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J.R. Geiger

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2025

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13 Stories

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Vujà dé

Weekly Contest #344

A lot of folks talk about déjà vu like it’s a glitch in the cosmic record—some little loop in the universe’s vinyl. I’ve never had that. Not once. My life runs the opposite direction. I get vujà dé—the bone‑deep certainty that none of this has ever happened before, that the world is improvising around me, that the script supervisor quit sometime around dawn and the universe has been winging it ever since. And every time it hits, I think the same thing: None of this shit’s happened before! That’s the line I tell people when they ask why I loo...

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Clive's Chronicles XII: The Centurion Helm Allocation Index and the Cat

The low humming of the fluorescent lights in the Ministry of Temporal Discrepancies’ Sub-Level Gamma was, to Clive, the sound of a universe gently, yet firmly, rejecting his life choices.Clive, now employed as a Temporal Logistics Efficiency Consultant—a role that mostly involved him policing the office break room for improperly categorized tea bags—had always cherished routine. Routine was the bedrock of sanity, the velvet quilt protecting the delicate machinery of his highly anxious mind. The office, usually vacated by precisely 5:01 PM (C...

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Clive's Chronicles XI: Quest for the Quilted Tranquility

Clive, the camel of infinite anxieties and a refined palate, was experiencing a new, profound emptiness. It wasn’t the kind of existential dread brought on by witnessing the collapse of a timeline or the social horror of a poorly brewed Assam. This was a physical, psychic void centered right where his mouth should have been—if his mouth were currently occupied by his cherished possession.He had lost his binky.Not just a binky, but The Soother. It was a custom-made, military-grade silicon pacifier, designed in a calming Federal blue and attac...

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Clive's Chronicles X: The Midnight Manifestation of Misplaced Mail

It was a dark and stormy night.The kind of night where the wind howled a low, mournful, utterly unseemly dirge around the manor's eaves, and the rain hammered against the conservatory glass with the persistent, irritating rhythm of an uninvited guest tapping a fork on fine china. Every shadow seemed to be contemplating larceny.Clive, retired from the diplomatic corps and currently consulting on the "Historical Integrity and Proper Dusting of Antiquities" for the eccentric, reclusive billionaire, Mr. Silas Blackwood, found himself deeply regr...

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Clive's Chronicles IX: The Curse of the Carved Caravan

The Dust and the Dame The sun was a cheap, copper penny pressed hard against the ceiling of the desert sky. It was 1922, and the Valley of the Kings was an oven fueled by dust and desperation. I hated the dust. It got into the fur, it ruined the nap of my best saddle blanket, and worst of all, it rendered a proper cup of tea completely impossible. Everything tasted like pulverized history.I was working for Lord Carnarvon, or rather, standing near the tent where Lord Carnarvon complained about the heat. My immediate boss was the archaeologist...

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Clive's Chronicles VIII: The Catastrophic Collapse of the Correct Cuppa

A.D. 2077: The Year of Perpetual Plastic Clive did not like the year 2077.He found the ambient lighting "overly stimulating," the synthetic wool carpets "disturbingly static," and the air quality, filtered through automated nutrient vents, "lacking in character and honest dust." But his deepest, most profound misery was reserved for the tea.In this future, tea—that sacred, delicate communion of leaf and water—was dispensed from a pressurized unit called the "Hydra-Brew 7000." It emerged as a lukewarm, chemically stabilized slurry that tasted...

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Clive’s Chronicles VII: The Great Nut-Based Nemesis

The air of late October in the Arizona foothills was crisp, a welcome, almost scandalous change from the Saharan inferno Clive still involuntarily sweated through during his nightmares. He was retired now, truly retired, living a quiet life near the research facility where Dr. Aris Thorne maintained a small, sensible garden. Clive’s duties largely involved looking stately and ensuring no local coyote developed notions of grandeur.Tonight, however, was an exception. Tonight was Trick-or-Treat Night in the nearby compound, a local custom Clive...

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Clive’s Chronicles VI: The Calico Cat

After his rather explosive departure from the White House, Clive found himself in a peculiar state of semi-retirement. His lifetime supply of Earl Grey was safely stored in a climate-controlled shed, and his days were spent in a research facility in Arizona. It was a place of beige walls, quiet humming machinery, and a distinct lack of geopolitical intrigue. For Clive, it was almost heaven. Almost.His new "handler" was a kindly but perpetually overwhelmed junior researcher named Dr. Aris Thorne. Dr. Thorne was brilliant with data, terrible w...

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Clive's Chronicles V: The Tea Crisis and the Thermonuclear Taps

Clive’s appointment as Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, Joe Harrison, was, by any measure, an act of sheer, glorious, and very American political absurdity. It started, as all great American fables do, with a viral video.A sudden flash flood during a climate summit in Morocco swept through the tented luncheon. While heads of state scrambled, Clive, then serving as a polite but highly anxious beverage-bearer for a wealthy Saudi delegation, was filmed performing an act of pure, reflexive heroism. He didn’t save a person; h...

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Clive's Chronicles IV: The Great Bed-Mix-Up Blunder

The sun was too hot and the sand was too wide,And Clive wished with all of his heart he could hide.But a camel must walk, and a camel must trudge,Through the dunes and the heat, without murmur or grudge.Clive knew this was true, but he felt it was frightful—The Sahara was rough, when he wished it delightful!He dreamt of a home with a rug that was plush,And a tiny wee clock that would never say, “Hush!”He yearned for a chaise, and a teapot of blue,And a life that was tidy and wonderfully New.But this, friends, was Clive’s Catastrophic Complai...

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Clive's Chronicles III: The Cursed Campfire

The Sahara at night was a different beast entirely from the Sahara by day. Gone was the blinding, oppressive glare, replaced by a velvet-black canvas speckled with a billion indifferent stars. The air, which had been a dry furnace, now held a chill that seeped into Clive’s very bones. And the silence—oh, the silence! During the day, it was a vast, humming emptiness. At night, it was a living, breathing thing, pressing in, amplifying every rustle of sand, every distant shhhick of a scorpion's claw.Ferdinand's caravan had made camp in a shallo...

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Clive's Chronicles II: The Perils of Paradise

Life is a sequence of trials, and for Clive, the Sahara portion of his existence had concluded with a profound, aching humiliation. He’d endangered two men, twelve camels, and an imported tin of Earl Grey—all for a sip of citrus-tinged tranquility.The two months that followed involved no more tweed jacket daydreams, just silent, grueling penance walking without a load, which was, quite frankly, boring. Archibald, the stoic elder, offered no comfort, only the occasional, profoundly irritating sigh that seemed to say, See? Told you so, you gre...

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Clive's Chronicles I: The Crisis of the Cuppa

The sun over the Sahara was not a benevolent monarch; it was a tireless, unforgiving overlord who ruled with a blinding, brass-knuckled fist. To most of the camels in Ferdinand's caravan, this was just life. They were built for it, these tall, dusty fortresses of the desert. They had the right kind of skin, the right kind of lips, the right kind of magnificent, condescending sneer.Then there was Clive.Clive was, to put it mildly, an evolutionary anomaly. He was structurally sound—two good humps, four working knees, and the customary set of t...

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