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Jaxon Reid

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Nov, 2023

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9 Followers
4 Following

17 Stories

230 karma pts

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It Knows About the Brown Butter

Weekly Contest #354

The signal came in on a Thursday. Thursdays were mine. Reconstituted lentils in a foil pouch, one cup of coffee that tasted like hot drywall, the methane storms rolling across Titan's northern hemisphere on the monitor in green and rust bands, slow and ugly and repetitive enough to pass for comfort. Nobody asked anything of me on Thursdays. The signal arrived anyway. I'd been at Listening Post Kepler-7 for eleven months and sixteen days. I know this because I scratched it into the aluminum housing of the water recycler with a paring knife I'...

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The Weight on Friday

Weekly Contest #351

It began, as most catastrophes in Ottawa do, with a bilingual memorandum. The Ministry of Psycho-Somatic Compliance issued the decree on a drizzly Tuesday, and by Wednesday morning, citizens of the capital were waking up with their emotional baggage physically attached to their bodies. A retroactive biological amendment.Bylaw 448-B, "The Somatic Manifestation Act," was framed as a transparency measure. If you carried the unresolved grief of a divorce, it was no longer a polite, repressed sigh at a dinner party. It was a forty-pound, violet-h...

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The Smell of Before

Weekly Contest #349

The ash smelled like her dead husband on the mornings Cass liked Piotr most. She'd figured out the correlation by accident, the way you figured out most things in the second year after the fires: by living inside something long enough that the pattern became unavoidable. On the mornings she woke up and felt, against all reasonable expectation, something like glad, the ash on the windowsill smelled like Marcus. His specific combination of cedar soap and the particular warmth of his neck. The ash didn't look different. It never looked differen...

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Ice Harvest

Weekly Contest #331

Marina Kovač did not inherit the fish business so much as step sideways into it, like a puddle she hadn’t noticed until it soaked her socks. Her father needed a job when the plant shut down. The owner of Heartland Seafood Distribution wanted Florida, or at least a horizon that wasn’t railroad tracks and grain elevators. Her grandfather had been an accountant. He liked ledgers, not nets. And yet fifteen years later, Marina was still hauling cod and halibut through landlocked states that had no business smelling faintly of ocean.The truck’s hu...

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Empty Load

Weekly Contest #323

Maya didn't want to believe the fluorescent lights at Spin Cycle had any life, but they did. Of course they did. Their persistent ritual included flickering at her like someone trying to remember your name. When they blinked—three quick pulses, then dark—she felt something was coming. Like noticing a drawer you forgot you had.During those brief blackouts, Maya never moved. Things moved inside her anyway. Once, she imagined leaving—not just the laundromat, but her entire life, the way you'd leave a party where you realized too late you didn...

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The Book of Birds that Aren't

Weekly Contest #321

The Viewing Forest did not initially seem like a place to get truly lost. There was a trailhead with a welcoming signboard, gravel packed into neat lines, the whiff of civilization still seeking attention around the edges. A list of rules posted at eye level: "Stay on Path. All Wanderings Must Be Logged." It looked like a day trip. A picnic. Something to slot between brunch and the evening newsThe birder thought so too. Binoculars hung comfortably around their neck, balanced from years of use. In the side pocket, a packet of peanuts, hal...

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Between Bergamot and Chlorine

Weekly Contest #308

Dana never meant to become a grave robber. Maybe intent doesn’t matter after grief takes hold.She signed up for ReMemory’s Digital Afterlife service three months after what the insurance company politely called “the incident.” According to the report, the car flipped four times before it stopped. The funeral director gently recommended a closed casket. He spoke in those careful tones used when what’s left in the box isn’t quite enough. Ash now lived in an urn on the mantel beside her half-drunk tea, the skin on the surface clouded like a cat...

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Molt

Weekly Contest #307

Daniel once believed skin was sacred. Back when his fingers still flew across foreign texts, he’d trace the valleys between his knuckles in the dark, counting wrinkles like rosary beads—proof that every inch of him belonged to no one but himself. That was before his left hand began quivering in its sleep, before letters started slipping like tadpoles off the keyboard, and before a doctor muttered a name so rare no acronym yet existed. After that, Daniel stopped counting. 1 A drone delivered the last resort: a white cylinder humming like a re...

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The Weight of the World

Let me tell you about the city that died of awareness. A metropolis strangled by its own enlightenment, where the collective conscience was measured in milliamps and worn like jewelry against tender wrists. The little green notification pulsed against Sascha's skin, a firefly mating with a stopwatch: GaiaSync Update Complete. Feel Closer to Earth Than Ever Before! A tired smile touched her lips—the kind you might see on a penguin just informed that global warming now comes in mint flavor. She tapped confirmation on her EcoSense Band. April ...

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The Weight of Water and Sun

The fog was all around us on the lake that morning. That's how they say it in textbooks—Lake Texcoco—but to me it was just the water we lived on, the same water my grandmother had planted things in, and her grandmother before that. The city was waking up in that slow, underwater way cities do when covered in mist. I was kneeling on our chinampa, which sounds exotic but was just our family's little floating farm. My knees pressed into the woven reeds at the edge and I could feel the dampness seeping through my clothes. I touched a water dropl...

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Cascade

The helicopter descended, its blades slicing the air with a steady, insistent rhythm that seemed to match, then outpace, the uneven beating of Dr. Griffin Gower's heart. He looked down at the Esterhaus Retreat, pale and sprawling against the dark coastal rock, its white angles and glass surfaces catching the light in a way that made the building appear both beautiful and somehow wrong, like a creature that had evolved in darkness suddenly exposed to day. The structure clung to the bluff with a determined, alien presence. Dr. Gower's fingers ...

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My Roommate Might Be a Time Traveler (But He's Really Bad At It)

The sock incident first tipped me off that Mark wasn't just awkward but possibly adrift in the cosmic laundry cycle of time—lost between the spin and rinse of centuries like a rebellious sock that refuses both its mate and the drawer that awaits it. There in our living room, he hunched over a holey athletic sock with the reverence of a medieval monk transcribing sacred texts. He dabbed at it with something fibrous and menacing—nettle, according to his solemn declaration, "foraged with respect for the hedgerow," a phrase that hung in the air ...

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An Algorithm of Nope

Weekly Contest #299

It wasn't hate. Nothing like TV drama, slammed doors and shouting. That takes energy, like wrestling a fitted sheet onto a mattress while convinced a stranger judges your technique. Leo’s thing with people was more complicated. A loop: crave connection, then build mazes between himself and others. A text, not a call. An email, proofread, not dropping by. A tight wave across the street, shoulders hunched, avoiding conversation.He’d watch neighbours haul groceries from his window, coffee mug clutched, its warmth barely registering. He’d duck i...

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Autobiography, Interrupted

Okay, so. Aldo Fontana. My name was still that, anyway. And up until last Tuesday, which now felt like a photograph you keep pulling out looking for something that was never there, life was…well, smooth. Like that 8:14 train I took. The chug-chug punctual? That was the beat to my song. And the library, where I worked —the card catalogues going shhh-click. That was me. A lot. Made things neat.I was a person who liked things Just So. Really liked it. Maybe a little too much, eh? People probably saw just the quiet library assistant. But it felt...

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Leftovers

Shortlisted for Contest #296 ⭐️

The hum. That was the first thing Owen Lux always noticed. Fable's Edge didn't breathe; it vibrated. A low thrum, deep in the bones, seeping through concrete and glass like damp. Daytime brought the usual racket -- traffic, commerce, ambition grinding itself down on the pavement. But night? Night was a steadier drone. Server farms sighing, ancient HVAC units wheezing, and beneath it all, the white noise of millions lying awake, staring at their ceilings. Owen lived right in the middle of that static. Or felt like he did.His apartment was thi...

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