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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 Day Seabrook Vanished

Jethro Pili

It started—innocently enough—with the fog.Seabrook had seen fog before. Being a coastal Southern California town, it was practically built on the stuff. Fog clung to the cliffs on quiet mornings like a sleepy cat refusing to get out of bed. Fog rolled across Highway 1 as if testing whether drivers were awake. Fog drifted through the harbor so consistently that locals jokingly called it “the Sixth Resident.” They had Tinsel, the wandering pelican; Buster, the German shepherd who always escaped his backyard; and Fog, who was simply Fog.But thi...

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The Weight of Stones

Jethro Pili

If there was one thing the men and women of the Essex County Sheriff’s Department agreed on—aside from the fact that Dunkin’ coffee tasted better after three hours of paperwork—it was that Sheriff Stanley Bennett-Meyer never, ever got sick.It wasn’t that he bragged about perfect health, because bragging wasn’t in his nature. It was just something everyone knew, the way everyone knew where the spare keys were or who hid the emergency chocolate in the supply closet (Deputy Lorraine Judge, though she denied it with suspiciously passionate indig...

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The Quiet Miracle

Jethro Pili

No one ever tells you that waiting rooms have their own weather.Not just temperature—although they were always cold enough to make your pulse sluggish—but weather in the emotional sense. A heaviness. A sense of suspended time. A strange mix of dread and stubborn hope that seemed to cling to every wall like condensation.Evan Harwood had spent enough time in them to learn their patterns: the rustling of magazines that no one actually read, the hum of vending machines, the squeak of rubber soles. He could predict when the automatic doors would ...

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The Night They Couldn’t Stay

Jethro Pili

The knock came at 11:58 p.m.Not a timid tap, not a polite “are-you-awake?” kind of knock.It was frantic—almost panicked—fast enough to shake the frames on the nearby wall.Lena Rivera sat bolt upright on her couch, where she’d dozed off finishing a crime novel. For half a second she thought she’d dreamed the sound. But then—BANG. BANG. BANG.No one knocked like that unless something was very wrong.She jumped up, heart pounding, and hurried to the door.When she opened it, cold night air spilled in—and on her doorstep stood her older sister Emil...

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The Prydwen Sails Again

Jethro Pili

Part IArthur “Art” Llewellyn had never been much of a believer in destiny. He believed in coffee, in deadlines, in the quiet tick-tick of the clock above his apartment door as he worked late into the night. He believed in his cat, Melon, who reliably sat on his keyboard whenever Art tried to finish a sentence. Mostly, he believed in keeping his head down, minding his business, and avoiding any problem that looked remotely mythic, catastrophic, or even mildly inconvenient.Which was why the package on his doorstep at 6:12 a.m. on a wind-whippe...

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ASK A FRIAR — EPISODE 47: “THE FOOTBALL FIASCO”

Jethro Pili

“Dear Father Spencer Vale, what is to be done about our parish priest? A fellow parishioner was in the very back pew on his phone watching football. Broncos vs. Chargers. Instead of reprimanding him, our priest yelled from the pulpit, ‘What’s the score, son?!?’ then proceeded to hoot and holler, fists in the air when the Broncos scored a touchdown. It was a disgrace, Father! What do we do here?” PART I — THE SETUP: CAMERA, CASSOCK, ACTIONFather Spencer Vale leaned forward toward the camera, his brown Franciscan hood draped loosely behind him...

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Where Two Roads Meet

Jethro Pili

The bell tower of St. Athanasius Seminary rang with a kind of solemn cheer that first morning—cheer for those beginning a great vocation, solemn for those realizing how far from home they now stood. Autumn lay like a coppery quilt across the grounds: rust-gold leaves, crisp air, the scent of cedar from the cloister walk. New students—wide-eyed, anxious, hopeful—moved through the campus like pilgrims trying to pretend they weren’t lost.Tristan Greene stood among them, though slightly apart.He was tall, thin, sharp in the angles, with thoughtf...

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The Longest Parting

Jethro Pili

Dani always hated endings.She said that once while sprawled across her favorite corduroy beanbag in my dorm room, twirling a pen between her fingers. “Endings suck,” she declared. “I like middles. Middles are comfy. Middles are where you can breathe.”But life, as I would learn again and again, doesn’t ask for our permission before it ends chapters. It just turns pages.That truth arrived for me on a fog-thick November morning, years after she first said it—when the world felt like it was drifting apart at the seams, and I was clinging to the ...

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Raan Losti

Jethro Pili

Raan Losti was upon us: a time of great change, our Elders called it.They said it in hushed tones around the glowpits, their wrinkled faces lit by flecks of emberlight that danced like nervous fireflies. They had seen two Raan Losti cycles before—both marked by upheaval, war, dissolutions of worlds and the births of new ones. But this one felt different. Heavier. As if the whole sky trembled beneath something unseen.I did not believe in ancient omens then. I was a cartographer, a star-mapper for the Ascendant Fleet, and numbers had always sp...

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The Last Kiss in the Parlor

Jethro Pili

The spring of 1861 arrived in Charleston County with an uneasy blend of jasmine-sweet breezes and the crisp metallic scent of impending war. It was the strangest thing, James Whitfield thought—that the season of rebirth should herald the slow unraveling of everything he knew. Birds still sang from every oak and magnolia, insistently cheerful against a backdrop of whispered dread, as if nature herself refused to acknowledge the tension rising like a storm swell across the South.But on the morning that would define the rest of his life—the mor...

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The Gravelight Visitor

Jethro Pili

Someone has been to my grave.I can tell before I rise fully from the soil, before my thoughts piece themselves together in the slow, syrupy way they do each dawn, before I remember—again—that I do not breathe. The earth carries the memory of footsteps the way skin carries the memory of touch, and my patch of it tingles with the echo of a presence.Someone was here.Someone living.I move without moving. A shift in intention is all it takes to drift above the grass, above the carved stone with my name, above the wilted bouquet that has no busine...

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Skeletons in the Closet

Jethro Pili

A 3,000-Word Investigative Drama Starring Jodie Williams of the Seabrook Viking News Jodie Williams had covered corruption before—mayors who skimmed a little off the top, council members who let their brothers-in-law cut in line for housing permits, police chiefs who looked the other way when a friend’s bar stayed open past 2 a.m. But nothing prepared her for Elroy Oakes.The man smiled too much. That was the first thing she’d noticed. Politicians smiled, sure, but Mayor Oakes smiled like a man who was absolutely convinced he’d never be c...

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The Girl Who Wouldn’t Fall

Jethro Pili

A Seabrook Viking News Story The alert came through at 10:14 a.m.Not the usual chatter. Not the breaking-news ping that meant a local council member had been caught on the wrong side of the law again, or the mayor had posted something regrettably philosophical on Facebook. No — this was different. This was a sound the newsroom never forgot, because it only ever meant one thing:A journalist was dead.Sam Ihle heard Grace Orozco gasp before he saw the screen. Her hand flew to her mouth as the color drained from her face.“What?” Sam asked, r...

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The Haunting of Elliot Gray

Jethro Pili

Trigger Warning: Character death due to illness (i.e., cancer) Elliot Gray did not believe in ghosts until the night his wife died.For most of his adult life, his world had been grounded in science, statistics, oncology reports, and the grim numerical progression that came with watching someone he loved disappear one cell at a time. Olivia had been the one who believed in signs, in feathers on doormats, in loved ones visiting in dreams. She had spoken gently of the veil thinning, of the spirit persisting, of love refusing to die even ...

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The Weight of the Music Box: A Story of Father Tristan Greene

Jethro Pili

The microphone light flicked on—a soft red glow in the small podcast studio tucked behind the parish office. Father Tristan Greene sat across from the host, a genial layman named Paul Martens, whose radio voice always reminded Tristan of a friendly uncle telling bedtime stories. The name of the show was Faith Unshaken, a popular Catholic podcast about miracles, mysteries, and moments of grace under fire.Paul smiled. “Welcome back, friends. Today, we have a very special guest. He’s been called Boston’s modern-day exorcist, though he prefers t...

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