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Carina Caccia

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2023

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106 Followers
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59 Stories

1467 karma pts

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Nonsequential Vignettes of The Wigmaker

Weekly Contest #343

1.“Wear it, Marie,” said Heath, “for a woman does as she’s told.”The brown locks fell about Marie’s forehead, framing her face, and for an instant Heath glimpsed a ghost in the twinkle of her eyes, veiled in part behind a wave of hair.“And stand there by the window. Yes, there in that patch of sunlight.”Marie obliged, and the golden brown gleamed like syrup.“Off with you,” said Heath.Marie made to leave, but he grabbed her wrist, his grip firm as a corset.“The wig,” he said. She removed it, revealing flaxen hair beneath.In his nascent solitu...

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Laundromat Meditations and Eternal Minutes

Weekly Contest #343

Twenty-five minutes in little sticks of fluorescent green. Nora’s weekends, they were now reserved for laundry.She looked up from her laptop at dryers 71 and 72, large and tunnelling eyes at the back of the room. Clothes going round and round, up and drop, white linen within tumbling like sea froth.Mammoth task of going to the laundromat, Nora typed, when you can hardly get out of bed. My sheets, they still stink of last month’s night sweats.She took a sip of the hazelnut espresso she’d bought from the boulangerie across the road, a bite of ...

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2026

Weekly Contest #336

TIMTim guffawed at his phone, blue light illuminating his wide eyes. Crinkle of aluminium as he popped a chip in his mouth, wiped the cheesy crumbs on his thighs. Ha, ha, ha. Scroll.Notification. Kate. Wanna meet on Phoenix?Tim swiped away the message as though swatting away a fly.Ha, ha, ha, and thus an hour elapsed. Tim’s eyes ached; dick, hard. New window, VR headset on. Stepsister. Slimy sock.He stepped into the shower where he soaped up his balls, lint in his belly button undisturbed, where it would remain for another two days. YouTube ...

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Unladylike

Weekly Contest #332

Tonight I cannot, will not, give you a plot. I’m as sick as a dog but at least my fist is healing. Fractured, I thought, when it turned green. Swollen, too, but it’s gone down now. I can press my thumb to my pinkie again, press a shampoo pump without pain. The stranger, he deserved it. Didn’t even catch his name. My electric heater might be making me dizzy – or maybe I’m dehydrated. A baguette and cheese for lunch probably didn’t help. McDonald’s, neither. Nor my thirteen-hour workdays which are, I admit, the best part of my day. ...

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When Repulsion Feels Like Touch

Weekly Contest #322

They measure us against labels. You know, boyfriend, husband, that kind of stuff. Exclusivity, it means you’re doing things right. Nonmonogamy, probably not. You’re either being sold short in your relationship or you’re the side chick. Why settle for less, right? Aspire to more, know your worth, etc. But maybe Nora didn’t measure herself, or them, against those standards. Maybe she just liked being with him. Maybe he was her best friend here. Maybe she was learning that love was not possession. She, she was the side chick; and he, in an open...

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An Aluminium Fix

Shortlisted for Contest #320 ⭐️

There are holes in my walls again – my home, it’s a leaky bucket. I stuff them with aluminium, €1.95 a roll; it’s what I can afford, and what I’m willing to spend. A mice infestation is the landlord’s problem, but it’s normal, they tell me. Oh, and make sure to sweep up any crumbs in your studio. That’s what they’re coming for.But I keep all my food in the fridge and microwave – even my pasta, and even my scraps. I wonder, sometimes, if it’s my thoughts they’re feeding on, my thoughts that let them in. I mean, there’s nothing else in here bu...

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You're the TV

Weekly Contest #317

If you could travel to the future, would you? Would you risk knowing an outcome and thereby realising it, ensnared in a self-fulfilling prophecy that mightn’t have eventuated had you not known?On the nightstand sat a silver bowl like a miniature satellite dish or a metal hibiscus, an antenna in its centre.“So, it’s a time machine?” said Melissa, cross-legged on white sheets.“Not quite,” said Nora. “It’s a time dish – it collects signal, waves, from existing superpositions yet to be collapsed.”“Alternate realities, then?”“Alternate potential ...

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Collapse

Weekly Contest #315

I read somewhere that we’re all a decision away from an entirely different life. Only, we don’t know it, not always, not often, because we either fail to make a choice or, when we do, we never see the alternative outcomes – not without tinted glasses, that is. And it begs the question: do we ever actually live? This life, I mean, not the inebriating nostalgia of what ifs.Tracing paper spread across the table, bare nails, 2B lead. “This,” said Nora, “is a collapse.” She tapped a circle on the page from which two thick lines branched out, one ...

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Neglect is a Womb

Weekly Contest #313

1.How loud is a sigh? As loud as the clatter of pans, the bang of a door slammed, a church organ rumbling through you? How about an eyeroll? The silent treatment? Were they half as loud as the voice in Nora’s head? Came in spirals, it did. Looping on repeat, kind of like the swirls she used to draw as a girl, filling double-sided A4 pages. Where’d that voice come from anyway? And she’d almost put her finger on it. She’d almost put her finger on it one afternoon at the post office. Her mother sighed audibly, fidgeting with self-service machin...

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Chronicles of a Limerent Object

Winner of Weekly Contest #311 🏆

1.He hadn’t meant to idealise her, to put her on a pedestal, to overwhelm. Radiant, she was. She drew people in, shook their hands, pulled up chairs for them. Are you the organiser? she’d been asked. No, she wasn’t. Just a woman with a smile, a woman in a sundress who scooted over and made room for others. What was her name again?And then she directed her smile at him, her warmth, her questions. Matthieu stirred in his seat, gripped tight the neck of his bottle so as not to tremble. He did that sometimes, or rather, the nerves did – as thoug...

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How to Fall Out of Love: The Story of a Self-Fulfilling Pen

Weekly Contest #307

But why do you collect the bones of every experience that disappoints you? Why do you crack them open and suck at the marrow long after there’s anything left? Three months ago, Margaret had passed, and her property, her assets, she’d left to her children. To Nora, her student, she’d left a box of stationery – BIC pens and half-used highlighters, it was abnormal to say the least. In modernity, they were disposable, really; they weren’t quills and ink pots inscribed with an ancestor’s name, no. Maybe it had been symbolic, everybody thought. A...

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Mourning Murcia

Weekly Contest #300

Picture this. You’re riding shotgun, speeding past kilometres of arid land, then dominoes of lemon trees, beds of sunflowers. There are remnants of walls, grey-white bricks wrapped with graffiti, as small as Monopoly houses beneath an infinite blue sky. There’s wind in your hair, sunshine on the dashboard and on your thighs. You’re Nora, and you’re leaving Murcia behind.Ignacio glanced over at her, eyes golden as resin behind his sunglasses, amber lenses projecting a sunshine scar across his cheek. Nora had insisted on paying him, but he’d B...

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Woe is Brad

Weekly Contest #299

Decorum, often, is a two-way street; or, better yet, it’s an entire city blueprint and is contingent on all of us. But there’s a world in which things are upside down, where cars fly and tenants, clinging to their curtains, are tugged from their windows by gravity (fine, that might be an exaggeration – but only in the literal sense). And in that world, decorum is a vacuous thing in its unrequitedness. It is demanded by some and performed by many – sometimes, even, when one spits in your face (quite literally this time). “Had you not looked a...

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Octopus in a Garage

Weekly Contest #296

Have you ever felt like an octopus in a garage? What, haven’t you heard that one before?“Why an octopus in a garage?”“Why not?”One might think this were a conversation born of disinhibited inebriety, but if we, dear readers, take a closer look, we’ll find that our protagonists’ beer bottles and half-torn labels bear the wide, caricaturesque eyes of 0.0%. (Four eyes, in fact, if we puzzle-piece the poor shreds back together). Four eyes. They called him that at school, Joaquín. Never quite fit in. Went to therapy for it, actually. How could h...

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VIEJO VERDE – Dirty Old Creep

Weekly Contest #292

I’m happier than I’ve been in seven years, until I hear my landlord’s footsteps on the stairs, hear him call my name. And for a moment he’ll take centre stage, though this is not the real story but its backdrop.—My landlord always keeps his door ajar so I must greet him by the stairwell.—“How about wine and castañas tonight?” he texts.—“Call me later,” he reads aloud. He reads my tank top. He reads my breasts.—My landlord needs me downstairs, needs help in the garage.—My landlord greets me in the kitchen, in his dressing gown, leans over me ...

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