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Conrad M

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Nov, 2021

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14 Stories

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What Lingers By Bradley Shadows

Weekly Contest #379

What Lingers By Bradley Shadows Someone was following Mara. She heard the footsteps when she stopped beneath the broken streetlight. Three more steps, then silence. She crossed the road. Behind her, shoes scraped the curb. In the dark window of the bakery, she saw only her own reflection: gray coat, pale face, one hand closed around the key in her pocket. She had left work late again. The last bus had passed her while she was waiting to cross, and she had been too tired to run. Now she wished she had. She walked faster. The footsteps kept p...

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The Darkness Within

Weekly Contest #376

THE DARKNESS WITHIN A Psychological Thriller By Bradley Shadows Chapter One: The Voice in the Dark Daniel Mercer had always believed that every man carried a little darkness inside him. Some men buried it beneath religion. Others drowned it in whiskey. Some disguised it with expensive suits, respectable jobs, and pleasant smiles. Daniel had spent forty-three years pretending his darkness didn't exist. But lately, it had started talking to him. And the worst part was that sometimes it made sense. The clock on his bedroom wall read 2:17 a.m. D...

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An Hour Before Morning

Weekly Contest #372

The Hour Before Morning Daniel Mercer woke at 2:17 in the morning. He opened his eyes suddenly, as though someone had called his name. For several seconds, he didn't move. He stared at the ceiling. The bedroom was dark except for the faint red glow of the digital clock on the nightstand. 2:17 A.M. Daniel frowned. He had no idea why he was awake. There had been no nightmare. No thunder. No noise from outside. Nothing that should have disturbed him. He rolled onto his side and pulled the blanket higher. "Go back to sleep." He closed his eyes. ...

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The Last Rest Stop

Weekly Contest #371

The rain had been falling for nearly 2 hours when Daniel Mercer saw the sign. Rest area 1 mile He leaned forward slightly, squinting through the windshield as his headlights pushed a narrow tunnel through the darkness. Finally he muttered. He had been driving since late afternoon, and the highway seemed to stretch endlessly into the night. There were no cars in sight. No headlights in the distance. No taillights disappearing around the next turn. Just the steady hiss of rain against the windshield and the rhythmic deep of the wipers. Dani...

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What We Carry

What We Carry By Vradley Shadows The first thing Daniel Mercer did every morning was check the locks. Front door. Back door. Kitchen window. Bedroom window. Then he checked them again. His wife, Sarah, never complained. She would sit at the kitchen table with both hands wrapped around her coffee cup, watching him move through the house. She knew better than to tell him they were safe. To Daniel, safe was not a place. It was a temporary condition—one that could disappear the moment a person stopped paying attention. Daniel had been home from...

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Looks Can be deceiving

Weekly Contest #366

Looks can be deceiving is part of my story. I'm blind and have been for over thirty years. So looks don't mean anything to me. I'm sixty seven years old now. I've been blind half my life. I will admit sometimes it has been hard. And other times interesting. Alot of people just upstand blindness. There is various kinds of blindness. To ne considered legally blind you have to have vision 20/200 or less. Or ne completely blind like me. I was in a bad car accident years ago. And had a bad TBI. My eyes are fine but I lost the signal to my brain. ...

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A hero From The Grave

Weekly Contest #261

Copyright 2022 Self- published by C.E. Metcalf ISBN 978-1-387-76220-0 A Hero From The Grave Everyone needs a hero. There is no strength stronger than love. Even from the ones that are no longer with us. Some stories say that hero’s never truly die that their souls remain amongst the living to protect the ones they love. Whether that is fact or fiction know one truly knows. But in this case……. Chapter 1 The last thing I remember I had just returned home after a tour in Afghanistan. I came home to a loving welcome home from both my son and...

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If I could Only Turn Back Time

Weekly Contest #234

I sit he by my lap top wondering about my life. I am sixty-four years old and wondering where my life went. I look back at it and wonder maybe I should have done this differently. Or I should have done that differently. Could have should have but didn't. I grew up in a small town in the sixties and seventies. And I couldn't wait to get out of there. I hated every minute of it. I didn't have a lot of friends because my family was one of the poorest in our Neiber hood. Our house was so old we had a hand pump in the yard for water and still had...

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I'm Ok by C.E. Metcalf

Weekly Contest #161

There are some of us out there that were called heroes. The ones that came home from war. And there are some of us that the war is still going on in our minds. We are sometimes called the lucky ones. And some of us don't feel that way. I myself am a disabled vet. I was blinded in a fire fight in Desert Storm. My self and two other men were taken cover behind an old junk vehicle trying to keep from getting shot. And then came the mortar blast. It destroyed the rest of it. The two men I was with died. and I ended up in a coma because of a TMI ...

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My Early Days

Weekly Contest #140

It was a rainy night in August when I sat on my front porch. The night was peaceful the sun had gone down a couple of hours ago. I remember when I was young, I did the same thing with my father. My father has been gone for forty- seven years. But those memories still live on. I was sixteen when he passed that was the saddest day of my life. He was sixty-two when I was born that was probably what gave him a stroke trying to raise me at that age. He did make it to seventy-nine. Because of his age and his health, we didn't do a lot of things t...

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The Locked Door by C.E. Metcalf

Weekly Contest #130

When I was a child, I lived with my grandmother why to this day I don't really know. Not that it really matters. Many years have gone by since then. But one thing I'll always remember was a locked door. I asked many times what was behind it and grandma would always say nothing for you to be concerned about. But of course, I was a curious boy like most boys my age. I wanted in the worst way to find out what was behind it. No matter how hard I begged grandma she never gave in. She caught me a couple of times trying to pick the lock on the door...

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The Storm from Hell by C.E. Metcalf

Weekly Contest #129

It was a cold winter in main. I sat at my kitchen table drinking a hot cup of coffee. I had spent the day cutting firewood. I had gotten an early start this morning because I knew a storm was coming. I had given up listening to the weather report years ago because most of the time they were wrong. I have lived in my cabin for 22 years and seen all kinds of weather. But this time I had a feeling the storm coming was going to be different. My cabin was about the size of a large 1- bedroom apartment. I had built it myself 23 years ago. It had t...

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Tea With Tony by C.E. Metcalf

Weekly Contest #128

As I was pouring myself a cup of tea this morning, I was the dear in my back yard. I have only lived here for a few years but every morning they show up. I have never been able to get close enough to touch them. Every time I tried, they must have smelled my scent and ran. I build a cabin in the middle of a hundred acres of wood land I purchased from an old friend. My old friend was named Tony I used to visit him quite often when he owned it. Tony lived to be the ripe old age of eighty- eight. He was Dieng of cancer when he sold it to me. I h...

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Merton

Weekly Contest #121

The year was 1984 Merton Whipple was on his morning walk to work. He worked for the city of Binghamton New York on the back of a garbage truck. He was twenty one and had been doing it since he was eighteen. It's the only job he had ever had. Just before he turned eighteen he dropped out of high school because he knew he was far from a good student. He lived with his mother and step father in a small house on Lyon street. He had a girl friend Connie who he used to see after work. At that time of his life she was the love of his life. They wer...

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