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James Brandt

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025

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23 Stories

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The Voices That Remain

Weekly Contest #379

The Road Back The morning was cold and overcast, the kind of autumn gray that pressed low against the fields. David Silbermann sat in the back seat of the car with his hands folded in his lap, watching the Polish countryside pass the window. Plowed rows. A wooden fence. A woman hanging laundry behind a small brick house. Everything looked so ordinary that he felt a flicker of something close to anger. He was fifty-two years old, and he looked it only around the eyes. His dark suit was pressed, his overcoat brushed, his silver hair combed n...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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Redemption Cometh

Weekly Contest #378

The Devil’s Reckoning The dead had begun collecting debts in Calico. Nobody knew who fired the silver bullets, and those unfortunate enough to discover the bodies seldom lingered long enough to investigate. Seven men had died in three weeks, each with a neat hole between the eyes and a bloodstained message pinned to his chest. The townsfolk whispered about bounty hunters, vigilantes, and the Devil himself. But the men of the Crimson Devil Gang knew better. They had seen something moving through the desert after sundown, something in a blac...

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Beware of the Fog

Weekly Contest #377

Abigail Chapman had been told the fog was normal. "About a hundred and sixty-five days a year," the real estate agent said, handing her the keys on the front porch of the Old Dickerson House. "You stop noticing." Abigail, twenty-seven, newly hired to teach English at Ilwaco High School, and desperate for a fresh start, nodded as though she believed it. Behind the agent, the Pacific Northwest rolled out like a painting someone had left in the rain. Evergreens climbed the hillside in dark ranks. Beyond the trees, the ocean threw itself again...

13 likes 12 comments 12
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The Man in the Mirror

Weekly Contest #376

The Cracks Begin Daniel Mercer had spent forty-nine years convincing the world he was a good man, and nearly as long trying to convince himself. He stood at the back of Hollis Creek Baptist Church in the black suit Rebecca had pressed that morning and waited for the grief to arrive. It did not. What came instead was a loosening in his chest, like a belt let out one notch after a long meal. His father was in the box at the front of the room. His father could not lower his voice anymore. Thomas Mercer had never needed to raise it. He lowere...

10 likes 6 comments 6
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What the Vultures Know

Weekly Contest #375

The First Time Anthony Fillingim was six years old when he found the squirrel. It lay beneath the big fir at the back of the yard in Hood River, Oregon, one paw curled against its chest, its tail flattened in the wet needles. A thread of ants was already working along its ribs. Anthony didn't know much about death, but he knew this wasn't sleeping. He felt sorry for it. That was all. He knelt in the damp and laid two fingers against the fur. The cold came at once. It ran out of the animal, up through his fingertips and into his chest, an...

6 likes 5 comments 5
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Vita Noire

Weekly Contest #374

The Promise of Youth In the sixth week of her internship, Dominique Baptiste still hadn't gotten used to the lobby. Devereaux Cosmetics headquarters rose out of the Baton Rouge skyline like a glass blade, all white marble and brushed silver, every surface lit so cleanly it seemed to hum. Enormous advertisements lined the atrium featuring flawless models, celebrity endorsements, the tagline Beauty Without Apology in letters taller than she was. Twenty-three years old, an LSU senior chosen from over four thousand applicants, Dominique carrie...

17 likes 4 comments 4
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The Girl Who Saw Too Much

Weekly Contest #373

The birthday cake sat on the rolling tray beside the hospital bed, its candles unlit because Krystal Jones could not bring herself to light them. Ten candles for a girl who had not opened her eyes in eight months. Outside the window, Morristown was waking up to another gray Tennessee morning, and inside room 214, Krystal held her daughter's hand the way she had every day since the accident, tracing small circles across the knuckles as if she could draw her back into her body. "She's going to come back to us," Demetrius said. He said it ever...

20 likes 15 comments 15
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The Night Before

Weekly Contest #372

12:47 A.M. I know because I've been watching the clock's red numbers change for the better part of an hour, waiting for them to move faster than they have any right to. I don't need the alarm. I haven't slept, and something tells me sleep isn't coming. Tomorrow, today, really, in a matter of hours, my unit deploys to Iraq. Leydi is asleep beside me, her breathing slow and even, one arm thrown across the space where I should be. I envy her that. Eleven years in the Army had taught me how to sleep almost anywhere, on the ground, in the back ...

16 likes 10 comments 10
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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 pa...

15 likes 6 comments 6
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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 di...

11 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 ...

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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...

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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, bod...

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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 see...

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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 ...

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