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Jelena Jelly

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2024

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23 Stories

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Between a Life and a Suitcase

Weekly Contest #345

The summer of 1995 began with a single suitcase.A brown suitcase covered with worn-out stickers from New York, Paris, and Barcelona.Cities I had never seen. Cities people travel to because they want to. That morning, we were traveling because we had to.My entire life fit inside that suitcase—everything I had been and everything I was about to lose. And we were only a small dot in a column of two hundred thousand people fleeing their own lives. Croatia. A beautiful country. The sea sparkling like broken glass in the sun, mountains smelling of...

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What We Didn’t Do

Weekly Contest #336

What We Didn't Do I stood at the edge of the pavement, like at the edge of a life I once lived—my body in the present, my heart stubbornly refusing to accept that the past was over. The street was ordinary. Too ordinary for what was happening inside me. People walked without caution, carrying shopping bags, carrying on conversations, and making dinner plans. Everything looked normal, and that was precisely the problem. Normality leaves no room for fractures.One innocent look, and I saw you. Not your face. Not yet. Your shoulders. The way you...

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Some Mothers Eat Last

Weekly Contest #333

My mother taught me how to stand long before I learned to speak a single word. Before language, before explanations, before the world asked for proof, she taught my body not to surrender. I watched doctors lean in, their voices barely above whispers, as if gentleness could soften the blow. Cerebral palsy. The diagnosis sat between us, heavy and untouched. Numbers pressed in. Possibilities shrank. My future tightened before I could reach for it. They studied charts, not my face.They spoke to one another, not to her. My mother listened the way...

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After The Storm

Weekly Contest #332

Every time I step onto the road, a storm begins in my head. Not the one from the sky—that comes later, if it comes at all. The first one rises from inside me. From my legs. From their wrong rhythm. From a slowness that never learned to hide. It is the storm of my complexes. It starts before the traffic light. Before the first car. Before anyone’s impatience. It starts the moment I realize I will be visible again. "You again.” “I show up when you go outside.” “I didn’t invite you.” “You didn’t invite the storm either.” Dark clouds gather on...

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I Wish My Teacher Knew

Weekly Contest #328

CW: Mental health, Physical violence, gore or abuse I Wish My Teacher Knew (A story in memory of my mother) I hadn’t planned for that morning to change anything. No revelations, tears, or heaviness that would cling to my chest long after the day was over. Just another lesson - one of those ordinary, predictable ones where I count the minutes until the bell rings. My desk was the same as always: chalk dust, open notebooks, a cold cup of coffee, and a polished black sign with my name on it written with white letters. How strange did it sound t...

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The Familiar Flesh

Weekly Contest #327

I am her body.Not a cat, not a crow, not a fox fat on graveyard mice. I am the familiar that remembers her before the spells, the kitchen, the kisses, and the knives. She named herself Lucia when she discovered leaving. And I, the body she once wore and wielded, am the house that learned to lock. You want it simple? Good. Here’s simple:Me - the body, the familiar, the narrator.She - Lucia, the witch’s spirit that stepped out and wants back in.It - the Shadow, the hitchhiking entity from the other side - a parasite shaped like help.Now that w...

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Bed And Roses

Weekly Contest #324

I didn’t expect the light to be this loud. It hummed over my head as if it had its own pulse, a bright, insect-buzzing thing that made the room look clean and unreal at the same time. Close to me, a cart squeaked past, metal on linoleum, and then there was the breathy chorus of women in pain - mine among them, ragged and hot.I had imagined birth as a private storm. Instead, it was like families at a supermarket on Saturday - everyone waiting for their turn at the register. “Breathe,” a nurse said. “In for four, out for six.” I breathed. I co...

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You Can See Me?

Weekly Contest #321

“You’re late.”“Sorry, Mom. Train. Rain. My own legs. Everything runs late.”“Still dramatizing, I see.”“And you’re still late to scold me.”“Sit down. The bench is wet, but you’re grown; you’ll survive.”“I’m wearing your old scarf.”“I can tell. It smells of mothballs and menthol.”“I know. There’s still a streak of Tiger Balm on the edge.”“I rubbed that on when my back betrayed me.”“I thought you hated it.”“I hated the pain, Molly, not the balm.” *** “How are you, dear?”“Like someone who pretended to be brave until a baby cried on the bus this ...

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Plan B (Just In Case)

Weekly Contest #318

You know what's the worst thing in life?It's not back pain, not taxes, not even your neighbor swearing his cat meows in Sanskrit. The worst thing is realizing you're a fucking Plan B. A living spare tire. People don't call you because they want you - they call you because their shiny wheel just rolled into a ditch.And let's clear this up right away: I talk to myself. Constantly. But it's not some Zen Instagram crap like "love yourself" or "inhale peace, exhale bullshit." No. It's a full-on Balkan bar fight. One version of me accuses, anothe...

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The Sister Who Never Was

You Were Everything I Dreamed – And Nothing I Had You taught my how to walk. At least, that’s what I used to tell people. In my stories, you held me under the arms as I took my first steps. Whispered, “You can do it.” And opened doors when the world got too loud. You stood in front of me like a shield. In my mind, you were my hero. My childhood, wrapped in gold. But you were never really there. In reality, you locked the door. Your eyes were sharp, your lips tight every time I entered the room. My walk, my braces, my struggle—you didn’t se...

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The Mask Of Truth

Weekly Contest #316

The gala theme is 'Beyond the Mask,' which is amusing because I’ve worn one for years, and nobody has ever asked to see what’s underneath it. “Breathe,” Myles murmurs, squeezing my palm. He is a good man—too good, if you ask my guilt. He thinks I’m nervous because I’m about to get another plaque that says Hero in a serif font. At the far end of the ballroom, the stage gleams like a dental smile. They’ve put my foundation’s logo everywhere: a paper mask split down the center, one side gold, the other side soot black. The board loves a metap...

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The Day I Met the Wrong Person at Exactly the Right Time

Weekly Contest #315

He didn’t rescue me. He didn’t stay. But he left me with no way back to who I was. I was sitting on the cold metal bench outside the train station—the one with the gum stuck underneath that’s been there since the ’90s—waiting for a train I had no intention of boarding. I wasn’t going anywhere. That was the whole point. I’d been there for over an hour, watching people with places to be and lives to live, while my coffee went from hot to lukewarm to that perfect bacterial petri-dish temperature. I’d been invisible all day. Which was exactly wh...

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God, are you there? It's me… the one you skipped.

Weekly Contest #313

Don't worry. I'm not here to monologue you into submission. I know you're busy - ice caps melting like forgotten popsicles, children crumbling beneath rubble, the slow apocalypse of cable news and mascara-streaked pop stars. You're fielding whole continents of agony. Me? I'm just background noise. Static. One wrong little girl who grew up into an even worse woman. A girl you, it seems, dodged with the grace of a practiced flinch. I get it. Maybe I was too small, like one of those songs nobody hears but still hurts to write. Perhaps I was too...

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God Sent Me a Message… and Then Blocked Me

Weekly Contest #310

A modern tale of divine ghosting and emotional roaming I don't quite remember when I lost faith. Maybe it was the day Aunt Lilian gifted me a Bible wrapped in greasy salami paper. The pages still smelled like peppercorn for weeks. Or perhaps it was when my ex said, "It's not that I don't love you, I just like you better when you're quiet," while buttering toast like nothing had happened. Or maybe it was one lazy Sunday, the kind where the air feels thick and lukewarm, when I made myself a watery coffee, sat down in pajamas with a pâté stain ...

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I Didn’t Survive to Be Silent

Weekly Contest #307

I didn't claw my way out of morphine-soaked comas and sterile white rooms where machines beeped louder than voices just to smile politely and shrink myself into something people could swallow without choking. I didn't drag this stitched-up body through nightmares and nosy prayers just to smooth my edges. I didn't survive to be palatable. I survived to tell you what it feels like when your birthplace gets erased from the map, when borders are redrawn with blood and bureaucracy, and your name, once whispered over lullabies and birthday cakes, ...

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