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E Moss

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2021

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15 Followers
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16 Stories

248 karma pts

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Report From Summer Camp, Once There Awaits Serious Work (Song of Prominence Delivered The End of These Laments)

It was awful for everyone there throughout the summer of that year in which I had joined the ranks of the labor encampment, hopeful I would get reimbursement once the contractual term had finished. Hope was of little use, or soonafter the months were gone, hope would be not just broken even against my calluses for hands. Hope in a place like this here labor encampment will be left scattered and could come only as a smarting shaft of wind blown at the faces to the voices in our ears the longer we worked to the thunder of our strength and weat...

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Kishōtenketsu

"Life is a hideous thing, and from the background behind what we know of it peer daemoniacal hints of truth which make it sometimes a thousandfold more hideous."- H.P. LOVECRAFT Are you there, God? It's me, and though we have talked little since that distant interim that was the half of childhood not yet made difficult by your enigmatic hand, the other half and perhaps moreso than I would care about knowing was nothing but myriad chance demonstrably shown to be simple proof that you have been hidden behind plain sight, you ominously there f...

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The Party (part 1/2)

(brief allusions to bodily fluids, a prevalent theme of existential anxiety and discomfort, as well as passages pertaining to a distorted perspective of imposter's syndrome; reading discretion is lightly advised) “A self does not amount to much, but no self is an island; each exists in a fabric of relationships that is more complex and mobile than ever before.”Jean-François Lyotard It was a party I was invited to attend that Friday of the first week of July, and examining how poorly this strange crowd weathered through the trouble soon preci...

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The Grey Man

(Forewarning: this account addresses sensitive and frankly disturbing themes pertaining to the murderer Albert Fish, specifically the abuse which helped influence him and his attraction to acts of cruel, often fatal violence. Viewer discretion is strongly advised) Albert Fish, born May 19th 1870 as Hamilton Howard Fish at the capital of the then-young United States of America, had inauspicious beginnings in his childhood to what would years later on coalesce into a lifelong adoration for acts of cruelty, torture & punishment(namely, his ...

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A Premonition of Better Things

Weekly Contest #216

It was not his intention for Jacob to leave his home behind this soon after his father had perished not long after he had shared another pleasantly benign and laconic dinner together, sitting across from the unclean heapings of hotly heated beef chunky in a canopy of canned vegetable aisles whipped downstream cheese-in-aesrolized can starch could not be used for a traditional trade in feigned tenderness shared between a single father figuring out who is even his son's best chances ahead but the dad did not want him back into a fitful game wi...

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Killers of Light (part 1; revised from a manuscript circa summer 2021)

Weekly Contest #206

Armies of scab-clad blackguards gather in crooked files under dim little exhaust off last skein of light before the one who wrote MOT so was the halcyon thousandfold at a zenith for all varieties of phosphene kiln killers to try and take flight. Behind them, cities and towns and terrain alike all lie razed, ablaze high, outlines of blackened rubble cast low.The mighty Mahmud, the victorious Lord,That all the misbelieving and black HordeOf Fears and Sorrows infest the SoulScatters and slays with his enchanted sword-from The Rubaiyat of O...

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The Shelf Life of an Insomniac When Faced With Danger

It was not what clear at first glance once it emerged into view, but the legs were less artful the closer he looked at this new form, feel that his entire nerve from top to bottom shrank into abject terror as the butchered bottom half of the form was nothing but a bunch of floridly threadbare tendons pulsating largeish only at the kneecap and thighmeat rounded until it terminated in a white, ringed circle of bloodless heel arcs that came inflexible on twofold feet that were without hindrance of skin or tissue and pronged toes jammed crookedl...

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Where Angels Seek & Dare Beyond Fool’s Wise Praise

Weekly Contest #172

(tw: mental health disturbingly depicted, parasocial influence culture grotesquely illustrated, as well as some explicit but brief instances of physical violence, and of course the disturbing suggestiveness of ambiguity that this narrative presents the following tale; author's note) By the time you read this, none of it will be true anymore. It will become increasingly clear that the boundaries have been breached longago. There is no need for ourselves to think lesser, once the publicity has done the release against what my convictions has...

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The Late and Great Job: What Went Wrong?

Weekly Contest #159

(Tw: suggestive violence, nightmarish imagery, amoral and wanton displays of greed, necromancy) Throughout a brief notoriety during that heightened forest of chiseled moon dust lay on the brickyard stockades: Weimar: burnt-out. 1923.  Small children, holes in their faces, are a cherubim so wan and fragile.  Seven days did me and Seleck sit squat in the shinola of the straightway into a puddle of hellwater. It was after many hours mired among the cabaret moribund whereupon we were promenading, penniless, peering for some...

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The Body Is Nothing But Someone Else to Overcome

Weekly Contest #151

Kurtz Loggia didn't know how to initially respond during the odd, finicky lull burnt over so many nights without having markedly a single disturbance to his phelgmatic existence within a smallish fifthteen-by-eighteen foot apartment condominium where he stayed whenever he wasn't outgoing with reprehensible attempts at summoning an artistically meaningful living by nosing his way into the illicit care of homely village spinsters who were once talentless socialites like himself, but nowaday were complacent in soliciting the company of surly do...

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The Convocation of Baal Betwixt The Final Zenith of Osiris

Weekly Contest #117

(trigger warning: acts of brutal, disturbing and esoteric violence bearing a ritualistic nature; iconoclastic imagery and allusions; cataclysmic terrestrial events potentially anxiety-inducing and evocative of certain environmental uncertainties) Everything was ready for the ritual. The owl would be plucked so the howling recesses of the drawing-room window would be opened to the applause of jade brilliant dappled across a baleful constellation, flaring saffron darkly from outermost the fall of the shadow over forests splintered with imp...

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Theaterland

Weekly Contest #102

CW: self-harm, strong language “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”–attributed to W.C. Fields   Belief, however nebulous, is a truth only cogent enough to serve those who would make the absence of that what is unthinkable to all but themselves. ** Let the viewer understand that this fictitious staging, this gamiture, is only one’s plight who is to be sentenced in that denatured assiduousness for relinquishing themselves to be insubordinate celebrants who think themselves burlesque tragedians, but grew t...

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Uproars and Benedictions

Weekly Contest #98

I have a limited arsenal of internal movements at hand given to me for explaining my plight, so if focus is frenetic then I shall implore the reader will entertain that I scramble in reciting my last utterances alive like slurred declarations concerning a passage into stillness that is transient, whereas all other which I surface is tenebrous in inhospitable abandon. So I ask that the reader be unflinching about observance so that I may leave understood, notwithstanding my vanishing reserve not only depleting me of alacrity but also seldom t...

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Wrong Ways Often Make Us Stay

Weekly Contest #97

I. Somewhere along the middle of the woodland road, someone is stepping alone as an honor to serve for his outstanding slow and somnambulatory  hypnosis that draws him continuously onward across the purulent scarification of macadam dustpan gravel and suppurating topsoil that only grew sorer, more tremulous with eczematous snowfall clenched between his nethers tucked shut beneath a valley’s downside enshadowed by oaktree curtains drawn, a man discovered someone he loathes more than himself. That person was a woman. He quickly becam...

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Vae Victis

Weekly Contest #91

I am not the same. This shouldn't be my downfall but it is, and I want to make something crystallize before going any further about how my last chance at attaining insuperable greatness was completely fumbled because you just had to be included within the bigger picture. It was supposed to be my namesake marked as worthy being among those few who were triumphant, me displaying what my entire lifespan could do in one moment that no one else could ever be capable of finishing. No one else could of underwent all I had done in stoic preparation ...

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