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Erin King

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2026

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8 Stories

93 karma pts

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Not the Van

Weekly Contest #358

The first house I ever cleared had a freezer full of wedding cake.Whole tiers, boxed in cardboard, frosting gone gray at the seams. The bride was eighty-six. Her husband had been gone thirty years. No one knew why she kept the cake.“Throw it away,” her son told me. “Whatever it meant, it’s over.”That was before I understood that nothing is over inside a house. It is only stored poorly.There is no real training for entering a dead person’s home with gloves, contractor bags, a clipboard, and permission. There are only habits acquired through r...

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The Emergency Contact

Weekly Contest #357

By the time the hospital called about the third person, Mira had begun to suspect she was a service. Not a person, exactly. More of a municipal feature. Like a drinking fountain, or those blue emergency poles on college campuses no one touched unless they had been in danger for three blocks already and wanted the university to have paperwork about it.She was eating cottage cheese from the container, over her sink, when her phone rang at 11:42 p.m., which was how she knew immediately it was either death, fraud, or someone who had confused com...

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The Difference That Drowning Made

Weekly Contest #356

The town built the museum three years after Evelyn Vale drowned.Not affordable housing. Not the flood barriers that engineers had requested for years before anyone became corpses.A museum.The Evelyn Vale Center for Civic Memory and River Heritage sat above Bellcross, on the hill, overlooking the river...all glass walls and copper trim and expensive remorse. It looked like a rich woman pretending not to notice the servants.Inside the lobby stood the canoe.People cried in front of it constantly.The canoe had belonged to Evelyn. That mattered b...

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The Shape She Took

Weekly Contest #355

The first thing mourners noticed about Vanessa Vale’s funeral was the flowers.There were enough of them to suggest either profound love or excellent accounting. White roses climbed the stage in disciplined arrangements large enough to obstruct sightlines. Orchids leaned from gold stands near the lobby like expensive women refusing to age naturally. Somewhere beneath it all lingered the wet green smell of cut stems slowly dying in conditioned air.Vanessa would have appreciated the restraint.Not the quantity, quantity had stopped meaning anyth...

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The Age of Leaving

Weekly Contest #354

By the time I came back to Mercy, I was forty-one and had successfully avoided becoming the sort of woman people described as “from there.” This was difficult, because I was from there.Mercy, Colorado: population 842 if you counted infants, drifters, and the bronze miner outside the courthouse, which everyone did, since he’d been there longer than most marriages and caused fewer public scenes. Mercy sat between two mountains like something dropped and forgotten from the pocket of a more ambitious town. In winter, it froze beautifully. In sum...

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What Settles Below

Weekly Contest #353

*This story depicts a suggested violent crime against a child.* The first thing the earth returned was not a body.It was a braid.Black hair threaded with green ribbon, pushed up through the mud behind the old chapel after three nights of hard rain.Evelyn Pike found it while walking her dog before sunrise. The dog began whining before she saw anything, pawing frantically at the soaked ground near the cattails. Later, she would insist she thought it was roots at first. Everyone said that afterward. Roots. Vines. Animal remains. Drift debris. T...

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A Chromatic Breach

Weekly Contest #352

They taught us early that color was not a property of the world. It was a failure of it.A misfire. A leak.“Color,” Instructor Hale would say, tapping the chalk against the board three times…always three, “is what happens when feeling (tap) exceeds (tap) containment (tap).”We were children then, but we understood containment. We had to. It was the first language we were given.Contain your voice. Contain your hands. Contain your reactions.Contain yourself.The classroom walls were a uniform, sanctioned gray, Designation Neutral-3, chosen for it...

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What the Mug Remembered

Weekly Contest #351

By the time the ceiling began to bow, Marla had already decided the house was fine.Not safe, she wasn’t delusional, but fine in the way expired yogurt is fine if you don’t think about it too hard.The distinction mattered. Safe implied a problem that wanted solving. Fine suggested a situation with character.Marla had lived for years inside the elastic definition of fine.It wasn’t that she had too much stuff. That phrasing lacked nuance and, worse, imagination. She had a comprehensive inventory of her life. A domestic archive arranged accordin...

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