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Etienne Fossifern

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2025

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22 Followers
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13 Stories

169 karma pts

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Art Doll, Blue

I bought a toy “art doll.” The baby doll is a light shade of blue. It is supposed to be a fairy doll. It has white spots speckled along its face and arms and legs. The doll reminded me of Rivers. Was China trying to tell me something?Rivers was born with Infant ALL Leukemia, the worst kind of it. He had it the whole time I was pregnant with him. Gestational leukemia. The doctors had never seen anything like it. It was progressive and relentless. His internal organs were misshapen and ruined. His pancreas, his liver—even if he could survive i...

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Spirit Road

Weekly Contest #346

Whenever I am in an unpleasant situation or stressed out or having a surgery or getting blood drawn or in agonizing pain or just devastated for whatever reason, I imagine a bright brilliant field full of tall green grass bending in a light breeze and monarch butterflies floating in the air. I imagine a warm sunny day, clear baby blue sky, white cotton candy clouds drifting across the sky. The field is full of wildflowers with colorful blossoms and green leaves, and they too bend and float in the cool breeze. Sometimes, if I am really struggl...

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The Bad Teacher

Trigger Warning: Multiple sensitive themes including physical violence, sexual violence, abuse, mental health, suicide. I raised my hand for the entire class and our teacher, Miss Dixon, would not call on me. She had once called on my raised hand early in the beginning of the year.I said, “Miss Dixon, should you be doing that?”Her face turned red and I knew that she was angry with me.In our second-grade math class she started to tell me, “Two plus two does not equal four,” and I was troubled by this revelation.Up till then I had been good at...

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Snow Flowers

Weekly Contest #339

I stood at the trailhead. The pebbly trail gave way to wooden planks and a boardwalk, wooden steps down to the field. The field lay stretched out before me in the distance and was full of wildflowers. I wanted to get a hike in. It was unseasonably warm for the middle of March and there was a warm front that was soon to give way to heavy snowfall. The wildflowers had begun to reveal themselves, blooming, and I hated to think of them stuck under inches or feet of snow and ice.I took the first step onto the trail. I was the only one who was hik...

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The Limit

Weekly Contest #338

I found out about the society through my friend, Bente Edo. In the first year of initiation, there is no use in having your old name. You get reborn into the society through a process of transformation and change.At first, I was skeptical. I thought perhaps I had found a new church or congregation. But it was not typically religious in that sense. It was a spiritual conversion that I was after. My old way of life and thinking was not cutting it anymore. I needed something to inspire me to aspire to a new way of life.I was not meant to know t...

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Come With Me

Weekly Contest #337

There was one last gas station before the edge went on forever down the side of the earth's flat planet simulation. The gas station, Nova’s Quick Stop. Chucho Churchill worked there and did an excellent job ringing up customers who wanted decent souvenirs and replacing the coffee pots with fresh coffee and sometimes even putting gas in people’s cars.Only one time had anyone ever driven over the edge. The car had been carrying a family, and the father had lost his mind. It was in the newspapers. Man Drives Family Off the Edge of The Earth to ...

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Heart Jacks Heart

Weekly Contest #337

I met Jack at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. The first time he barely noticed me. The second time, it was what I shared in the meeting that piqued his attention. Afterwards he followed me out with his styrofoam cup of coffee and asked me if I was okay.I said, not really.I was eleven days clean and sober and could feel the wheels turning in my head. It was only a matter of time before I was able to find a way to use again. But I was glad that he stopped me going out the door, offered me a cigarette, which I do not smoke anymore but that after...

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The 375 (943) Poet

Weekly Contest #336

Mazin was depressed, reserved, a poet yearning for fame. His depression taught him not to hope or dream. That nothing good would ever happen to him. That he could not make things happen even if he wanted to.Mazin looked at his life and thought, my God what is the point? I have nothing to show for myself, all these years have come to nothing.But he was still able to write poetry. He wrote notebook after notebook, filled up every page with his cursive script. He knew what he wanted. He was not confused as to what his life should be.The countle...

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Rain Night

Weekly Contest #335

Berlin lived in a house on a hill overlooking a road that cut serpentine through the valley. Across the road there are cabins down in the holler. The slant of their roofs visible from the deck. One house has a white tin roof that glitters in the sun. Next door to Berlin’s small quaint white house is a brown A-frame shack that has been long forgotten by time and by people. It was once an old man’s workshop, but he died many years ago.The large shack has a sloping roof that touches the ground on one side. The a-frame shack is situated in dense...

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Begin Again

Weekly Contest #335

Ace Beppy was a fashion designer who won a fashion design contest put on by the fashion department of the Eckermann School of Fashion. He won fifty thousand dollars, a feature article in Vogue magazine. The plan was to make a spring/summer collection titled: End of an Age. He was given use of a sewing room in the fashion department to make his spring/summer collection.The room was full of drafting tables and floor to ceiling windows that let in the natural, bright light of the mornings and afternoons. The fashion building was old; it had bee...

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I Can’t Do It Alone

Move back home and do it with your mother.But. But it would change your life. Change our lives. In a good way. We would be less self centered and less selfish. We could be a family.No way. You are in no position. You are on methadone. You take psych meds. You were high risk the first time around. And need I remind you of the fact that you have no money? You are not exactly set up or well funded. I like my life the way it is now. I have my music. My career. Things the way I like them. I don’t want all that to change. And if I did want that fo...

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Everything You Can Imagine Is Real

Weekly Contest #313

I am worried about Nathan. He insists that he can see dinosaurs. That they speak to him. That they are in the wild garden. I have pieced together that this garden he speaks of is some place where the dinosaurs exist in his mind. He has an active imagination and has been getting carried away. There is that cartoon he is fond of called Betula Radish Wuz Here.In that show there are several colorful talking dinosaurs who solve mysteries. Detective Radish solves crimes. The crimes are always silly like someone loses their baseball hat or house ke...

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The Book Warehouse

Weekly Contest #312

Welcome. Take a price list. It shows the discounts.I stepped into the book warehouse and looked around. Vast, enormous.I looked up at the top of the shelves crammed full of thick books with colorful spines and whispered, this place is dangerous.The wide shelves were filled with gigantic boxes. Huge boxes on wooden pallets all the way up to the ceiling. Death by books? A proper and sophisticated way to die.The crowds of people pushed forward, and I bumped into several people. Everyone was looking at the books on the shelves and in the boxes a...

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