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Jem Gray

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2024

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22 Followers
61 Following

5 Stories

86 karma pts

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By the hem of his garment

He watched his wife’s back strain at a final weed pulled from the cracked ground. She examined the unruly creature and tossed it in the broken wheelbarrow. Even with her face weathered and her last remaining headscarf long stained and worn, he saw a glowing queen of a land whose soil he used to wash off her precious hands, hands which healed his deepest wounds with their touch.The sigh which reached his ears was the world’s heaviest rock. At that moment he drowned under it. He decided then: enough. It was time to buy the ticket.Later, squeez...

11 likes 4 comments 4
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Briefcase Buddy's Briefcase

Weekly Contest #286

Monty, ann ebony-coated Hare, found himself standing in a makeshift graveyard.Once upon a time, this area had been full of pine trees, Long Leggy Lanky hikers and the odd Long Leggy Lanky robber who gave his spoils away. Today, Sherwood Forest was no more than a massacre of brown chewed up stumps.Wisely, despite the mass murder of the trees, the Long Leggy Lankies of this particular forest had decided to retain the forest’s legacy, at least by its title, for a little while longer. Monty the Hare squinted up at the sign “Sherwood Forest, 5 mi...

5 likes 0 comments 0
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Speak To Me

Music was my first language. I was blessed with a gentle tone and I could sing in tune. I was a dark-skinned, long-legged 7-year old in a white British public primary school chosen to sing “Welcome Jesus” during the Nativity at Christmas. During the rehearsal breaks I savored the wide-eyed looks and warm smiles given by Parent volunteers to my relay of how I was adopted. I didn’t know where Nazareth was or why Mary and the other girls had to wrap their heads in ripped table-cloths of blues, and browns and reds, but I knew how to caress and l...

4 likes 2 comments 2
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Spider and Moth

Weekly Contest #241

Trgger warning: this story contains references to war and the trauma of war.Made up of the thinnest of protein fiber threads, the spider’s web prompts a cautious reflection about how nature can trick light. The silk is an invisible cloak splayed out with mathematical accuracy on a branch, or across the corner of a doorway, or between two rails.The subject is a particular web on your television. It’s not on the frame, but rather drawing you in from within - the many moving shades of a pixelated scene unfolding. A spider is weaving its silk de...

15 likes 6 comments 6
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Spill the tea

Weekly Contest #239

Shaimah rolled the dice idly between her fingers. If she closed her eyes the indents of the white dots could be felt. Number three, she was sure of it. Opened her eyes - five. Close. The dice reminded her nothing happens by chance. Everything can, and should, be explained. Like why she’d been hailed at 3am by a stranger who knew her number and had convinced her to leave her pencil-thin flat, crusted with the remnants of a student social night, to meet him. Under the bridge off from Station Street, he’d said. I know your secret. You’re no fra...

14 likes 2 comments 2
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