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Bob Faszczewski

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2021

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150 Stories

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Salt Water Washes Clean

Weekly Contest #352

John Norton loved the peace and quiet of his palatial home on the bay side of 94th Street in Ocean City, Maryland. After a busy day filling prescriptions at the local hospital in Berlin, Maryland he often would drive to his retreat at the beach and sit down to a dinner of medium rare steak and a glass of wine from Windmill Creek. Afterwards, he would continue reading his latest James Paterson crime novel while relaxing on the comfortable wicker chair on his patio and taking in the solitude of the peaceful bay. On most nights, thi...

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Time Runs Out

Weekly Contest #346

Annapolis Police Sergeant Jim Jenson and his squad had their hands full in their crowded precinct as they tried to pin down the details of the busiest crime spree the capital had seen in his lifetime.Their unit had arrested so many suspects that no chairs remained in the bullpen. Smash and grab bandits had knocked over many of the town’s most exclusive jewelry stores so quickly that, between police, suspects and their attorneys and witnesses, not a spare space remained in the middle of the standing room only crowd in the precinct.“All of tho...

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The Day Everything Stopped

Weekly Contest #344

Struter Jones dashed to the corner–just in time she figured--to catch the 7:58 Fifth Avenue bus. As usual, she had timed her sprint to the bus stop down to the last second. Quickly getting fed up with her go-nowhere clerical position, she did only what she had to do when she had to do it. “Only in a holding pattern with this gig,” she thought to herself as she searched for the miracle job that would take her out of the morass that, for the last five years, had kept her on the vicious treadmill while she waited to crash through t...

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Seaside Redemption

Weekly Contest #343

John Norton loved the peace and quiet of his palatial home on the bayside of 94th Street in Ocean City, Maryland. After a busy day filling prescriptions at Atlantic General Hospital in Berlin, Maryland he often would drive to his retreat at the beach and sit down to a dinner of medium rare steak and a glass of wine from Windmill Creek. Afterwards, he would continue reading his latest James Paterson crime novel while relaxing on the comfortable wicker chair on his patio. On most nights, this would lull him into a deep sleep there,...

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Finally Making the Score

Weekly Contest #341

CW: Substance abuse, Physical violence or abuse Wanted high school football coach to lead championship-caliber team.Jim Pierce, fresh out of rehab from the opiate addiction that nearly ended his life, had sworn he would never again return to the small town. But the ad, that jumped out at the former high school football star from the pages of The Bonn Bugle, presented a challenge he felt he could not ignore. He slammed the door of the fleabag motel where he had spent the last six months of his recovery and decided to return to the scene of ...

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Do Twin Brew Spirits Still Roam Across the Garden State?

Weekly Contest #339

Elizabethport, New Jersey, has given its residents plenty of fodder to produce strange and macabre tales, often spun from its reputation as a 1920s mobster haven. Much of its eerie history resulted from its location along the Arthur Kill as it flows into the Hudson River and the constant change in the landscape along the banks of the kill as the area evolved from a Revolutionary War commercial hub to center of industry to a modern transportation corridor feeding into Newark International Airport. This transformation often left in its wa...

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Blowin' in the Ether

Weekly Contest #337

Blowin’ in the Ether I laid on the Assateague Island beach drenched in the warmth of the sun’s rays as my mind wandered to far-off places. I soon fell asleep, and my dreams transported me thousands of miles away to East Maui's Waianapanapa State Park in the Hawaiian Islands. Back to the wonderful vacations my family had taken there during my teens. Suddenly, a powerful wind blew sand across my face, carrying with it a crumpled piece of paper. My curiosity peaked, I opened it to a strange and unexpected message, “A matter of imp...

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Not What We Signed Up For

Weekly Contest #336

It started out as a pleasant jaunt along Route 50 East to Maryland’s coastline on the Atlantic Ocean. We headed out in the early afternoon, figuring it would give us plenty of time to bask in the sun of Ocean City and later frolic in the waves–perhaps spotting a few dolphins or whales breaching in the surf. We stopped in one of the boardwalk eateries for a little pizza and a few adult beverages before continuing our trip. We figured we’d return in the early evening to our bed and breakfast in quaint and quiet downtown Berlin. ...

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Blackout

Weekly Contest #335

Harold didn’t remember when his haunting dream encounters began, and he never knew when they would once again rear their ugly heads. It often happened on a work day when, right after breakfast, he rushed out the door to his garage, backed into the driveway then found himself in a nightmarish dream world. He dodged drones flying at him and trying to knock him to the ground but awakened just in time to avoid becoming a victim. He lost his memory of about 10 minutes of his life every time, but, just before every blackout, he saw a ye...

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What Was in That Batter?

Weekly Contest #333

Every year on the Saturday before Labor Day I ended my vacation on Maryland’s Eastern Shore with a trip to the West Ocean City Flap Jackery and treated myself to a heaping platter of Delmarva pancakes. This time, though, my annual journey would lift me into a world I could never have anticipated in a decade of breakfast dining on the ocean. As I took my first bite I found myself lifted out of the tiny cafe and transported across hundreds of miles of space and back in time to my parents’ middle class home in Elizabeth, New Jersey in ...

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A Matter of Degrees

Weekly Contest #332

Residents of the Northern Hemisphere normally welcome the chance to throw off their layers of winter clothing and romp with as little attire as possible in the world’s lakes and oceans. They didn’t realize that, during this particular year, the sun they so fervently wished could become the instrument of their destruction. As Mother Nature began to close the curtain on 2300 she decided to play a cruel joke on humanity by having the sun shine continuously–24 hours a day. Medical personnel working in emergency rooms across most of the civi...

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Clearing Away the Sludge

Weekly Contest #331

Another page had flipped the calendar past midnight as I contemplated spending another night tossing and turning in my sleep as I lay alone in the darkness of my rundown cabin in the backwoods. I found it more and more difficult to get the sludge that had taken over my psyche out of my head. It seemed like the saga of my life continued to assault me, beginning with the boring tediousness of my dead-end job, which had left me nothing to look forward to in my daily work life. Then, Chapter Two of the sorry ta...

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Unseen Epilogue

Weekly Contest #330

The final pages of the story of the librarian known as Mary McFee closed far more strangely than any of her colleagues in the Rehoboth Beach Public Library or the beach resort's residents ever would have imagined. Mary had come to the library six months ago after moving to the Delmarva Peninsula from Akron, Ohio. She had fit neatly into the typical librarian stereotype–single, quiet and unassuming–even living alone in her beachside condo with only her gentle tabby cat as a roommate. Yet, the other library employees who lived n...

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Sleepwalker

Weekly Contest #329

Even after working long and exhausting days as the superintendent of his village’s graveyard, Walter had tossed and turned for months every time he attempted to fall asleep. During the night, the uncle said the next morning, when he restlessly moved around in his sleep, he heard a loud crunching sound. In his dreams he would see human bones broken up and crushed all over his sheets. Then he would get up and sleepwalk around his home for several minutes before going back to sleep. He would wake up with no recollection of having rested b...

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Homerun for the Misfit

Weekly Contest #328

As the midnight of their lives closed in on Harry and his high school buddies at their 50th reunion they mapped out a plan to come up to the plate relive a stickball game like those that had highlighted almost every afternoon in their teens. Harry recalled how he used to step menacingly up to the manhole cover with his converted wooden broom handle waiting for Joey or one of his other pals to wind up and let loose with the perfect pitch. Then he would get a real piece of it and send the rubber ball flying down the block as he...

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