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Erin King

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2026

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5 Stories

37 karma pts

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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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