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Gareth Johnson

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2025

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67 Followers
313 Following

26 Stories

442 karma pts

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The Cartographer of Forgotten Doors

She found him in the museum after closing, standing before the Flemish still-lifes with their painted skulls and overripe fruits, their brocades catching a light that no longer existed anywhere on earth. He was not supposed to be there. Neither, technically, was she."Do I know you?" she asked, because something in the architecture of his shoulders—the precise angle of them, the way they carried a burden invisible to ordinary sight—tugged at a memory she could not quite locate, the way a tongue finds the absence of a tooth.He turned. His face...

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The River

He came back in October when the light had gone flat and the cottonwoods stood stripped along the bank like things long dead. He had not intended to come. He had driven south out of Cheyenne on the interstate and somewhere past Wheatland he had turned onto the state road and then onto the county road and then onto the dirt track that had no name and when he saw the line of trees ahead dark against the pale sky, he stopped the truck and sat with the engine running.The river was low. It always was in October.He cut the engine and got out and s...

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The Café at the Edge of Memory

She sensed him before she saw him—an ancient instinct, the way prey knows when a predator has entered the clearing. Eight years collapsed into nothing, time folding back on itself like a map of a country she'd sworn never to revisit. Jake stood at the counter in his winter coat still damp with February rain, ordering coffee black as ink, large enough to warm both hands. Some rituals persisted across lifetimes, outlasting love itself.Maya could have fled. The café had a back door that opened onto an alley where snow collected in the corners l...

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The Last Appointment

Death worked out of a converted office building in Detroit that someone had chopped into studios in 2015 and everyone had regretted since. The waiting room smelled like rain and old receipts, the kind of atmospheric gloom you'd expect if you were the type to expect atmospheric gloom, which Gideon wasn't because he was primarily focused on the fact that he was definitely, completely, no-question dead."Mr. Kowalski?" Death looked up from his clipboard. He wore a cardigan that had seen better centuries and reading glasses that caught the failin...

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The Last Good Coffee Before Morning

The espresso machine at Eternal Grounds wheezed like it had consumption, which was weirdly appropriate given the place used to be a funeral home. Not "converted into luxury condos" funeral home. Not "tastefully repurposed into a wellness center" funeral home. Actual "we still found embalming fluid in the basement storage and the owner said 'eh, it's probably fine'" funeral home, now serving overpriced lattes to insomniacs and shift workers in a neighborhood where the Victorian architecture sagged under the weight of bad renovations and the g...

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The Lamp Comes With a Manual

The genie materialized at 11:45 PM between the kitchen alcove and the futon, in a space that couldn't fit Keisha's laundry basket, let alone seven feet of person wearing linen that predated the Byzantine Empire.Keisha had been awake for nineteen hours. She was eating pad thai directly from the takeout container, the same container from three days ago, and her eyes needed several seconds to confirm that yes, there was now a man in her studio apartment, and yes, he was holding a navy blue three-ring binder from Office Depot."You have freed me ...

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What Wood Remembers

The rocking horse had been carved from black walnut in 1847, when the hollow still belonged to the Whitmore family, and it remembered everything.It remembered the hands of the woodworker who had shaped it—how he'd wept as he sanded its mane smooth, grieving his own daughter lost to fever that winter. Grief had soaked into the grain alongside the linseed oil. Perhaps that was why the horse could see what others could not. Perhaps sorrow had given it eyes. The boy's name was Caleb, and he had loved the horse fiercely.Seven years old, copper-h...

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Draft Seven (I Think? I've Lost Count)

Weekly Contest #340

Look, I know you're reading this. You're always reading this because you wrote this, and we need to talk about your creative process, which currently resembles a drunk playing Jenga with my entire existence. I'm aware that opening with an aggressive second-person address might alienate readers, but that's your anxiety, not mine. I'm a fictional character. I have no stake in whether people like this. That's entirely your problem, which—and here's where it gets really fun—you've displaced onto me, making me carry your vanity while you get to m...

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The Keeper of Forgotten Names

The girl in the attic room had stopped believing in angels three winters ago, on the night her mother's boyfriend put cigarettes out on her little brother's arms. Now she believed in other things—things that moved in the narrow spaces between the walls of their Baltimore rowhouse, things that whispered her real name when the streetlights flickered and died.The social workers called her Destiny. She called herself nothing at all.She was fourteen when the Keeper found her, or when she found the Keeper—the distinction mattered less than the inv...

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The Wednesday Market

The market appeared on Wednesdays, which Vera supposed made sense. Wednesdays had always belonged to wanderers and transformations, to the gods who traded eyes for wisdom and walked between worlds.She found it three weeks after the funeral, when she was still doing Owen's grocery shopping out of habit. The list was still in her phone—almond milk, the good bread from the bakery, those expensive olives he pretended not to love. She'd gone to the store four times since he died, filled the cart with things for a man who wasn't coming back, then ...

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The Annotated Survival Guide to Your Imminent Cosmic Irrelevance

Weekly Contest #338

Teddy Yuen found the book on a Tuesday, which was already a problem because nothing good has ever happened on a Tuesday. Black Tuesday cratered the stock market and kicked off the Great Depression. The Greeks have considered Tuesday unlucky for five hundred years because Constantinople fell on one. That time you texted your ex at 2 AM with what you thought was a "mature and measured" message but was actually unhinged goblin behavior—also a Tuesday, statistically speaking. The day is cursed, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you...

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The Testimony of Dust

Weekly Contest #338

The boy lay in the dark of the barn loft and did not move. Below him several men had gathered. Their voices rose through the gapped boards like prayers from a congregation that had forgotten God's name and learned older ones instead.He had come to sleep in the hay in summer when the house held its heat like a kiln and his small room under the eaves grew close enough to suffocate. The loft released the day's warmth as evening came, and the smell of it—dusty and sweet and mixed with horsesweat and the ghost of last year's tobacco still hanging...

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The Perilous and Most Honorable Society of Those Who Have Seen the Thing

Weekly Contest #338

The invitation arrived in Declan's mailbox between a Spectrum bill and a coupon for forty percent off at Bed Bath & Beyond, which should have been his first clue that something weird was happening, because Bed Bath & Beyond had been dead for two years and yet here was a coupon, pristine, urgent, offering savings on bath towels that no longer existed in any accessible retail dimension.The invitation itself was printed on paper so thick it felt like holding a slice of expensive cheese. The text was embossed in gold: You Have Been Obser...

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The Children of the Forest

Weekly Contest #338

The fluorescent lights in the Natural History Museum's west corridor had been having some kind of nervous breakdown for three days—flickering in a rhythm that suggested either faulty wiring or a really passive-aggressive ghost. Clara had filed two maintenance requests, both of which had been received with the enthusiasm of a man being asked to clean up after the apocalypse."Budget's tight," Jerry from facilities had said, like that explained why a major metropolitan museum couldn't afford a fucking light bulb."We're closing in ten," her supe...

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The Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing Your Undead Lifestyle

Weekly Contest #338

Danny closed The Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing Your Undead Lifestyle and tossed it onto the coffee table, where it landed next to a half-eaten gas station burrito and three empty Monster Energy cans. The book had been zero help. Chapter seven promised "Practical Tips for Maintaining Human Relationships," but it was mostly Victorian-era advice about not drinking your servants and shit about finding discreet donors at opium dens."Opium dens," Danny muttered to his empty apartment. "Yeah, let me just head down to the Tucson opium den. It's...

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