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B. D. Bradshaw

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2023

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63 Stories

277 karma pts

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The Body in the Basement

(Content warning: themes of death/murder)Tick... tick... tick. The clock on the mantle punctured the silence, counting the seconds like a nail tapping on glass.Each click carried through Violet's chest, and her heart heard the commands, synchronising its thumping to its monotonous rhythm.Tick... tick... tick. She lay on the floor, the sick, artificial florally scent of carpet cleaner clouding her head. Her fingers pinched around another jigsaw piece, half of her thoughts focused on where it belonged in the puzzle, the other half stuck on som...

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Buried Secrets

When I was fifteen, every Saturday, I would make my way to my neighbour, Ms. Murphy's house to do a little housekeeping in exchange for pocket money. It was no trouble - she and my grandmother had been close friends, so she was practically family.Ms. Murphy lived alone, and at the grand age of ninety-nine, there were many things that she struggled with. While her late husband's estate paid for a carer five days a week, my parents helped out by providing meals, and the occasional chat over a cup of tea. With each passing week, we couldn't hel...

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Misnamed Identity

Weekly Contest #257

(Content warning: Theme of death, mentions of gore.)I was dead, that's all I knew.I simply continued to sit quietly, stilly, waiting for something to change, for memory to return. I feel I can no longer use my eyes, and yet it is as if their range has improved. I can see either wall of the chamber - a slick, misted stone cloaked in the shadows, lit briefly in the dim glow from a crack in the ceiling overhead. And forward, there is an entrance, though the path beyond is unknown to me, fully shrouded and dimmed. The air is cold, damp, and sour...

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The Empress and the Bandit King

The roar of the crowd droned through the mighty coliseum walls, the tumultuous waves of red and gold swelling, rippling and undulating like the evening tides of the Blackknife Bay. Another warrior cut down in one sweep of the blade, his body buckling at the crook of the knee and the inner curve of the spine, backwards, spilling over the dirt. His assassin, a towering colossus of gnarled muscle stood unyielding, presenting the sword wrapped around a bulging, sinuous arm to the audience. Teeth bared in a ferocious snarl, veins throbbing, he ho...

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Cookies for my Planet!

Twenty thousand years in the future, at the core of the Milky Way, the Galactic Assembly would play host to the most epic event in the universe. The Infinity Auction - a colossal convention where aliens gathered to buy ancient artefacts, magnificent masterpieces, and plenty of planetoids. There were Umphits and Trullets, Flibbertibs and Quadzets. They arrived in their starships, their spacecrafts and saucers. They mingled in the meeting room, gossiped in the gallery, and reclined in the refectory. And then came the hour when the auction bega...

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Mercy's Quandary

Ancalen had fallen. Zaeren, captain of the guard, tore along the fortress halls, searching for stragglers. Against the thunder of crumbling stone, her armour crunched and crackled, sparkling in the rippling firelight. A cloud of rubble tore through the passageway, the ground beneath her feet quaking. She barely balanced herself on the wall and her spear, choking on the dust. The way was blocked, the only alternative being the stairs to the dungeons. That was fine, that way led to the siege tunnels - she still had an escape route. The rest of...

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Take Time to Think

'If you had the power to stop time, what would you do with it?'That was where our conversation had begun - a simple, non-confrontational thought experiment to gauge my friends' morality... Right? Well, yes and no. Mostly I was just looking for some inspiration; ideas don't always strike me unawares.Freddy said he'd rob a bank if he could. Pretty boring answer if you ask me - from experience I know it's actually easier to steal the stuff than the cash to buy it.Luke surprisingly put some genuine thought into it. He figured electronics probabl...

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Night and Day

With the graceful retreat of the sun towards the western horizon, the sky ignited with gold, reaching up to the blue to dance upon the nebula's blushed wisps - cosmic phantoms floating upon a celestial zephyr. Thistles swayed and sang, caressed by the breeze, gently grazing the fuzz of their leaves upon the lake's glassy surface. High above, a flock of starlings swam on the updrafts, twisting and arching like brushstrokes to paint upon a canvas of rose. They descended into the sanctuary of their canopy abode, chirping noisily for the moment ...

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The Reserve

"Where to, boyo?" The twenty-something woman rolled down the window of her minivan, flashing a sly grin to the kid outside her door. He stood shifting on his toes, his back near buckling under the massive weight of his pack. It was as big as he was, with extra bags strapped all over it, ready to engulf his small frame with one wrong move.With a quivering lip, he cleared his throat. "T-The Reserve... You're headed that way, right?""Oh, sure. Yeah, hop in." She unlocked the passenger side door. "You can put your stuff in 'back."The seventeen-y...

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Dreams of a Future

The Oxford Literary Archive was the life's work of none other than the distinguished Professor Nicholas Gordon Anderson, or so his fellow academics claimed. Though he may have established it, and laid the groundwork for its cultivation, it was his students that translated its donated materials to digital form. They were tasked with taking the physical works from the university depository, and copying them into the database - with the promise of unlimited coffee refills from the library café, and a commendation for their permanent records. Es...

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Faetouched

Wight Manor in Glen ne Geas had been home to the clan of Cailein since the first age. Its cliff-top location, secret passages, battlements, barbican and towers had kept it safe from a thousand sieges, but for Aileas, it was little more than a playground. Though she had no siblings, she played with the children of the clan's guard, relishing the long daylight hours by frolicking about the manor in efforts to avoid her father's watchful eye. If the leader of the clan would catch Aileas in the midst of any strenuous activity, he'd send her sulk...

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The Wind in the Willows

Weekly Contest #248

'The Wind in the Willows.' I never actually read the book but I remember the puppet series from when I was a kid. It used to terrify me - something about the stop motion was too uncanny for my eight-year-old brain. There were only a couple of episodes that followed the plot of the book, the rest I assumed were original stories written with the same characters, or parts of the book padded out for runtime.Although that one show scared the heck out of me as a kid, I remember the main story and the characters themselves fondly. What was it reall...

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Smoulder

Haven was a realm divided in two. There was Verdant - a flourishing land of green, home to humans, creatures and flora, all unique though each tailored to the same fundamental design. And then there was Smoulder, a primordial ecosystem of chaos. To the inhabitants of Verdant, its fundamentals of function were unknown - incomprehensible, intangible, untameable. The plants and animals knew to stay away on instinct, but man's curiosity meant that laws had to be enforced to discourage traversal and exploration.The divide between the lands was a ...

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Escape Room 4

The escape room was Jackie's idea. 'You love puzzles, don't you Grace? Let's do an escape room for your birthday!' I mean, Sudoku and crosswords were more the types of puzzles I was actually into, but sure, why wouldn't I want to try it? From what I've seen about escape rooms, they're just warehouses split up like office cubicles with drama school students fake crying about fake apocalypses or zombie virus outbreaks. What I really wanted for my twenty-first birthday was a night on the town, not a day of playing pretend in some disused parkin...

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The Tides Above - The Eirai Myth Behind Meteor Showers

Weekly Contest #245

In the days of oblivion, the Tides Above over the realm of mortals were rich and plentiful. It was a vast ocean - not of water, but of aetherium - the cosmic lifeblood from which all existence began. And within the depths of this ethereal sea swam great schools of fish - shoals that would undertake grand journeys across the tides that would last centuries. And such majestic creatures glimmered like the starlight as they caught the gemstones that drifted in the swell, and carried them to the western and eastern shores - their crossing a testa...

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