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Fletcher Fox

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2024

Stories (57)

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Library

12 Followers

0 Following

57 Stories

268 karma pts

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The Weight of Consent

Fletcher Fox

Submitted to Contest #298

This story contains themes of incestuous sexual abuse, coercion, and disability being used to excuse nonconsensual acts. It also explores the victim’s inaccurate view of consent, fear of criminalization, passive suicidal ideation, and dissociation. Please take care while reading. "Hey, you alright?" Alana could see exhaustion in her friend's face, his tired eyes, tensed shoulders almost to his ears as he stared in wide-eyed embarrassment at being questioned about his emotional state."Yeah, just... no, I'm not alright. Do you ever feel like e...

7 likes

illegally loved

Fletcher Fox

Warning: This story includes themes of criminality and legal consequences, inability to understand consent, incestuous sexual abuse enabled by authority, internalized victim blaming, dissociation, emotional manipulation, and passive suicidal ideation (not wanting to exist). No portrayal in this story is meant to demonize any specific disability.Physically, there's no acute threat to sitting on the couch next to my brother. Physically, his hands on me, one around my shoulder, the other resting on my knee, are warm, a weight that in a normal f...

1 like

Mom-ster

Fletcher Fox

There's a hidden weight in every banal breakfast conversation now. It looks normal, seems ordinary, occasionally I can even convince myself nothing has actually happened. The only difference is where I wake up beforehand, which bed I'm leaving, but I shouldn't feel so much about it. Mom says I'm the man of the house now, and men love women, and I love her, so I'm supposed to love her. I do love her, I just don't love when she kisses me goodbye before I get on the schoolbus, the kiss is long and on the mouth. I just don't love what happens at...

1 like

the library that looked like an apartment complex

Fletcher Fox

The brick buildings are typical of Boston - old, with metal balconies where sparrows balance and perch, before flying elsewhere in search of food or a puddle to drink from. The building was tan, bricks weathered, not that anyone paid much attention to the architecture where they were headed, anyway. These were rarely those sorts of travels. That wasn't to say nobody ever went there in search of architecture studies - libraries housed all sorts of scholars, after all. And this brick building, in spite of what the balconies might lead a pedest...

1 like

nobody will listen to what you say, so write

Fletcher Fox

What's the point of talking if nobody will listen to what you say? That's generally my philosophy, and very rarely does anyone want to listen. Like the loser blowing me kisses and calling me slurs on my way to class, he doesn't give a damn if I'm actually a lesbian. Still, words are better than actions, and I'm grateful we're not in the same English class. I'm grateful the agonizingly long day of harassment by peers and ignorance by grownups is almost to an end. Almost, but not yet. The assignment is written on the board. Mr. Brown shows us ...

1 like

When Too Much Isn't True

Fletcher Fox

TW SEXUAL ABUSE, DISSOCIATION, INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS, INTERNALIZED VICTIM BLAMING "I've said too much." My heart pounded against the prison bars of my ribcage. My mouth was dry.  "You haven't said anything!" She shouted, but that wasn't true. If that was true, she wouldn't be frustrated with me, would be entirely unaware anything was wrong in the first place. Nothing was supposed to be. Nothing was supposed to be wrong. On paper, my life was ideal. I lived rent free with my parents, I have a disabled older brother, sure, but he adored me. ...

1 like

Inside Closed Eyes

Fletcher Fox

The mystery was why. Why create this sort of a painting? This dark, melancholy portrait of the artist with black pits for eyes, only for the artist to later paint over them altogether, leaving a black bar across the eyes like they were the patient in a medical case study. Only the sheer variety of colors in the background as well as the stylization of the painting made clear this was not a photograph from a medical case study. No, this was indeed a work of art. The paint was mixed by hand on a palette. In a world with more and more digital c...

1 like

unloveable, message received, loud and clear

Fletcher Fox

James wasn’t procrastinating. He was perfectly happy staying up late. He wanted to be lying in bed, playing spider solitaire on his phone. His dreams sometimes included spider solitaire, that’s how late he stayed up playing it, but there wasn’t any nefarious reason for it. There wasn’t any dread in his gut, fear somehow living in his neck, hands - no, James was living his waking life as though he would fall asleep eventually, and he had no reason to care about that, to avoid it, he didn’t. He fell asleep around four in the morning, his phone...

2 likes

transformative teenage rebellion

Fletcher Fox

My mom dropped me off at the restaurant, convinced I was just meeting with a study group. They were somewhat correct, just not the type of studying nor group my mom would approve of. My backpack did not contain books, but rather clothes, clothes my mom would scream at me if she knew I would be wearing in public, but this was not just anywhere in public.  No, I knew this restaurant, this event, was safe, so I undressed in the single stall bathroom, taking care to zipper my skirt and button my blouse, applying makeup the way I had taught ...

2 likes

fog

Fletcher Fox

When this was the weather, being asked to write a story wherein the weather mirrored a character’s emotions was simply too easy. Fog was practically used more often as a metaphor for emotions than as a weather phenomenon at this point. Human beings even have machines that make fog specifically for the atmospheric effect said weather creates at concerts and theaters. But this was no human created fog. It was light and saturated the air, made seeing distances impossible, made the confused angstrom of emotion all that much worse.  So yeah,...

2 likes

Vera, truth spells, and overt anger

Fletcher Fox

Trigger warning: kidnapping, non-consensual truth spell use, past physical abuse, current sexual assault, and dissociationSometimes, being under a truth spell just means not being able to lie about being fine anymore. Not that I was lying to Vera about being fine because I wasn't - that would require answering her inquiries into my well-being at all. But generally, even before I came to and recognized the sickeningly familiar feeling of being compelled to tell the truth, I had been the type of person to claim I was doing fine when maybe I wa...

2 likes

never thought we’d have a last kiss

Fletcher Fox

Submitted to Contest #286

trigger warning: extremely dubious consent, emotional manipulationBlake owed Clara an explanation, he knew that much. He decided to be honest, completely honest, for once. "I thought that if I tried hard enough, if I played along, then I would eventually learn to love you the way you want me to.""But you don't." She said, not phrasing it as a question, all too aware of the reality she now had to face. Clara blinked rapidly, willing away tears. She couldn't afford to break down, not when Blake stood in front of her, baring his soul, betraying...

5 likes

Problems of a pen

Fletcher Fox

I used to be useful. Now the ink has dried. The poor artist scratches my tip against the sketch pad to no avail. I’m empty. The ink inside me has dried and no longer flows freely. The artist shakes my clear glass body, evidently frustrated by my inability to function, to create the markings required of a pen. Ink is meant to flow through a pen the way blood flows through a living creature’s veins. But mine has clotted, has stopped working as it ought to. It wasn't always like this. Nowadays, I spend the majority of my time clicked closed, ti...

2 likes

should’ve known better

Fletcher Fox

content warning: sexual assault and suicide attempt “I should’ve known better.” “Excuse me?” “You only ever call me when you fucking need something, and the only time I hang up, you know, now that I’m employed and have a job and can’t obey your every whim any more, you go ahead and do something so reckless and stupid, it makes me regret ever setting a boundary. I should’ve known better than to answer the damned phone.” “Julie, please, it’s not like that, I swear, I -“ “You’re calling me from the fucking psych ward after drinking an entire bo...

0 likes

parasitoid paranoia

Fletcher Fox

Every story starts with a birth. Or maybe every birth begins a story, the writing of a life, and sometimes the writing of a death at the same time. Parasitoids do just that - they rewrite the story of a beetle's life to instead birth a fly from said beetle's pupae. They rewrite the story of a spider's molt to instead birth a parasitic wasp in Costa Rica. Parasitoids eat their host from the inside out, and until recently, the only reason they haven't inspired more horror stories was that human beings were never victims of their destruction.&n...

1 like