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Gareth Johnson

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2025

Stories (11)

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Library

23 Followers

248 Following

11 Stories

129 karma pts

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Rewind Specialist, Third Class

Nobody tells you temporal manipulation is mostly paperwork. They talk about the power, the responsibility, the weight of holding causality in your hands—and then they hand you a laminated card explaining your allotted monthly minutes.Ninety. I get ninety minutes of pause per month. Rewind is more expensive—that's limited to thirty minutes. More expensive temporally. More expensive bureaucratically. More expensive in the migraines that feel like someone's running my consciousness through a cheese grater, the ones that last for hours after I w...

2 likes

The Lost and Found

Submitted to Contest #337

I've been sitting in this particular Starbucks for three hours, watching the door and pretending to work on my laptop. The laptop isn't even on. I realized this about forty-five minutes ago and decided that acknowledging it would require more energy than maintaining the pretense, so here we are.I'm looking for my brother.Not in the milk-carton, true-crime-podcast sense—he's not missing-missing. He's just gone in that specific way people can be gone in New York, where eight million people means you can absolutely lose one particular person in...

5 likes

The Anniversary

Submitted to Contest #336

The restaurant was too bright, Claire thought. Everything was too bright—the white tablecloths, the chrome fixtures, the afternoon sun streaming through floor-to-ceiling windows. Her mother had chosen this place. Of course she had."Forty years," her father said, raising his water glass. His hands trembled slightly, the way they had since the stroke. "Can you believe it, Claire-bear?"Claire smiled and lifted her own glass. Across the table, her mother sat perfectly straight in a cream-colored blazer, her lipstick the exact shade of rose it ha...

12 likes

Almost Counts in Nothing But Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

Submitted to Contest #337

The quantum probability field flickered at 99.97%—which, in any reasonable universe (one where effort correlated with outcome, where the laws of physics acknowledged the concept of "trying really hard"), would be close enough. But Marissa Chen had been doing this job for six years—Temporal Adjustment Specialist II, Grade 7, benefits-eligible—and she knew that the universe was not, in fact, reasonable, and that 99.97% meant absolutely nothing when the threshold was 99.98%. Almost is never enough. The phrase appeared on every rejection notice ...

2 likes

The Care Coordination Call

Submitted to Contest #337

The call came at 10:30 AM on a Thursday, which was, of course, 11:30 PM in Singapore, because Rachel had always had impeccable timing in the way a wildfire has impeccable timing, arriving exactly when you'd finally sat down with something hot and caffeinated and were harboring fragile hopes of productivity. My phone lit up with her contact photo (her at someone's wedding, mid-laugh, approximately thirteen time zones and what felt like several geological epochs ago), and I experienced that particular full-body clench that came from knowing yo...

2 likes

Cell 14-D

Submitted to Contest #337

The man counts. Has counted. Will count until counting becomes the sound his mind makes instead of thinking. Cell 14-D measures nine feet by five feet by seven feet high. These are the dimensions of his universe. They do not change. They have never changed. They will not change until he is removed or until he is bones. Or until something else decides. The walls sweat. Pacific salt eating through concrete and steel and the idea of permanence. His tongue knows the taste. His skin secretes the same bitter mineral. He wonders if he is becoming t...

2 likes

Four Minutes

Submitted to Contest #336

Four Minutes Lydia was holding a knife—the good one, German steel, wedding gift from a marriage that lasted eighteen months—spreading aioli on sprouted grain bread when her phone lit up with the notification.SCHEDULED MAINTENANCE: Universal System Reboot in 4:00 minutes. Please save all work and ensure consciousness continuity protocols are in place. For questions, contact your local Reality Administrator. She looked at the phone. Looked at the sandwich. Looked back at the phone. 11:56 PM. Tuesday. Four minutes. The universe was rebooting in...

5 likes

The Question

Submitted to Contest #336

"Hey, so, quick question—and I mean quick, like genuinely quick, not the kind of quick where I say quick but then it turns into this whole thing where I'm detailing the socioeconomic implications of like, I don't know, oat milk pricing structures at Whole Foods versus Trader Joe's, which—actually, have you noticed that Trader Joe's oat milk is legitimately half the price but somehow tastes worse? Like, objectively worse. I thought it would be one of those situations where your brain convinces you the expensive version is better because of ps...

20 likes

The Last Shared Expense

Submitted to Contest #336

The email came through at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, which was typical of Eric—not because he was burning the midnight oil in some admirably productive way, but because he'd probably been watching YouTube videos about urban planning (his latest fixation, replacing the brief cryptocurrency phase and the even briefer artisanal pickle-making period) and remembered, mid-video about Amsterdam's cycling infrastructure, that he'd never responded to the accountant about dissolving their LLC. The subject line read: "Re: Final Distribution of Assets and W...

4 likes

The Exit Interview

Submitted to Contest #336

The fluorescent lights in Conference Room 3B hummed at a frequency that suggested they were perhaps three days away from finally giving up entirely—a timeline Rebecca understood intimately, having spent the last forty-five minutes watching Darren from HR attempt to conduct an exit interview with something that was, technically speaking, no longer entirely present in this dimension. "So if you could just initial here," Darren said, sliding the Non-Disclosure Agreement across the laminate table (Ikea, the BEKANT series, battleship gray, purcha...

4 likes

The Consultation

Submitted to Contest #335

The therapist's office has that specific aesthetic that exists at the intersection of "calming" and "expensive"—succulents that are thriving a little too perfectly (someone is definitely getting paid to water those), abstract art that's just chaotic enough to seem deep but not so chaotic it might upset anyone, and a white noise machine that's doing its best to mask the sound of someone crying in the adjacent room. (It's not doing great. The walls here are aspirational rather than functional.) Dr. Reeves sits across from me in a chair that pr...

7 likes