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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2025
Submitted to Contest #330
I wasn’t supposed to be kissing him. See, there are kisses and there are KISSES. You can engage in an underlined one. Or one in italics. Bold or regular. There are kisses you forget almost immediately afterwards, and kisses that linger for forty years. So that when you think back, you bite your lip and look off into the distance, and you can still feel his hands in your hair and his body against yours, and most importantly his lips. Oh, his lips. I wasn’t supposed to be kissing him. Let’s get that straight right up front. I wasn’t supposed ...
She said, “I like my coffee like I like my men. Late at night and a little depressed.” He was intrigued and moved one stool closer to her at the bar. He’d never seen anyone drinking black coffee with the intensity she had been doing all night. It had to be hot. The bartender continually made fresh pots. This chick didn’t wince or flinch, and although there was sugar on the bar, she hadn’t touched her spoon. “So you’re a purist?” he asked. “You could say that.” “What makes coffee depressed?” "What makes anyone depressed?” she asked. “You tell...
Submitted to Contest #329
“You know this is why you're single, right?” Jake asked, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. Ace could have said the same thing right back at him. Jake often had a little catsup somewhere on his person. Instead, Ace spun his butter knife on the table, as if he were going to make the stainless balance on the tip. “You have to stop with the nonsense,” his ex-former future brother-in-law said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Yeah you do. The numbers, man. All you do is talk to people about numbers.” Numbers followed Ace—or vi...
Submitted to Contest #328
“You can’t go back in time for $17,” Randall said. “I can,” Meg insisted. “It doesn’t make any sense. It costs twenty times that to take the trip unless you do stand-by. Most people want to go back in time to fix something big. You know that. You’ve read the articles, right? You get how this tech works.” “That’s why I’ve got to go. I need to fix something.” She steeled herself and looked directly into his eyes. She really wanted him to understand. “I didn’t have the money to lose. Losing seventeen bucks changed everything.” He’d heard the st...
Submitted to Contest #325
Cassandra could sense when Calvin was getting ready to leave work. He would be shifting his mask, taking off his “Work” Calvin face and putting on his “Home” Calvin face, tying the knots under his straw-blond hair. Even though his office was downtown, and it took at least 30 minutes to get back to their little bungalow, she had a feeling when he lifted his briefcase, said goodbye to his secretary, Trish, and headed to the parking garage. She’d speed up then, fixing everything the way “Home” Calvin liked. Glossy magazines that featured his th...
Submitted to Contest #324
You couldn’t tell Chad anything. Well, you could, but he wouldn’t listen. He always had to figure out anything and everything the hard way. He didn’t even consider it a hard way. If you said, “Hey, don’t touch that, Chad, it’s hot.” Chad would touch it, and say, “Yeah. That’s hot.” It was as if every day were his first day on earth. If someone accidentally used an idiom in front of Chad, he would cock his head and look at that person with his striking blue eyes piercing into their very cerebral cortex. “Why would anyone try to make a silk p...
Submitted to Contest #323
CW: Horror, implied gore/violence Melanie took her time. There were candles to light and blinds to draw and a bath bomb to drop and a record to play. The undoing of the week came with a specific order of events in order to welcome in the weekend and wash away five days of dreck, the dust and the grit (both emotional and physical) that got under her nails and into her soul. She took her time placing the rose-scented candle on the inside corner and the vanilla one on the edge of the sink. There was a knock on the front door right then, of cour...
Submitted to Contest #322
The waiter had those reptilian, once-in-a-lifetime kind of eyes, green ovals with yellow in the center, flickering and jewel-like. He wasn't exactly attractive. It was more that he was enticing, slim in his fitted black waistcoat and perfectly pressed trousers, and charming in the way he spoke with an almost hidden lisp, as if his tongue touched each letter of every word but lingered longer on the sibilant consonants. Think the opening lines of Lolita, except in this case his tongue caressed every “s.” He was courteous, but not obsequious. T...
Submitted to Contest #321
Norbert and Bobbin and Reginald and Frisky were all standing with their white gloves on, wringing their hands, bowing and shuffling. They had been taught what to do if the mistress tinkled her little bell or the master bellowed. But not one of the classes had explained how to deal with this type of disaster. Sure, Gilbert and Filbert and Wilson and Narwhal had learned how to press the lord’s boxers and puff the lady’s niblets, and they were well schooled in how to pretend not to see indiscretions of any type occurring directly in their line ...
Submitted to Contest #319
I am tired of being called his monster. I am literally exhausted. Seriously, when someone says “Frankenstein,” and then some arrogant little twerp adds, “I think you mean Frankenstein’s monster, the doctor was Frankenstein,” I believe we should all be able to cannibalize that person for parts. You should just call me Frank. It’s much easier, neater, we can all be on the same page of the same classic. And yeah, I know. I know. I am a monster. I scare people with my oddly colored skin and my mismatched limbs. But the thing is, aren’t we all ju...
Submitted to Contest #316
The thing is, you never want to take off the mask if you don’t have to. You keep yourself contained, calm, carefully tucked away. All your tendrils in place. Nothing unfurled. You smile with your mouth but not your eyes. You make people feel understood and cared for from the moment you punch the clock in the a.m. to nine long hours later. You are a customer service specialist. The problem is that there are certain people who want only to break your shell. They will try anything, everything, demand your manager, a refund, resolution, restitut...
Submitted to Contest #314
Sleep and I? We’ve never been on friendly terms. In fact, sleep treats me as if I owe him money. Or I did it with his girlfriend. Sleep treats me like he’s a bartender and I’ve overstayed my welcome. "You don't have to go home, but you can’t sleep here.” I can’t sleep, and this means that in every city I’ve ever lived in, I know what goes on at night. I know who is up and who is down and which corners of the darkness are safe and which are trouble. I know who I can call and who will be annoyed if I wake them up at all hours. I know what dawn...
Submitted to Contest #313
We’d only met the one time. After years of semi knowing each other in the way that the internet allows people to semi know each other. Like, you're not sure if you should call the people who live in the box or your phone your friend or not. Would they be there for you in real life? People who are only available with an emoji or a meme, who can silence you with a button or send you to voicemail. Who leave you on “seen.” We met the one time, at a coffee shop, and we were polite and Ms. Manners would have nodded from her perch above and said, "...
The kiss was like rose petals dappled with dew. Except it wasn’t. Because kisses aren’t like that. Kisses are like nothing you can describe with flowers. His kiss was dark-roasted coffee on a cold morning, a sensation that drives the bad dreams away and sets you up for a new day. Except kisses are kisses and coffee is coffee. His kiss was warm laundry fresh out of the dryer. The fleeting scent of a candle right when you blow it out. Sparklers on the Fourth of July. Frost on the windowsill. And all of that is wrong. Poets want the kiss to be ...
Submitted to Contest #312
I know he’s seeing someone else. Don't tell me he’s not. Don’t say I’m imagining things. The worst response to offer in a situation like this is to gaslight the wife. And okay, sure, fine. I’m not officially his wife. Not technically. We didn’t stand up in front of god and everyone and say our vows, but I like to think I came close. Maybe, I should have been prepared for this. The world is a quickly changing place after all.What’s popular one day is out-of-style the next, and with built-in obsolescence it’s anyone’s guess what (or who) is no...
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