Menu

More apps built by Reedsy

Assemble a team of professionals

The writing app for authors

Writing courses, events and memberships

Get your book reviewed

Weekly writing prompts and contests

Menu
Prompts
Contests
Stories
Blog

EK Studios

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2020

Stories
Comments
Library
4 Followers
0 Following

41 Stories

10 karma pts

?

The Trouble With Happily Ever After

Once upon a time… That is how all respectable stories begin, so let us begin there, even though I have learned that beginnings are often lies we tell to make endings feel deserved. Once upon a time, in a kingdom whose maps were always slightly out of date, there lived a princess who refused to practice smiling. Her name was Maribel Thorne, and this caused a great deal of distress. Princesses, as everyone knows, are meant to smile. They smile while standing on balconies. They smile while listening to bards sing songs that rhyme love with dove...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

Selected Correspondence from the Briarfield Archive

March 3 Dear Journal,Mrs. Calder says keeping a diary will help “settle my thoughts.” She presses the pen into my hand like it’s medicine, like words might stitch something closed inside me. I don’t know what I’m meant to write, so I’ll start with facts.My name is Elowen Hart. I am sixteen years old. I live in Briarfield now, though I did not grow up here. My mother says the move is temporary. She says a lot of things that sound like promises if you don’t look at them too closely.The house smells like dust and old rain. The woods begin right...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

What Listens Between the Trees

They warned me the way people always warn you about things they don’t quite believe in anymore.Don’t go into the woods. Don’t talk to strangers.They said it lightly, half-smiling, like an old rhyme you repeat because it feels wrong not to. The warnings were stitched into bedtime stories and town festivals, and the way mothers’ hands tightened just a little when dusk came early. They were painted on signs at the trailhead—NO TRESPASSING. FOREST PRESERVE CLOSED AT SUNSET. They were muttered by elders who stared too long at the tree line and th...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

Before the Flame Goes Out

“It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark.”That is how they remember the night.That is how I remember being born.I am a match.Not a metaphor. Not a symbol. A match—one small sliver of wood, tipped with sulfur and hope, tucked inside a thin paper box that smelled of glue and pine sap. I was never meant to last. That is the truth of my kind. We are made for endings, for brief brilliance, for becoming nothing but smoke and memory.But no one ever asks what it feels like to burn.I lay with my sisters in the box, pressed c...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

The Wolf Who Was Never Asked

They call me Big, as if size were the crime. They call me Bad, as if hunger were a moral failure. They do not call me by my name, because no one ever asked for it.Names are a human luxury.I was born beneath pine shadows where the forest breathes slow and deep, where snow muffles sound, and even fear moves quietly. My mother taught me the old laws: hunt clean, kill quickly, take only what you need. The forest is a ledger—every bite recorded, every death balanced by life. I learned the scent of deer on the wind, the way rabbits freeze before t...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

"You Know What? I Quit."

I was halfway through microwaving my third cup of coffee when it happened.The moment.The click.The breaking point.My boss, Tim—the kind of man who uses phrases like “circle back” and “synergize” without irony—poked his head into the break room and said, “Hey, Jen, real quick—can you finish those quarterly reports before lunch? And also, can you jump on the Smithson call at 11? They had some concerns about the proposal and I told them you’d clarify everything.”He smiled, the kind of smile that assumes obedience, then vanished before I could a...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

"The Biggest Lie"

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life.My voice didn’t shake. I didn’t sweat. I looked them each in the eye—row after row of expectant, blinking, breathing faces—and I said the words as if they were gospel.“My brother was a good man.”The silence afterward was respectful. Some people bowed their heads. Others wiped their eyes. A few nodded, the way people do when they agree with something they want to believe.But inside, I was cracking open.My brother, Ethan, had died four days earlier. Car crash on Route 6. Single vehicle....

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

"The Choice"

He looked between us once more and said, “It’s either her or me…”His voice trembled, not from weakness but from the weight of his own ultimatum. I had heard those words before—on television dramas, in secondhand stories—but never in my life did I imagine they’d be aimed at me.Her or me.The woman standing next to me, Mara, didn’t flinch. She stared at him as if she’d known this moment was coming all along. Her silence felt like thunder, rolling between the three of us, shaking the very foundation of the room.Jacob had always been the calm one...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

"The Left Turn"

At the intersection, I could go right and head home — but turning left would take me…Well, I didn’t know where it would take me.I’d never gone left.Not in the dozens of times I’d passed through this sleepy four-way just outside town. Always right, toward my small apartment and my small life. Grocery bags in the trunk. Radio humming something forgettable. Right turn. Home.But today felt different. I had nothing in the trunk. Nothing to do. And, if I was being honest, nothing really waiting for me on the other side of that right turn.So I went...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

"Nowhere But Forward"

It took a few seconds to realize I was utterly and completely lost.One moment I was hiking the familiar trail behind my grandfather’s cabin, the scent of pine and damp moss thick in the air, the next—gone. The trail had vanished. No markers. No footprints. No distant sound of cars from the highway.Only silence. Not peaceful silence either, but the kind that presses in close, unnatural and watching.I turned in a slow circle, heart thudding. The trail I’d followed for years should have wound left around the boulder that now sat alone, surround...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

“The Quiet Draft”

The retreat was called Stillwater, though there was no water anywhere nearby. Just pine, hills, and a lingering scent of moss that clung to everything—your sweaters, your skin, even the notebooks you left on the porch overnight.Twelve writers had been invited. Eleven arrived.The one who didn’t was never mentioned again.Mara was one of them—invited on the strength of her recent success, a debut novel that had clawed its way into the public's imagination and refused to leave. She came not to write a second book, she claimed, but to think about...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

"Eleven Hours"

The email subject line read: FINAL DEADLINE: 11:59 PM TONIGHT. NO EXCEPTIONS.Mara stared at it, her stomach a knot of static. She had eleven hours left to finish the novel she’d spent two years starting and ten months abandoning. She was contractually obligated to submit it by midnight or return the advance—every cent of it—plus breach penalties. The figure haunted her: $28,000, a number that lived on her fridge in bold red Sharpie.She checked the time. 12:52 p.m.Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. Nothing came.Not a word.It had started w...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

“The Night Draft”

Dawn was a curse.Julian Blake had tried every productivity hack known to the internet. Sunrise alarms. Blue light blockers. Coffee with butter. Cold showers. Accountability partners. Morning pages. Apps with timers and badges and smug notifications.None of it worked.From 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Julian existed in a state of conscious paralysis—awake, but incapable. He would sit at his desk, surrounded by all the trappings of a writer’s life—fountain pens, notebooks, an antique typewriter he never used—and feel nothing but dread.He wasn’t lazy. He w...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

“The Voice Between the Lines”

The first time I heard her voice, I was halfway through writing a sentence I hadn't thought of yet."The lamp’s light flickered, casting shadows like regret on the hotel’s faded wallpaper."I stared at the words on my laptop screen. I hadn’t written them. At least, not consciously. But there they were—my fingers on the keys, my breath shallow, as if I'd caught someone whispering behind me.I live alone. That’s important to note.Ghostwriting isn’t as glamorous as people think. For every bestselling memoir by an actor who can't spell “memoir,” th...

1 like 1 comment 1
Read story

Again

Again, the storm had come without warning.Wind howled through the gnarled pines like a voice lost to time, and rain lashed against the old glass windows of the Bellhurst Inn. Inside, the guests murmured uneasily over their half-finished meals, the lights flickering as thunder rolled like distant drums.Mara stood behind the reception desk, watching the barometer needle twitch violently. She had read about the strange weather patterns in this valley—how storms came and went in spirals, always on the same days, sometimes even the same hour. But...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story