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Iris Silverman

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2020

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26 Stories

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Weekly Contest #352

Back then, the soles of our feet were always pitch-black, and our skin still had enough elasticity to rebound after each sunburn. The heat was so intense that it nearly blurred our vision, warping the air like flames do. Our hands stayed sticky because of the watered-down popsicles we grabbed from Mr. Coolidge’s freezer. Until we grew out of popsicles and grew into our bodies, sitting on sweaty leather car seats in parking lots, missing each other’s lips in the dark. Those summers were sacred for many reasons. But summer of 1978 marked a shi...

3 likes 1 comment 1
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On Liberty, Tangerine Houses, and Hurricanes

Weekly Contest #332

I loved our lime-green 3 bedroom, 2-half bath house on Egania Street, no matter how many times the piping froze in the winter and the toilet got stopped up. I loved that it stood on painted wooden stilts like a circus performer, wobbly under pressure but never willing to surrender. I loved that house, but I sure didn’t love everything that happened around it.It was late September of 2005, I was 13, and we’d barely begun to recover from the wrath of Hurricane Katrina. While most of my classmates moved with their families across the Southeast,...

19 likes 1 comment 1
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Walking Moon Magnets

Weekly Contest #330

In those days, he and I were walking moon magnets. Bare feet in tune with the Earth beneath us. The uneven grass blades like knowing smiles of the guardian angels watching over us from above. Nature is uneven. And lopsided. Everything that’s real is. What is a walking moon magnet? They’d ask me. You’d ask me. And to that I’d say, You should have been there. You should have been there, in Ocean Isle, North Carolina, where my whole world was splayed out over a whopping 6.89 acres. The land that two families co-habited and faced the calm water...

17 likes 3 comments 3
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Salt of the Earth

Weekly Contest #324

It smelled like rotting fish, potato chips, and the bottom of New York City’s oldest dumpster, but it also relaxed something deep inside of me, a muscle in my soul that no amount of meditation can touch. And the birds we saw – oh, the birds we saw! Pelicans, storks, and cranes. Long-legged blue-tinted creatures with stoic poses. Brooding and shy beings with stunning beaks longer than their bodies. In the early 2000s, we ran home to this place.We ran out with our binoculars and played house in the scorching sun, surrounded by this sea so choc...

23 likes 5 comments 5
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Martha and Louise's Daughter

Weekly Contest #322

The wheels of my car turn like clumsy cartwheels in the weeds next to a perfectly manicured soccer field. I am the child who cannot sit still, and these wheels are my feet. The glass Coke bottle on my dashboard reflecting the sun is the feeling I have of wanting more, so much so that I risk being broken. My license plate is a cheap tattoo that tells you only where I have been, not where I am going. It’s dusk now. I’m sitting by the Lake of the Woods in the Northwest Angle, a desolated town toned down by the stillness of the lake that enclos...

17 likes 3 comments 3
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The Loneliest Island

Weekly Contest #305

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life. “I wasn’t there.” The “there” I was talking about was a lake. Ferring Lake, to be exact. Ferring Lake is a 200 square-mile dynamic body of water, with strong central currents, pockets of picturesque clear-water beaches, and areas so full of thick mud that even the most durable wading boots don’t stand a chance. The beautiful clearings were once home to secret hammocks hung between shady trees and a plethora of old furniture dropped off by high school students. In one area, there was ...

21 likes 3 comments 3
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In Another World

Shortlisted for Contest #305 ⭐️

At the intersection, I could go right and head home – but turning left would take me…to your apartment, one that I’ve never been to but seen pictures of online. “Home” is a loose term, as it currently refers to the hotel room I will be staying in alone in the town where I could also find you. You and your fiance, Lucy, a woman with plain brown hair and an unremarkable face, who poses wide-eyed and smiling next to you. You, gorgeously poetic and subtly cruel as John Mayer.In another world, you and I fell in love in the Appalachian Mountains o...

26 likes 7 comments 7
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Under Cheyenne's Skies

Weekly Contest #304

TW: Themes of death and dying, bullying, sensitive language Cheyenne Blackburn deserved more than this world gave her. She was one of the first friends I made when my mom and I immigrated from Toronto, Canada to Catskill, New York. We were both certified Horse Girls, and so we met at summer day camp at Catskill Equestrian Center when we were just 7 years old. Cheyanne had long thin legs like winter tree branches, hair as light as melted butter, and striking caramel-colored brown eyes. Her hair was so thin you almost thought it might melt aw...

14 likes 1 comment 1
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If the End of the World Could Talk

Shortlisted for Contest #302 ⭐️

My name is Sage Duperior, and I once lived at the End of the World. At least, that’s what they call Venice, Louisiana, the last pit-stop before entering into an abyss that is the Gulf of Mexico. It’s the closest thing you’ll get to being on another planet while still floating around on this one. The town is basically surrounded on both sides by water. On the map, the state of Louisiana seems to shrivel out and branch into a frail leaf or two – that’s where Venice is. Somewhere on that leaf. There are stretches of land after it, but it’s all ...

30 likes 25 comments 25
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Even a Dirty Pool is a Mirror

Weekly Contest #300

TW: Themes of childhood death, dying, and terminal illnessIt was the summer of 1990 at Girl Scout Camp in Upstate New York, and I was 15 years old. The first thing I noticed the day I was dropped off was the eerie outdoor pool. A flimsy sign indicated a maximum depth of 12 feet near the thin diving board, which inched out hesitantly over the stagnant water below. The water seemed to grow a kind of green, sludgy mildew that only would be tamed by an intricate cocktail of every cleaner that existed in the world. Glistening from afar, the pool’...

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Even Honeysuckle is a Just a Weed

Weekly Contest #298

I drenched the cold, cheese-less scrambled eggs in off-brand ketchup and shook the life out of the salt shaker until I saw thin, translucent granules floating in the thick red sea. What was I supposed to do? I didn’t know how to fucking cook. How was a 13-year-old boy expected to make breakfast, lunch, and dinner for both himself and his schizophrenic mother? “Mom!” I would yell from the kitchen, hoping for a response since that meant she was at least inside. Back then, my mom was taking her clothes off in our front lawn a lot. She’d sit th...

14 likes 6 comments 6
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Nebula Grieving

Weekly Contest #296

TW: Themes of pregnancy loss and sexual assault.“Hey, Bunny! Think fast!”My co-worker threw a size-XL pair of men’s tighty-whities at my head and, to my dismay, the crotch landed perfectly on my nose.“Not funny. That’s absolutely disgusting.” I looked down at the pile of junk I still had to sort through and gritted my teeth, my hand flying instinctively to my stomach.I was sifting through the bin drop-offs for that day in the suffocatingly humid make-shift storage room, nausea hitting me in waves. New Tomorrow Thrift, where I got my first jo...

12 likes 13 comments 13
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White Sand

Weekly Contest #294

She was from the coast. We all had wide eyes when she showed off her seashells and bird feathers with a smug grin, laying them out on the carpet in a perfect line. The dusty red, alphabet-letter-speckled carpet made for a shocking background; the contrast was like that of a diamond ring lying on a fast food counter. I felt ashamed suddenly of the tattered sweater I wore three times a week, its comfort melting away like snow in the Southern sun.  We all sat criss-cross-applesauce while she told us stories about deep-sea fishing with her ...

19 likes 17 comments 17
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What We Take To The Grave

Weekly Contest #294

TW: This story contains themes of sexual abuse and substance abuseGrandaddy was a 70 year-old rail-thin, one-legged chain-smoker born and raised in Red Bay, Alabama and one of the meanest people I’d ever met. He’d wake up each morning around 7am and hobble into the kitchen on his crutches. Then, he’d take a swig from his flask and chase it down with a pork rind or a Little Debbie cake, whatever was closest in reach. He never wore a prosthetic - just dirty blue jeans with the end tied off on the left leg. I knew his routines like this be...

16 likes 7 comments 7
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Inflatable Green Pools, Scotch, and the Summer of 1985

Weekly Contest #292

Georgia told me that the humid air in our small Arkansas cabin made her have nightmares for that entire summer. She said the emerald green leaves that cushioned the tree branches outside were trapping the heat in, suffocating her. She acted like I didn’t know that what she really hated the most was the fact that the air conditioner had broken a couple of months back and our dad had never bothered to get it fixed. We’d wake up every morning with droplets of sweat glistening on our skinny backs, doing its best to dry while it was confined to o...

19 likes 16 comments 16
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