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James Brandt

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025

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17 Followers
20 Following

15 Stories

316 karma pts

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Kings Dominion: After Dark

Weekly Contest #371

Everyone knows Kings Dominion closes at ten. What almost nobody knows is that on certain nights, after the last human guest drags their sunburned, cotton-candy-sticky self out to the parking lot, the gates don't stay closed for long. At 12:01 a.m., the lights come back on. Ethan Mercer didn't know that either. Not until the night he fell asleep in a maintenance closet and woke up to find out the hard way. The Last Guest It had been a fourteen-hour shift, funnel cakes, a broken soft-serve machine, and a thunderstorm that sent half the park sc...

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The Watch of Consequence

Weekly Contest #370

The Man in the Cubicle Aaron Hutcherson had imagined a different life when he joined the CIA. He'd pictured dead drops in foreign capitals, encrypted phone calls, rooms where decisions of consequence were made. What he'd gotten instead was a cubicle beneath humming fluorescent lights, three monitors of raw intelligence feed, and an endless queue of assessments that vanished into the bureaucracy the moment he filed them. He was good at his job. He was also, increasingly, invisible inside it. At noon he left the building the way he always did,...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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Jimmy Ryker and the Na-Na

Weekly Contest #369

Jimmy and His Best Friend Jimmy Ryker was two years old, and he was absolutely, positively, one hundred percent sure that he was becoming a very big boy. He could prove it, too. He could run. Fast. Stopping, on the other hand, was still a bit of a mystery to him—he usually just ran into the couch, or the dog, or Daddy's legs, and called it good. He could climb onto the big couch all by himself, using his knee and a grunt and sometimes a little bit of Mommy's help that he pretended he didn't need. He could feed himself with his very own spoon...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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The Weather Phenom

Weekly Contest #368

The Man Who Never Misses The KWYN studio lights burned hot over Jaxon Rainwright as the seven o'clock forecast rolled live. Behind him, the radar map churned with an angry red line of thunderstorms sliding toward central Iowa. Every competing station in Des Moines was calling for severe wind, hail, maybe a tornado or two before midnight. Jaxon looked into the camera and smiled like a man discussing tomorrow's sunshine. "This system is going to weaken considerably before it reaches us," he said. "By the time it crosses the county line, you'll...

12 likes 10 comments 10
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The Waiting Hours

Weekly Contest #367

Three Hours Three hours was the only thought on everyone’s mind, especially mine. I sat in a molded plastic chair at McChord Air Force Base and watched the clock on the far wall tick toward a number I didn't want it to reach. In three hours, I would board an aircraft bound for Iraq. The terminal smelled like burnt coffee and gun oil. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead, harsh enough to make everyone look a little sick. Duffel bags and rucks were stacked in uneven towers between the rows of chairs, weapons cased and leaning against them, body ...

12 likes 12 comments 12
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The Cereal Killer

Weekly Contest #366

The fluorescent lights of the Piggly Wiggly on Route 9 flickered like a dying flashlight in a horror movie, casting long shadows across Aisle 7. Yellow police tape crisscrossed the endcap display, snapping softly in the draft of the air conditioning. Somewhere, a Muzak version of "Ring of Fire" played over the intercom, blissfully unaware of the tragedy that had unfolded beneath it. Detective Hank Spooner ducked under the tape, coffee in one hand, notepad in the other, a half-eaten granola bar wrapper poking out of his coat pocket. He'd seen...

17 likes 4 comments 4
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United We Stand

Weekly Contest #365

The first sign was silence. At 0347 Zulu, three geostationary weather satellites over the Pacific stopped transmitting within the same nine-second window. By 0402, a fourth went dark over the Atlantic. Analysts at Space Command assumed a coordinated cyberattack; Russia, maybe, or China testing a new kinetic weapon. Someone floated space debris. Someone else floated a solar flare. By 0530, the US Space Array in New Mexico had a different answer. Something enormous had entered the solar system, decelerating in a way that defied every law of ph...

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The Scapegoat

Weekly Contest #364

The clock above the locked door of Interrogation Room Three ticked with a patience Johnathan Turner did not share. He sat with his hands folded so tightly his knuckles had gone pale, his knee bouncing beneath the metal table in a rhythm that betrayed every ounce of the fear he was trying to swallow. The room smelled of old coffee and colder metal, and the fluorescent light overhead buzzed just loud enough to notice, just soft enough to make a person wonder if they were imagining it. On the other side of the one-way mirror, Detective Cameron ...

11 likes 4 comments 4
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Justin and Snagglepaws

Weekly Contest #363

Justin folded his shirt for the third time, smoothing the sleeves flat against his chest until the seams lined up just right. Then he folded it again, because the first fold hadn't been quite right after all. On his bed, three other shirts sat in a neat stack, corners squared like little soldiers. This was how bedtime worked. This was how bedtime always worked, and Justin liked it that way. His nightlight glowed a soft amber in the corner of the room, but even so, the shadows in the corners seemed to stretch a little longer than they should....

9 likes 6 comments 6
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What the Fire Remembers

Weekly Contest #362

Marcus Webb measured silence in seconds before it could be measured in anything else. Three seconds of quiet in his apartment on Maple Street meant the refrigerator had cycled off. Five seconds meant a car had stopped at the light outside his window. Anything past ten seconds, and his body started counting for him, the old training surfacing like a diver coming up too fast, bends of the mind instead of the blood. He had been home from his fourth deployment for two years now. Mosul, then Baghdad, then Diyala Province, then a stretch of Kandah...

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The Rib-Off

Weekly Contest #361

As summer drew to a close, only one obstacle stood between Jacob Dylan and a perfect end to the season: the Annual Rib-Off Competition, held the last weekend of August at the Orange County Fairgrounds in Costa Mesa, California. Pitmasters from across the county would gather to settle, once and for all, who made the finest barbeque ribs in Orange County. Jacob had entered the competition for years, and for years he had fallen just short of the top spot. His rival, and the woman who had beaten him more times than he cared to count, was Josie A...

11 likes 8 comments 8
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Letting Go

Weekly Contest #360

Sunlight, fractured by morning mist, illuminated a secluded Napa Valley vineyard. Here, Robert Jenkins, confined to a wheelchair, revisited the hallowed ground where he had pledged his love to his beloved wife, Cheryl two and a half decades earlier. However, a year earlier, the memory clawed at him; a tempestuous night in Tacoma, a rain-slicked road, and a furious argument, the details now lost in the fog of trauma. Driving their Mercedes, he’d lost control, the car becoming a projectile hurtling into a tree at a devastating speed. The impac...

8 likes 5 comments 5
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E-Jay Saves the School

Weekly Contest #359

Snow fell in thick, silent curtains over the grounds of the Edward James Hollingsworth School for Boys on a bitter January morning. Charles Browning stood just inside the iron gate, taking in the sprawling campus before him. The school had been founded during the Great Depression by Edward James Hollingsworth Sr. as a sanctuary for disadvantaged youth, a place where boys with nothing could be given something worth holding onto. Even now, nestled in the wooded hills north of Montpelier, Vermont, the institution carried the quiet dignity of th...

20 likes 9 comments 9
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The Manchu One Hundred

Weekly Contest #358

Nobody believed in me. That was their first mistake. I said nothing when I heard the whispers, when eyes passed over my 5-foot-5 frame and 115-pound body and quietly wrote me off. I simply made up my mind: I wasn't just going to finish the Manchu 100; I was going to own it. The event was exactly what it sounded like. One hundred miles. Four days. Twenty-five miles a day, in full combat gear, what we called Battle Rattle, along a tank trail stretching from Camp Roberts, California, to Fort Hunter-Liggett. My rucksack, loaded with gear and rad...

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I'm a Good Dog (As Told by Bear)

Weekly Contest #357

My name is Bear, and I am a Golden Retriever. I am also a trained emotional support animal, though I think of that title the way a river might think of the word flowing; it describes what I do, but not what I am. What I am is simpler and also larger than any title. I know the smell of a bad dream before it happens. This is not a figure of speech. There is a real shift, something chemical and faint and precise, like the particular quality of air in the hour before a storm rolls in off open water. His breathing changes too, not dramatically, ...

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