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Brittany Rosenberger

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2026

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25 Followers
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10 Stories

208 karma pts

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Eleven Steps to Morning

I’ve been awake since 1:47 a.m., watching the ceiling fan cut the same four shadows into the same four corners of my room, and by 3:00 a.m. I can’t do it anymore. My mouth is dry. My legs feel like they belong to someone else, someone more tired than me.There’s a job in another city sitting in my inbox, an offer with a deadline attached: “let me know by 8 a.m.” I’ve re-read the email so many times the words have stopped meaning anything, the way any word does if you say it enough times in a row. I don’t know what I’m going to write back. I o...

5 likes 2 comments 2
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This Magic Moment

In memory of my Pop-Pop and Mom-Mom. The sterile scent of the hospital room—a sharp, aggressive mixture of rubbing alcohol and floor wax—pressed against Adam’s senses, a stark contrast to the memory he was trying to summon. He sat in the uncomfortable plastic chair, his large, weathered hands gripping the side of the bed where Kathleen lay. Her breathing was labored, a rhythmic, fragile sound that seemed to be counting down the moments of his life as much as hers.Looking at her, the lines of age and the toll of her illness were undeniable,...

7 likes 0 comments 0
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Five More Minutes

Summer was over, and so were we.Those words weren’t a sentence. They were a hollow, ringing toll, the final chime of a clock that had run out of time. They hung in the thick, suffocating humidity of the July night, pressing down on Levi and me like a physical weight. We were sprawled in the bed of his Ford—a rusted, mechanical monument to our shared history. The cold steel biting into my back through my thin sundress, a stark contrast to the stifling heat of the day. We were parked in the gut of the Miller family’s north pasture, a sanctuary...

5 likes 2 comments 2
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The Residue of Breath

Weekly Contest #360

Trigger Warning: Violence, kidnapping/imprisonment, psychological abuse, blood/injury. The first thing you must understand about the dead is that they do not speak. When people pay me twelve hundred dollars an hour to sit in my high-backed velvet chairs and contact their departed, they expect a performance. They want tears, changing temperatures, and messages about misplaced silver brooches. I give them what they want because a well-placed lie is often the only thing keeping the living from a very steep cliff.But I am not a fraud. I am a rea...

28 likes 26 comments 26
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The River Kept Its Own

Weekly Contest #358

Trigger Warning: Violence, horror themes, undead/infected creatures, and life-threatening situations. I crouched behind the rotted, moss-slicked trunk of a fallen white oak, with my fingers dug so deep into the dirt I could feel the damp pulse of the earth. Sweat poured down my face, ruining the brim of my faded baseball cap. Ten yards away, something tore through the mountain laurel.It wasn’t a deer.Deer didn’t make that wet, clicking sound in the back of their throats. And deer definitely didn’t drag one foot behind them with a heavy, rhyt...

23 likes 7 comments 7
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The Things Arthur Couldn’t Break

Weekly Contest #356

The checkered linoleum in the kitchen was peeling up at the corners with age. Every time I stepped near the sink, the floorboards gave a wet, low groan that felt less like old timber and more like the house warning me to stay back.I had spent three days packing my grandmother Evelyn’s life into cardboard liquor boxes I’d begged off the guy at the corner store. The house smelled exactly how she had during her final years… Mothballs, damp cedar, and that sharp, medicinal sting of generic liniment. To the rest of the family, Evelyn was a bitter...

16 likes 6 comments 6
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The Last Will

Weekly Contest #355

The air inside the DiPaolo & Sons Funeral Home was thick enough to choke a saint. It was a blend of industrial floor wax, heavy floral arrangements that had already begun to turn and the sharp bite of anisette biscotti warming under heat lamps in the back lounge.Carol Marcone stood at the head of the mahogany casket, her posture rigid, her spine a straight line of pure Italian silk. She wore a tailored black sheath dress and a birdcage veil that came down just far enough to obscure her eyes. To the casual observer—the distant cousins fro...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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The Weight of Distant Stars

Weekly Contest #354

2,731 days. In the grand timeline of the cosmos, seven and a half years is less than a heartbeat. It was a rounding error in the life of a nebula. But for Eleanor, 2,731 days was an eternity of compressed oxygen and thinning light. It was the exact time since the universe had developed a hole and her son, Leo, had fallen through it. She kept the count on the silver frame of the hallway mirror. Every morning, before the kettle whistled, she etched a tiny line into the wood. The frame was now a jagged landscape of scars, a silver topography ...

10 likes 4 comments 4
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The Tale of Pipkin’s Sparkle

Weekly Contest #353

My name is Pipkin and I am currently pinned beneath a blueberry.To you, a blueberry is a snack. To me, it is a five-ton sphere of indigo doom that smells faintly of summer and impending humiliation. I am supposed to be an Elder Scout of the Mossy-Knoll Tribe, a title that suggests dignity, grace and the ability to fly in a straight line. Instead, I am currently negotiating with a beetle named Barnaby to see if he’ll swap his leverage for a half-chewed piece of honeysuckle.“Listen, Barnaby,” I grunted, my face pressed against a damp patch of ...

21 likes 6 comments 6
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The Weight of a July Blue

Weekly Contest #352

In the textbooks, July is a riot of aggressive color. It is the scorching, unforgiving yellow of the midday sun. A light so bright it flattens the world into two dimensions. It is the artificial, celebratory explosions of red and white that scar the blue night sky, demanding attention with every concussive boom. But that year, the world lost its warmth. The spectrum shifted, narrowed, and cooled. For me, July bled into a singular, haunting shade of blue.It started with his eyes. They were a bright, crystalline blue that had seen decades of l...

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