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Ari Vovk

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2025

Stories (14)

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39 Followers

52 Following

14 Stories

393 karma pts

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Time to Say Goodbye

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #340

The soaring violins of Time to Say Goodbye fill the hermetic chamber as I pull the door shut. The door seals with an expensive-sounding pressurized thud. Dave pulls his rumbling truck ahead of us; the world inside the Mercedes is self-contained. Sarah Brightman’s transporting soprano wraps us entirely in her evocative plaint. The clinically white gauges float in the dash. The 6-inch LCD command screen is equally bright. With the headlamps killed, Guillaume’s got the lighting exactly backward. We are essentially blind to the outside world, ye...

1 like

Mice in the Walls

Ari Vovk

When the doctors told Sarah a blood cancer killed Kittie, she demanded to know whether it couldn’t have been passed to her daughter by the mice in the walls. And though the doctors sought to reassure her that this was highly unlikely, Sarah was not reassured. She knew her surviving daughter summoned the infestation, like a mekhasheyfe bringing forth the shedim. She knew they had taken Kittie’s light. At a minimum your mother encouraged them. She had done nothing to stop them. That first horrible night, when Abe had returned, alone, to the s...

1 like

Tammy

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #309

Down here the soot-dark shacks stood in rocks and dirt and mud, hemmed in by the river and the hillside.But at the top of the hill, hidden from view, the houses were well maintained, their pretty lawns tumbling out onto the broad boulevards of M, L, and K streets. There were tall trees all around up there: Douglas Fir and Ash and Maple and the ubiquitous Linden. The neighborhood at the top of the hill was bursting with white chokecherry blossoms and white and pink and red crab apple flowers.Down here a broad woman in a house dress sat in a r...

18 likes

San Luis Bright

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #308

December 1969 Lucy,Before Pinkie went off to war and never came back, he revealed to me the mystery of geodes. We were sitting on a log at Pebble Beach, where all the river rocks are jumbled up. The beach was so close to my bedroom that at night in the unseeing San Luis dark, I heard splashing rivulets slapping the shore. Sometimes a truck rumbled through the dark, his noisy passage obscuring the splash, his headlamps refracting blue and white.I was throwing rocks, enjoying the satisfying plonk as each stone broke the slapping surface. ‘Did ...

14 likes

Chayei Sarah

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #307

Things were never quite the same between the world and Sarah. Someone well acquainted with the family told me that Sarah knew your mother had done this to her kid sister. Sarah knew it was like the stronger chick pushing the weakest sibling from the nest. Tormenting the weaker one, pecking its neck, sucking up all the nutrients of the regurgitated worms from her mother’s bill. Eventually the weak and tormented and friendless younger chick falls quietly from the nest and into the hungry mandibles of the predators on the turf below. Sarah knew...

15 likes

Mekhasheyfe

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #306

Ghost,When Uncle Al died, leaving Leon grieving, and Rachel drifting into depravity, the last bit of my forebears’ lambency blinked out with him. Rachel, 12 years younger than Al, was a sort of big sister to me, at least before she started to spiral. Rachel’s descent into her own darkness preceded Uncle Al’s passing by several years. As such things tend to unfold, by the time I needed Rachel most, she had already begun to deteriorate, a reality which I only pieced together over time.I had known Rachel since I was 9 and she was 15. Mother hir...

12 likes

Petrouchka's Fatiguing Dream

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #304

November 18, 20232:17 AMSubject: Fatiguing Dream Sis,I had the dream again last night.The Charlatan’s hot and bitter breath was moist on my fuzzy face; his hands were firm on my sawdust shoulders, holding me in place. The Moor, scimitar in hand, led the Ballerina away. I tried to protest; pathetic, high-pitched sounds emerging from my levering felt mouth. My oversize head was hanging to my chest; my arms and legs were waving under a force beyond my own. The gathered people laughed. Dad stood off to the side, watching.I needed to piss, but I ...

8 likes

I Have Heard the Mermaids Singing, Each to Each

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #290

1One morning Father observes that she has brought forth these downy hard nubs. So coldly forlorn in the bright morning frost as to seem almost dead, her diaphanous white buds augur a quickening in white and pink. He knows that her blossoms will soon blush awake, her young leaves will blink shyly at the chill dawn. Dressing her spindly twigs in bright green promise, her leaves and blossoms will attract flies and bees and all manner of little things.The rain will come, persisting for several days. Petals falling with the rain. Littering the tu...

15 likes

Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #289

My dad lives in this time and space, riding his motorcycle about the neighborhood barefooted, in cutoff jeans and old t-shirt, black curls blowing high above his forehead in the breeze, round sunglasses flashing sepia light shining through 1970’s Polaroids. Thanks to him, I have the impression all life began here.Within a few years immoderate facial hair will absorb his features, cutoff jeans will grow into filthy dungarees, heavy work boots will cover his bare feet. The body will grow puffier - caked in bits of drywall mud - on his trousers...

16 likes

A Horse Bolted in Boylston Street

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #288

Though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I fear no evil. On the day in 1937 when Grandpa Aaron was incinerated, shabbas had arrived sunny and mild. A pity of doves gathered, pecking and muttering, sighing and cooing about the pond in Public Garden. Then G-d winked, the sun flashed, an involuntary chill coursed through creation, and a horse bolted in Boylston Street. Its cart, loaded with Diamond matchbooks and Standard Oil kerosene canisters, hit the curb. Volatile freight striked and clattered. Matchbooks ignited. Canis...

19 likes

Chava

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #287

September 30, 1979Chava,Because this was the end, Bernie rented a big house on the lake for one last shindig before the winter would set in, and I would die. The place had a wrap-around veranda in the shadow of a grove of large deciduous trees blowing and dancing and holding space on the edge of the lake, their brilliant leaves obscuring the setting sun, her light refracting through their boughs, reflecting from the lake, alighting here and there upon the drifting piles of autumn leaves littering the low cropped turf, etc.Bernie placed a cup...

11 likes

It's a Pity

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #286

It is springtime in this littoral wasteland. Heavy Gulf weather, having relieved itself over the Mesopotamian Marshes, hangs oppressively upon these blown-up shores. The midday atmosphere smothers every cooling breeze whispering off the recumbent sea.As war machines desolate this slip of land, the writer seeks shelter in metaphor. The birds in his rafters shuffle, and sigh. The sun’s first rays have awaked them. Hunting drones predate above his creaking attic. Their sites have discovered his aerie. Like the pity in his rafters, distractedly ...

24 likes

Sleep Whispers 'Come'

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #285

Now I can't return to the patio bar. I can't remember the way. Perhaps I want it too much.He leaned in. His body. Bergamot and citrus. His muskiness. A curl falling before my eye, a knuckle pressing upon my temple. Studied grace. Sleep whispered, ‘come.’ Coruscating tikis. His stubbled jaw, now a hooded eye. Moistening breath warm on my neck, bittersweet. A smoldering cigarette. A Sazerac melting the rocks in a low ball on a high top. I rise from bed. Pink slippers, slightly soiled, spilled coffee. Taking up my fraying shawl, quiet...

18 likes

Pinkie's Promise

Ari Vovk

Submitted to Contest #284

Note: This story contains a scene of accidental death. It describes cruelty toward animals. It includes a letter written from the perspective of a combatant in wartime, describing some of the difficult things he has witnessed there. The goldfinches arrived sparkling upon the landing the same day that Ernesto returned, alone, bearing his news like a rucksack full of stones, weighing down each doleful step in a cloud of San Luis dust. I noticed the goldfinches through the kitchen window, gathering upon the cement outside the door, and flutt...

13 likes