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 "Reso...

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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, t...

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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...

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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...

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