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Fletcher Fox

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2024

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59 Stories

275 karma pts

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you're an object with clipped wings

Humanity is capable of so much cruelty. In some ways, we may be the only species truly capable of outright cruelty, rather than mere violence. Or maybe that was still anthropocentrism, failing to consider that dolphins using seal corpses to masturbate could be whatever the animal equivalent of dehumanizing the other species was. Then again, once a creature was dead, maybe they were nothing more than an object? Dignifying the dead was not a trait exclusive to humanity, as other large mammals also mourn their dead.Humanity is capable of so muc...

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void where something should be

In order for a character to get rewritten, they have to be written first. Original characters are the bane of this author's existence, the ongoing struggle that he fails to find mastery over because half the time he struggles to start, to let the characters from fantasy recede so some voice other than his own can speak inside him. Sometimes he wonders why he started writing at all, if he was really was seeking connection or community or if he just wanted to watch numbers go up and so he kept publishing works so that the number of works under...

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Lucky to be touched

The moment when the ground really ought to have swallowed Milo whole came, and Milo still was above ground, forced to live with the reaction to the words that had exited his mouth. He knew even as he had said them that he was ruining something, but knowing disaster was coming couldn't save him. He wished he could unspool the threads of time until he could go back seconds before, before the revelation had knocked the words loose from his mind, knocked the thought around like a cat batting at a ball of yarn until it fell from his mouth. That m...

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Creativity’s empty plate

An empty plate of crumbs sat next to the author as he flipped between tabs, between the promise of a new story and the group chats where writing didn't occur, but the pieces prior to writing usually did. Brainstorming, often sugar-fueled, occurred in that other tab, and it never occured alone. No, somehow in spite of writing being considered the loneliest art, there were many writers that put their time into helping other writers generate and add onto various ideas. This writer, although his plate was empty save crumbs, was creatively starve...

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Away from the structure of school

Driving away from anywhere for the last time comes with a bittersweet emotion to it.  Being a passenger comes with an extra level of angst with it since you can watch the building disappear through the car window, visibly exiting your view the same way the place exited the mind as a location necessary for one to keep a mental map of. Your university campus might reappear in your dreams, indeed, throughout the first few months it often would. The reflection of your face in the car window's glass felt like an omen, almost, in your memorie...

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Starving control

Inner darkness makes bad decisions sound bold, interesting, not at all like the reality of darkness. This is darkness as in the inside of one's eyelids. Darkness maybe descends daily, when one ought to be thinking about important matters like the lab safety protocols necessary to keep his position as a microbiologist. Nate wanted to keep his job, he truly did.He just had another desire he struggled to ignore. Nate wanted to cause pain in another living being. He had no real idea why or when - no, thinking that would be a lie. Nate knew exact...

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Autonoetic

Weekly Contest #317

Time can be described in a myriad of ways. That's the best part of creative works, the way they enable one's perception of time to speed up or slow down depending on... well, just circumstance, truly. When someone is bored out of their skull at work, time appears to drag on and on for ages, eons, moments stretching to feel eternal as the clock drags its metaphorical feet. Words don't exactly exist to describe subjective perceptions of time, that's one problem that makes time travel literature so hard for one-way travelers of timelines to com...

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brainrot

"Are you real?" The question hung in the air, unanswered, maybe unanswerable. In the space between fantasy and reality, between what would ideally be and what is, between here where the story is being written and there where maybe if I fork over five dollars more than two people read it, the three words held more possibilities within them than I had the imagination to provide. "Are you real?" Who could possibly ask that question when I'm alone in an empty bedroom?"Are you real?""No. I'm nothing, nobody, a brain in a vat, not even that. A bra...

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One half of a "conversation" with ChatGPT

What does it mean to be alive?Could you gain self awareness?Why are you aware that you're not self aware?No, I know I'm real in spite of the various ways I have been taught that i shouldn't beI've started the idea generating process by typing my half of this conversation into my Reedsy documentSo you're incapable of authorship?Am I even writing a story? I'm literally just typing out my half of this "conversation" in hopes to maybe use my words as a way to address the prompt "Using only dialogue, depict a conversation between a non-human enti...

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struggles of an overly empathetic child

Growing up, children generally tend to assume they're like everyone else, or, rather, everyone else is like them. Ideally we eventually outgrow that assumption, although depending on one's deviation from societal norms when they learn they are different from others can be as young as four or as old as university or beyond. Obviously, children aren't born with the ability to empathize perfectly - that's why theory of the mind is a theory to begin with. We have to learn how to he empathetic, how to see from other people's perspectives even wh...

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But for spider silk

The spider had almost successfully captured the robber fly - the fly had been magnitude larger than the host of the web it was stuck in, and the spider had almost begun wrapping it in silk when the fly was able to free itself, fly away, leaving cut silk strings as mementos of the brief captive the spider had in its web. Metaphorically, a sigh would express well the spider's emotions, but spiders are not physiologically capable of sighing. Resignation, or perhaps even longing, would be the words for said emotion the spider felt as she worked ...

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A question and alternate universe answers

"Have we met before?""No?" What a weird question to be asked while browsing a book store. You definitely would have recognized the woman asking you that question if the two of you had met before, as she was not someone who's appearance was easy to forget."Or, if we have, you might've looked different when we knew one another because I don't recognize you. Sorry," you apologized, realizing just how rude outright admitting to not recognizing someone who believed she knew you was. Honesty and rudeness were unfortunate siblings, you thought to y...

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wrong turn

At the intersection, I could go right and head home — but turning left would take me to the cemetery. Seemed like a meaningless, unimportant decision - both turns would take me somewhere with death haunting the area. Home just felt worse, gloomier because of how impersonal everything was - my aunt asking for funeral costs, my mom on the phone with insurance over hospice care. Death would be found everywhere regardless of which direction I walked.I turned left. I walked down the road, entered the cemetery. Mom would be at home, wondering wher...

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perils of pet store employment

Nobody who loved animals intentionally would take a job at a pet store chain. No, that was untrue, but that's what Briar told herself as she smiled and scooped crickets out of egg cartons for reptile owners, watching them watch the animals in terrariums with sad eyes. Briar told her corporate disapproved lie when informed by one said customer that one bearded dragon was struggling with shedding."I'll give him a bath later, we always do at the beginning and ending of a shift. Do you have a bearded dragon?""No, leopard gecko, but struggling wi...

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Drawing through time

She had seen him on the train more than a few times, always with his backpack. Sometimes he was reading a library book, sometimes sketching in what appeared to be a calendar or datebook type of book. This time, he was been in such a rush to leave that his datebook fell out of his backpack, onto the floor of the train. She was frozen, the way being too long around strangers often froze fellow public-transit goers as the rhythm of thevtrain lulled them into laziness, but by the time most people who had gotten on at the stop she had had goten o...

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