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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025
Submitted to Contest #326
The house taught her how to listen. It did not do it kindly. It did it by subtraction. The refrigerator’s low hum slowed to a long breath. The old radiator ticked in a rhythm too steady to be mechanical. Even when nothing moved, it felt like something was still moving, just out of sight. Claire stood in the narrow hallway and watched the far mirror take her in. It was a tall mirror, beveled at the edges, the kind that makes a hallway feel longer than it is. Her mother had kept it covered with a sheet. Claire remembered the way that fabric ha...
Submitted to Contest #324
At dawn, the sea was a pewter plate. Nia stood calf-deep where the tide nibbled at the shore and tried to forget what her body could feel. The women of the Morwynion Club shouted to each other and slapped their arms to wake the blood. They always seemed a few degrees warmer than the air. Their laughter was not cruel, just practiced. It had learned to rise in cold places. “Ready?” called Siân, who wore a red bobble hat, bright and unmissable. “In a minute,” Nia said, though she had come here for this minute and no other. She drew the zipper u...
Submitted to Contest #323
The bell looked further away than it was, smudged and patient atop the green. Since the first winter of the war, the bell had sounded every morning, one toll for each name carved on the wall. People drifted toward it with the same sleepy determination as always. Their boots whispering through wet grass, hoods pulled up as the mist folded its way along the ridge and settled into the village like a thin shawl. The bell’s rope, dark with years of handling, hung straight. Elias stood behind the elm and watched them gather. His breath came out in...
Submitted to Contest #322
There was a winter where the paints froze on my windowsill. I learned to warm tubes in my palms before the first squeeze. My hands smelled like turpentine and cheap coffee. I painted on cardboard once, because canvas cost a bus fare and a bus fare cost a meal. Those were the weeks when I measured time in strokes and bites. The radiator sighed like a tired dog. My landlord learned how to knock with two fingers and I learned how to make a laugh sound like a promise. That was where she had found me. Evelyn Roche arrived in a coat the color of...
Submitted to Contest #320
The forest still smelled of smoke even though the fire had passed nearly a year ago. Mara tugged her bandana higher over her mouth as she stepped carefully between the blackened trunks. Every footfall sent up a soft puff of ash that clung to her boots and found its way into her lungs no matter how tightly she pulled the cloth across her face. The sky above was too bright, a hard blue that made the charred land seem even harsher, and the silence pressed in until her ears rang. She told herself she was imagining it, that the wildlife would ret...
Submitted to Contest #319
The orchard is quiet when I first step into it, not a quiet peace, but of a breath held too long. It’s a hush that needles against my skin, the kind that makes you want to whisper without knowing why. The air smells of damp earth, of moss clinging to bark, of sweetness gone just past ripe. The fruit here has secrets bruising under their skin. As a child I was never allowed past the first row. My grandmother would grip my wrist if I wandered too close, her knuckles white with something more than age. “They’re greedy things,” she’d mutter, t...
Shortlisted for Contest #317 ⭐️
It rained on the day they buried my grandmother. Not the hard kind that rattles rooftops and sends people running for shelter, but the quiet, persistent sort that seeps into wool and bones alike. It felt like the sky had taken up the same soft voice the priest used, and together they were asking us to keep our heads down. Be good. Be small. Be done. Inside the little church, lilies crowded the altar. I sat in the second pew with my knees pressed to the polished wood. The casket looked lighter than wood should look. My mother's hand was flat ...
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