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Colin Devonshire

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2019

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144 Stories

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Snatched

The heat in Bangkok was a physical weight, pressing down on the back of Marcus’s neck as he adjusted the damp rag in his grip. Beside him, Leo chain-smoked, the glowing tip of his cigarette a nervous firefly in the gloom of the soi.  Their target was a boy, no older than seven, who walked this alley every afternoon to buy mango sticky rice from the old woman at the end. A routine. A vulnerability.The boy, Niran, arrived precisely at 4:17 PM, his small sandals slapping against the cracked concrete. He was humming a tune, his eyes fi...

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Gifted

The package arrived on the same day as the letter from the Thai lawyer, a stiff, cream-coloured envelope that smelled faintly of sandalwood and dust. Maya had been in Hua Hin for a week, trapped in the sticky, slow aftermath of her estranged grandmother’s death. The air in the small house by the canal was thick, a living thing that clung to her skin and made her English-bred lungs work harder. She’d come back to this land of her mother’s birth not out of grief, but out of a sense of grim obligation. She was the only blood relative left, and ...

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Someone Else, Please

The air in the Chiang Mai guesthouse was thick with the scent of jasmine and cheap incense, a perfume that did little to mask the mildew creeping in from the monsoon rains. For Tom, it was a sensory overdose, a million miles from the damp, grey concrete of the London estate where the whispers in his head had first started. Here, the whispers were quieter, drowned out by the rhythmic thrum of cicadas and the soft, melodic lilt of Thai.He’d been running for six months. Running from a father who saw him as a burden, from a string of dead-end jo...

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Bolt!

The air in Chiang Mai was a thick, sweet soup of car exhaust and rotting fruit, a combination Beth had come to associate with a kind of hopeful disorientation. She was a world away from the grey drizzle of Manchester, and the heat was a living thing that pressed against her skin, demanding she slow down, breathe deeper. Every morning, she walked to the Thai language school, past wizened women selling garlands of marigolds and the ceaseless, honking flow of motorbikes. She was learning to say sawasdee kha with the correct, falling t...

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Should ‘av

The monsoon had finally broken, a fat, wet curtain that turned Chiang Mai’s streets into rivers of brown water and red clay. For a week, I’d been trapped in my bungalow on the outskirts, listening to the frantic drumming of rain on the corrugated iron roof and the ceaseless, manic chorus of geckos. It was this auditory assault, more than the heat, that had frayed my last nerve. I was a man on the edge of a breakdown, and all I needed was a cold beer and five minutes of quiet.That’s when Mel found me.I was huddled under the awning of a roadsi...

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Rumours, Rumours

The air in Pattaya, thick with the scent of frying garlic and cheap perfume, was a familiar anaesthetic to Jack. He’d been a regular at the "Silver Moon" bar for the better part of a decade, a retired engineer from Birmingham who had traded grey skies for perpetual humidity and the quiet desperation of his pension for the noisy, chaotic camaraderie of the Walking Street expats. He was on his second Leo, the condensation from the bottle pooling on the scarred wooden table, when the rumour reached him.It wasn't whispered. It was delivered with...

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Who, Me?

The air in Bangkok was a thick, humid blanket, woven with the scent of jasmine, diesel fumes, and the ever-present tang of the Chao Phraya River. For James, it smelled like hope. For the last two years, this chaotic, beautiful city had been his sanctuary. The clatter of tuk-tuks, the neon-lit labyrinth of Soi Cowboy, the serene smiles of the monks – it was the perfect anaesthetic for the life he'd left behind in a sterile London office and a marriage that had become a mausoleum of unspoken resentments.He’d come for the diving, initially. Kha...

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Accidents Happen?

The heat was a physical weight, a wet blanket that clung to Bobby's skin long after the sun had bled out behind the city's jagged skyline. It was the kind of heat that didn't just make you sweat; it seeped into your bones, a constant, low-grade fever that pulsed in time with the city's arrhythmic heartbeat. From his balcony on the eleventh floor of the decrepit apartment block off Sukhumvit, Bobby could see it all. The neon haze of Nana, the serpentine crawl of traffic on the expressway, the ghostly, unblinking stare of the million windows t...

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The Last Meal

The air in the hills of northern Thailand was thick with the scent of wet earth and decaying leaves. It was the kind of smell that clung to your clothes and seeped into your bones, a primal perfume of the jungle. Inside the small, open-air kitchen of the bamboo hut, the smell was entirely different. Here, it was the sharp, clean aroma of lemongrass, the earthy warmth of galangal, and the sweet, pungent kick of shrimp paste.Pimchanok moved with a practised, almost meditative grace. Her hands, gnarled and dark from a lifetime of work, were ste...

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The Last Resort

The Last ResortThe heat in Bangkok was a physical weight, a wet blanket that clung to the skin and made the air itself seem to sweat. By the time the train hissed and clattered its way down the coast to Hua Hin, the oppressive humidity had given way to a salt-tinged breeze, but the sun, a bleached-white coin in a pale sky, was still relentless. It was the kind of heat that promised storms, the kind that preceded the monsoon's final, gasping breaths. Summer was ending, and with it, the last of Mark's patience.He checked into the same hotel he...

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Smoke in the Neon

The air in Pattaya was thick as old blood, a cloying mix of diesel fumes, frying oil, and the cheap, floral perfume that clung to the girls who worked the soi. For Eddie, it was the smell of home, a home built on sand and cheap beer. He’d been here, in this gaudy, neon-lit purgatory, for over a decade. His liver, a loyal soldier for too many years, was finally raising the white flag. The doctor in Bangkok, a man with spectacles as thick as his own prescription for mortality, had given him a timeline: six months, maybe less. The cancer, a sna...

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Door Ajar

Door AjarWhen Anousone was very young, his grandmother, Ya, allowed him a night light. It was a small ceramic elephant, its bulbous body painted with faded gold and fired in a kiln somewhere near Udon Thani. At night, it cast a soft amber glow across his bedding, turning his toy trucks into sleeping monsters and his pile of clothes into a crouching animal. He slept soundly then, with the confidence of a child who believed that light was a wall and darkness merely what lay on the other side.Ya took the elephant away on his seventh birthday. “...

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The Survivor

The SurvivorThe Andaman Sea doesn’t give up its dead. Not willingly. It tucks them into coral gardens, wraps them in anemone fronds, lets them bloat and drift through underwater canyons until their bones are picked clean by parrotfish. That’s what the dive master told me once, over cheap whisky on a Railay Beach deck. I didn’t believe him then.I believe him now.His name was Chalky. Chalky Fletcher. We’d come from Bristol together, fresh out of university, pockets full of debt and the kind of arrogance that makes you think Southeast Asia owes...

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The Weight of Jasmine

The Weight of JasmineThe monsoon had reduced everything to a single, relentless note. Rain hammered the corrugated iron roof of the long-tail boat’s awning, a deafening percussion that made speech impossible. Kraisorn didn’t mind. He sat on the damp wooden bench, feeling the familiar vibration of the engine through his spine, and watched the brown Chao Phraya River slide past. The world beyond the awning was a watercolour of greys and greens—mangrove roots clawing at the swollen banks, the distant spires of a temple dissolving into the downp...

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The Bones Under the Buffalo Grass

The heat came off the paddy in shimmering waves, turning the distant line of eucalyptus trees into a watercolour smudge. Finn Bishop knelt in the mud, his knees screaming inside his worn-out jeans, and pulled another clump of grass from the irrigation ditch. It was thankless work, the kind of work backpackers did when their money ran out, and their pride hadn't quite caught up.Somchai, the farm owner, had told him to clear the weeds from the northern channel before noon. "Mai pen rai," (never mind) Finn had said, as he understood. He didn't ...

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