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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jun, 2022
Submitted to Contest #253
My Mum once told me to enjoy life. But she added a warning, and that warning was that time has a habit of speeding up as you get older. She may as well have told me not to panic. Or to smile, and that it might never happen. That was the attention I paid to her advice, and to her for that matter. And yet I remember her words well, and now, in the context of who and what I have become, I understand where she was coming from. This wasn’t a soundbite. This wasn’t knowledge. She meant what she had said, and in order for me to understand, I had to...
Submitted to Contest #252
As Bill walked home he put his unease down to the fact that he had not been feeling right all day. The day itself had taken against him from the outset. Rising from the messy pit of his bed he’d paused in his half-arsed redistribution of his duvet. Dumped the forgotten duvet at the foot of the bed and patted at a spot on the sheet that looked about as wrong as it had any business looking. The situation of this patch was embarrassing, being in the area where his crotch and backside vied for position as he tossed and turned in the grip of the ...
In the pursuit of success, Dan had found a state where all his needs were taken care of. There was not one need that he could muster that was not already catered for. The identification of a need that required attending to became something of an obsession for him, and in time he began to suspect that he was becoming bored with life itself. That he’d bested the final boss, and there was nothing left to play for. He'd even toyed with an array of wants. Wants however, were substandard needs. Dan was wise to that from the outset, and so this var...
By all accounts, John was a nice bloke. Not a very nice bloke. Just nice. Nice being the go to word for people who didn’t have anything else nice to say about a person. Using nice to describe someone was in itself not nice. It wasn’t just that there was a lacklustre laziness at play in the use of this go-to word, it was that the underlying meaning of nice was pathetically negative. By describing John as nice, a person was telling the world that they were bored with John. Never was there an excuse to be bored, and so this should hav...
We meet via friends. Always theirs, never mine. A small knot of misfits and losers desperately clinging to each other as though they aren’t dragging each other down, when that’s all they’re capable of. Sharing a broken camaraderie that strokes the one thing they all have in common, the crushing boredom of their isolating loneliness. I can taste their wounds. Each and every one of them. These inept creatures kid themselves into thinking they have done a good job of hiding their pain and inadequacies. I’ll tell you something for free, the more...
Submitted to Contest #251
Dogeared paperbacks were her preferred companions. These rascally mongrels could suffer the rough and tumble of her daily life, and come back with tail wagging and looking for more. There was love here. Not the polished art of a chocolatier, instead this was roughhewn and had a substantial heft to it. She relished breaking their spines and scarring their faces. Releasing them from the dog pound cage of their conformity so that they were free to become the characters they were always meant to be. This was the conspicuous aspect of her reading...
How to begin? I lose count of the times I have faced this question. There are so many beginnings in this life of ours, and only a singular end for many of them. All the strands that we follow as we make our choices. Interwoven, however much we think we can keep them apart. I’ll begin with words. Those strange conveyances of meaning. Or not, as is often the case. We occasionally take a moment to look up the meaning of a word, but all we are looking at is a clinical definition. Meaning goes much deeper than that. Meaning goes all the way to th...
Submitted to Contest #250
He’d learnt to limit his words and in doing so he had become quieter. Now, anyone who encountered him mistook him for a taciturn man, not the prisoner he had become. Imprisoned in his own body. Trapped in a place that he had made his home only to see it taken down brick by brick to reveal impenetrable bars that no one in their right mind would seek to go beyond, for surrounded by the bars of this place was a cloying and eternal darkness which reached out for him, beckoning him forth. Promising oblivion when it was clear that pain was all it ...
Submitted to Contest #249
She sees it as much as feels it. She does not question this. Content instead to be afforded a ringside seat to a very special moment in her life. A moment made special by it’s simplicity. A celebration of an end. All of her final exams now over. The elation of having completed this part of her journey. No care as to the results of her efforts. That is for another day. All that matters is now. There is nothing else. She feels alive in a way that she hasn’t in such a long time and she embraces that feeling and pulls it closer. She sees it all ...
It was the radio that voiced the recriminations that he’d anticipated with such dread. Uncertain as to how best broach the subject, the radio stuttered and then fell silent. If the silence had been truly bad, his recollection of it was not notable. The jarring crunch of static that followed, an injured insect, gone wild thrashing about in the stifling cabin of the car, mirroring the noise in his brain. Radio and the chaos of his mind jamming but never getting into their groove, and in the midst of this punk track was a simple, repetitive lyr...
Submitted to Contest #248
Norman was the first up. He was always the first up and also the first downstairs. This was his routine and in the solitary minutes afforded to him as he made his mug of tea and toasted his bread, he could taste the flavours of another life dancing upon his forlorn tongue. Mug in one hand. Half remembered buttered toast in the other, he stared out into the world and wished himself just a few yards hence. That was all it would take. To step through the prison of glass before him and be swept up and away by the wind. A fallen leaf carried off ...
Submitted to Contest #247
Travel, I was told, would expand my mind. So I followed that sage advice. And I thought it had. It felt like it had. I felt bigger, and as a result I could only conclude that I was better for that. After all, we are supposed to grow. Firstly, we grow up. Then we expand. Our horizons broaden and broaden until we are spoilt for choice. But then, life is a series of choices. Often, the choice we make is to make no choice at all. We bury ourselves in the sands of ignorance and pretend we are staying put, when there is never any possibi...
Submitted to Contest #246
The drive to the coast was too much. He could feel the weight of it on his shoulders and another part of it pressed obscenely into his forehead. He would have cried, but that option was not open to him – it lay in a faraway place and the distance of it hurt him. There was no release here, which flew in the face of why they had come. A long weekend away from the stress of the day-to-day. An escape from the dumb humdrum. The peculiar price paid for such an adventure was beyond any that he was willing to pay, but he would pay it all the same. P...
Submitted to Contest #245
The ship’s log would state that Captain John Tanner was the first to set foot on the newly discovered lands. This was not the case. Tanner was a shrewd and sometimes cunning man. He prioritised survival over the flim-flam of bravery, chivalry and honour. He had a head on him and he used it. His crew, those who were lucky enough to live through the depravations of numerous long and treacherous voyages, would have likely referred to him as dependable. The word would be qualified, but not expanded upon. Not that anyone would have aske...
The moon was absent that night. This was a night when the see lapped at the night sky. Kissing it gently until the dark heavens succumbed and there was no way of knowing where sky and ocean began or ended. The two lovers intertwined in a brief embrace that should have been desperate in its stolen transience, but was instead languorous and so hypnotically natural that Glen could no longer remember where the horizon should have been. He stared out across the boat and lost himself in that distant lovemaking. The ebb and flow of the water undern...
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