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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

Stories (222)

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30 Followers

41 Following

222 Stories

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The White Oak

Jethro Pili

The box arrived on a Tuesday, which Roseanne Van Helsing would later decide mattered.Tuesdays were supposed to be quiet. Tuesdays were grading days, laundry days, days when the world politely kept its distance and allowed her to exist unnoticed. Nothing ever arrived on Tuesdays except bills and grocery flyers and the occasional catalog she never remembered subscribing to.So when the parcel sat on her doorstep—long, narrow, wrapped in brown paper and tied with actual twine—she stopped short like she’d found a snake sunning itself on the welco...

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Have We Met Before?

Jethro Pili

They always met the same way.Not with thunder or prophecy or a flash of light—but with a pause. A hesitation. A moment when the world seemed to lean in and hold its breath across vast oceans of time.And one of them would say, softly, uncertainly:“Have we met before?”I. Medieval England — 1191The abbey bells were ringing for terce when Eleanor spilled her basket of apples in the cloister garden.A knight in travel-stained mail bent at once to help her gather them. His hands were battle scarred, his movements careful, reverent—as if each apple ...

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Not What We Planned

Jethro Pili

The wagons came in at dawn, when the sky over the high plains was the pale blue of a robin’s egg and the grass still held the night’s cold. From a distance, they looked like beetles crawling toward water—dark shapes against the endless sweep of land. Up close, they were scarred and dusted and stubbornly hopeful, canvas tops patched and reins mended with care.The Calder family had been traveling for nearly six months when they reached the town that would—so they believed—be the end of their wandering.It was called Cottonwood Ford, a place tha...

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The Second Star to the Right

Jethro Pili

She learned early how to listen for wings.Not the wings of angels—those belonged to church ceilings and oil paintings and the gentle lies told to children who asked too many questions—but the particular sound of boyish wings: a quick, silvery flutter like laughter caught in a throat. If you held your breath just right, if you leaned out far enough, you might hear it over the rasp of your own lungs.The sanatorium sat on a hill above the town, a long white building with verandas like outstretched arms and windows tall enough for dreams to esca...

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The Journal Entries of Roseanne Van Helsing

Jethro Pili

The Journal of Roseanne Van HelsingVampire hunter. Loyal friend. Fierce protectress. Dutiful adopted granddaughter.1. 14 MarchGrandfather says a journal is a weapon.Not in the way a stake is a weapon, or a blade, or even a prayer whispered through bloodied lips. He says memory itself can kill—or save—depending on how faithfully it is kept. Write it down, he told me, pressing this leather-bound book into my hands. The truth rots when it is left only in the mind.So here I am, ink-stained fingers, candle burning too low, trying to write what I ...

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Cold Night, Colder Dawn

Jethro Pili

“It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark.”The words would have sounded trite if anyone there had spoken them aloud, the sort of thing a dime novelist might scrawl with a shiver of false poetry. But the cold that night was no metaphor. It was the kind of cold that crept in through seams and memories alike, that turned breath into a visible confession and made even seasoned men wonder—just briefly—whether this was how the world ended: quietly, under snow, with no one to bear witness but the dark.They had stopped in th...

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Do Not Go Into The Waldock Woods

Jethro Pili

No one remembered who first said it.Only that everyone did.At Waldock College, warnings moved the way ivy did—slow, persistent, clinging to stone. They were whispered during orientation tours, scribbled in bathroom stalls, passed between upperclassmen with the gravity of inherited sin.Don’t go into the woods.The guide would smile when a freshman asked why.“Oh, just superstition,” they’d say, gesturing vaguely to the dark tree line behind Waldock Hall.“Local legend.”But legends didn’t press themselves against the windows at night.Waldock Hall...

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I Am The Count

Jethro Pili

They always begin with the end.With the blood on the marble.With the scream swallowed by velvet curtains.With my name hissed like a curse—the Count, as though that were explanation enough.So allow me the discourtesy of beginning earlier.Before the iron gates.Before the silver crucifix clenched in a trembling hand.Before I learned how quickly love curdles into legend.I am the Count because the world required a shape for its fear.But once—long before they sharpened stakes and stories alike—I was merely a man who learned too slowly that time is...

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Welcome To The Happy Ray

Jethro Pili

Sam Ihle decided—about three seconds after opening the menu—that this was a mistake.Not a relationship mistake. Not a career mistake. Just a restaurant mistake.Across the small candlelit table, Jodie Williams-Ihle watched his eyebrows climb steadily north, like twin explorers who had found something deeply unsettling on the horizon.“Oh no,” she said, folding her hands around her water glass. “You’re doing the face.”“I am not doing the face,” Sam said, still staring at the menu. “This is a completely new face. This is… academic concern.”“That...

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Fish Be With You

Jethro Pili

Father Tristan Greene unlocked the rectory door with hands that were still trembling—not with fear, but with the aftershock of exertion, like a runner who had crossed the finish line and only then realized how hard his heart was pounding.The exorcism had lasted nearly four hours.Four hours of Latin prayers spoken hoarsely through a throat that felt flayed raw. Four hours of incense thick enough to sting the eyes. Four hours of resistance—violent, cunning, and cruel—pressing back against every word of Scripture he pronounced. Four hours of st...

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Taco Split

Jethro Pili

Hunger, at first, is a small thing.It is the polite clearing of the throat inside the body. The gentle tap on the ribs. The whisper that says, Hey. We could eat.It is not dramatic. It does not yet have opinions.This is where the hunger begins for Elena Morales—sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, back against the couch, laptop open but unwatched, the soft blue glow of a paused documentary washing over her walls. Outside, Los Angeles is doing what it always does in the evening: humming, breathing, pretending it is not tired.Her...

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Colcannon For The Long Winter

Jethro Pili

The pot had been sitting on the back burner for hours, not quite simmering, not quite resting—just existing in that patient, domestic way food does when it knows it will be needed later. Colcannon was like that. It did not rush. It waited. Potatoes softened into themselves beneath a lid fogged with steam, kale slumped into submission, butter melting not in a hurry but with dignity. It was a dish that understood winters, understood patience, understood that hunger was not always loud.Samuel Joseph Ihle noticed the smell before he noticed anyt...

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Accidentally On Purpose

Jethro Pili

Something was burning.Not “something might be burning,” not “is that a faint hint of smoke?” No—this was the kind of thick, unmistakable, coughing-inducing smoke that barreled out of an oven like it had been storing grudges inside.Sam Ihle froze mid-paragraph, his Parker pen still tapping lightly against the edge of his notebook—one of the nice ones Danny Van Hoosier bought him so he’d stop chewing the caps off Bics like they were a nervous man’s chewing gum. The tapping stopped. His eyes narrowed. His nose twitched once, twice.“...Jodie?” h...

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The Wind That Blows The Dove

Jethro Pili

The fog had rolled into Seabrook like a tired gray animal, stretching its limbs across the coastal town until everything felt muted—streets, storefronts, even the gulls themselves. It wasn’t an unusual morning on the Southern California coastline, but something about this fog felt heavier, denser, as if it carried secrets in its folds.Hannah Reyes stood outside Fire House 87 Café, hugging her navy cardigan tight around her shoulders while she waited for her to-go order. The old firehouse, now a coffee shop and museum, always smelled faintly ...

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Two Men I Trust In A Storm

Jethro Pili

The wind hit the cruise ship like a hammer.Julius Turner braced himself against the railing of Deck 10 as the Pacific churned below, the once-calm turquoise now a furious slate gray. Lightning webbed across the sky in white jagged flashes. The air tasted like metal and rain. Even the deck beneath his sneakers thrummed with the deep, guttural vibrations of engines pushed to their limits.His twin sister, Juliet, tightened her hoodie strings with trembling fingers.“Dad said this weather was supposed to stay north,” she muttered, shifting her fe...

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