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Daniel P. Douglas

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2024

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97 Followers
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29 Stories

1007 karma pts

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The Strudel Gambit: Flair McSnazz and the Ray Gun of Doom

Weekly Contest #341

FLAIR MCSNAZZ HAD made himself three promises about Vienna.The first was that he would never return. The second stipulated that should he return, he would avoid the Innere Stadt, a place where certain shopkeepers possessed persistent memories and deeply rooted family connections. And the third was that if he somehow found himself in the Innere Stadt despite the first two promises, he would absolutely, categorically, not go anywhere near Konditorei Hoffmann on Dorotheergasse, because the last time he had been there, a woman named Gertrude had...

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Eat Them All

Weekly Contest #319

NOTE: Cannibalistic horror, violence, and foul language. Kaitlyn’s molars punctured Steve’s trachea. As his cartilage split, Kaitlyn’s mind severed from her body to observe and catalog the feeding. Steve’s blood flooded her palate, his carotid hammering at 180 beats per minute. Betrayal weighed heavy as his fingers clutched her hair.“Sorry,” Kaitlyn said, the word gurgling out a mouth full of blood “Steve—” Her jaw dislocated. Tendons snapped and regenerated around hunger that predated human drives. Steve’s brain and body released everythin...

12 likes 6 comments 6
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Seven Flowers for Lemonade

Weekly Contest #308

THE LEMONADE STAND materialized at the corner of Maple and Third like a memory made solid, and Cliff felt his foot ease off the accelerator. Through the windshield of his sedan, the sight struck him, not of this stand with its crooked cardboard sign and red plastic cups, but of something older and as familiar as his own reflection and twice as strange.He turned into his driveway, the automatic motion of coming home, but his hands froze on the steering wheel as the engine idled. The garage door waited, unopened. Behind him, just visible in th...

27 likes 14 comments 14
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Pack Politics - A Tale of Tails and Treachery

Weekly Contest #306

FADE IN:EXT. BARKINGTON COMMONS DOG PARK - DAWNPerfect symmetry divides the frame. A centerline bisects the park like a political wound. Morning light strikes with predatory certainty.AUGUSTUS (V.O.) - Every revolution begins with a perfectly organized lie. I should know. I've sniffed out thirty-seven election cycles, and they all smell the same— like hope mixed with shit.AUGUSTUS (70s, bloodhound) sits dead center. Ancient. Methodical. His clouded eyes carry decades of disillusionment.AUGUSTUS (V.O.) - The morning sun hit Barkington Commons...

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Perfect Teeth

Weekly Contest #305

NOTE: Mention of suicide by overdose and one F-bomb used. I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life. “She died peacefully.”Three hundred faces tilted toward me like sunflowers following a false light. My mother’s dental colleagues, her bridge club, the neighbors who’d borrowed sugar for thirty years. All of them desperate to believe that cancer was something open to negotiation, something that understood manners.She’d clawed at the bed rails until her fingernails split. Begged me to kill her with the same voice that once sang...

20 likes 14 comments 14
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Nanite Heart

Weekly Contest #303

THE CLAY HAD battled her for a long time. Eira twisted her misshapen fingers against the stubborn material, forcing it to yield as sweat beaded on her forehead. Pain radiated through her wrists—not just pain but humiliation, the kind that comes when your own body turns traitor. Her fingers, once precise instruments of creation, now twisted betrayers, arthritis gnawing at her joints like a sadistic parasite feeding on her talent.She paused, studying the half-formed figure emerging from the clay. Something remarkable lurked beneath her hands, ...

21 likes 6 comments 6
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Mathematical Showdown

Weekly Contest #302

CECIL HIGGINS counted heartbeats like other men counted coins. Precise. Methodical. The drunk swaying twenty-six feet away had an elevated pulse—112 beats per minute, visible in the filthy neck above his crooked collar. Cecil’s pencil scratched another data point in notebook nine. Three years of obsessive documentation had worn the leather cover smooth. Coffee, whiskey, and other men’s blood stained the pages inside.Subject exhibits classic alcoholic tremors. Right-hand deviation: 1.5 inches per second. Predictable. Equation applies.The man ...

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Decimal Displacement: A Border Tragedy In 0.036 Degrees

Weekly Contest #302

THE MISPLACEMENT of a decimal point in the border coordinates between the Principality of Vestovia and the Republic of Ostravya—longitude 48.2731° rather than 48.2371°—occurred on Tuesday, March 17, 1952, during a light rainfall that caused cartographer Leopold Himmelweiss’s fountain pen to bleed on the official survey document. The pen—a Pelikan 400 with tortoiseshell barrel, purchased in Vienna on the occasion of his forty-third birthday—had been refilled precisely seventeen minutes prior with Ostravyan Treasury Black No. 17, the official ...

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Digesting Darkness

Winner of Weekly Contest #301 🏆

THE FIRST TIME I ate someone’s grief, it was an accident.My aunt had just died, and my cousin couldn’t stop crying at the funeral. She clutched her mother’s wedding ring so tight her knuckles grew white. When she hugged me, she pressed the ring into my palm.“I can’t look at it anymore,” she said. “Just take it away.”I slipped it into my pocket, and something strange happened on the drive home. A warm sensation spread through my gut, like I’d swallowed a shot of good whiskey. By the time I parked in my driveway, I felt freaking amazing—light,...

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The Deserter

Weekly Contest #301

The seven fingers of First Commodore Myx Voltar’s right hand shivered over the flashing command console. Thoughts of his three hundred and twenty-seven cycles of legendary military service and unwavering loyalty churned behind his large, black, almond-shaped eyes and inside his elongated head, wholly evaporating as five words blinked on the screen.COMMENCE PLANETARY CLEANSING: LUMIAN HOMEWORLDA species whose crime was refusing military alliance with the Kelvari Empire, the Lumians were philosophers and poets, and they now faced eradication b...

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Mickey’s Infernal Bargain

Weekly Contest #300

Contains Some Foul Language Consistent with Character (Satan)SATAN SLOUCHED AGAINST the obsidian throne, picking ash from under his fingernails with the tip of a ceremonial dagger. The screams from the ninth circle had dulled to white noise centuries ago. Another day in Hell—predictable, boring, and exactly how he liked it.A lesser demon scurried in, clutching a stack of contracts. “My Lord, we’ve got seventeen new arrivals from Wall Street. The usual package?”“Give them the broker special. Eternity of cold calls that never connect.” Satan w...

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The Asphalt Buccaneers

Weekly Contest #299

Ahoy, ye landlubbers! Gather ‘round your glowing screens and lend yer ears to the tale of Captain “Spectacular Steve” Sullivan and his motley crew aboard The Rusty Hatchback. ‘Twas a day so hot the asphalt be bubbling like the Devil’s own jacuzzi when our story unfurled its metaphorical sails...In the urban seas of downtown sailed a peculiar vessel—a 1997 Dodge Caravan with more rust than paint, a peeling magnetic sign reading “THE ASPHALT BUCCANEERS: ENTERTAINMENT OR YOUR DOUBLOONS BACK,” and festooned with a rubber chicken wearing a tiny p...

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This New Weird

Weekly Contest #299

I woke up to silence, which should’ve been my first clue something was off. No mom banging on my door with her patented, “Max, it’s 7:15, why aren’t you vertical?” No dad fumbling with the coffee maker downstairs. Just the stupid birds outside my window, chirping like they didn't get the memo that the world had basically ended and restarted with all the characters in the wrong positions.7:43, my phone said. Whatever. Not like time had any meaning during the zombie apocalypse of online school we’d been living through.7:43.Wait.School. Real sc...

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With His Boots On

Weekly Contest #297

IN THE EAST, a faint rose and gold ethereal light hinted at dawn breaking through the deep indigo of the night. Nathaniel Everett sat still on the weathered porch steps of the ranch house, his eyes fixed upon the distant horizon where the jagged silhouettes of the Sawtooth Mountains stood etched against the brightening firmament. The air hung still and cool around him, carrying the mingled scents of sage and pine from the surrounding foothills.Within the house behind him, the old man lay dying.Nathaniel rolled a cigarette, the ritual offerin...

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Tides

Weekly Contest #295

Drew bolted upright, sheets tangled around his sweat-drenched body. The digital clock glowed 4:13 AM in angry red numerals that pulsed in sync with the throbbing behind his eyes.Fluorescent lights. Metal desk cold against his palms. Walls painted institutional gray. A stern voice: “Captain Reeves, these reports are unacceptable. The operation failed because of your negligence.”The dream clung to him like seaweed. Drew moved carefully to avoid waking Sunny. Her blonde hair spread across the pillow, her face peaceful in the pre-dawn darkness. ...

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