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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

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150 Stories

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The Wind That Blows My Love

October 3rd, 1863Near Culpeper Courthouse, VirginiaDearest Francesca,The pigeon-master says I must write smaller because General Beauregard’s birds are not built to carry the complete works of Shakespeare upon their legs. I told him I only intended to send one sonnet’s worth of longing and misery to Charleston.He answered that longing weighs more than ammunition.I reckon he is right.The bird carrying this letter is a gray hen called Jubilee. She bites fingers and struts like a colonel inspecting troops. If she arrives pecking at your window,...

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Blessed Are The Peacemakers For They Shall Get Punched

The first punch landed beside the trifle.Not in it, thankfully. Mrs. Hargreaves had spent all Saturday layering sponge cake, custard, raspberry jam, and whipped cream into the great crystal bowl that sat like a crown jewel in the middle of St. Bartholomew’s parish hall. Had the punch landed two inches lower, half the congregation might have witnessed seventy-two-year-old Edith Hargreaves commit a murder with a serving spoon.Instead, the blow struck Colin Mercer square in the jaw.The hall fell silent.A fork clattered against a plate somewhere...

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Death Aboard the Eidolon

The yacht Eidolon cut through the black Atlantic like a silver knife.Moonlight glazed the water in long ribbons, and the sea breathed against the hull with the slow patience of some immense sleeping creature. Above deck, rigging creaked softly in the wind. Below, behind polished mahogany walls and velvet drapery, eight guests sat around a dinner table lit by wavering candlelight.The dining salon smelled faintly of cigar smoke, sea salt, and roasted pheasant.Captain Alistair Vale stood at the head of the table with one hand resting on the bac...

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For Longshore

The wind off the sea smelled wrong.Too warm.Too coppery.Old Nan Barrow stood on the cliffs above Longshore with her shawl wrapped tight around her shoulders, staring into the darkness beyond the surf. The moon silvered the water, but farther inland—past the dunes, beyond the black teeth of the pine forest—fires burned.Too many fires.Orcs.Not raiding bands this time. Not drunken marauders looking for sheep and women and silver cups.An army.Nan crossed herself and whispered a prayer through her remaining teeth.Below her, Longshore did not slee...

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He Said, She Said

The rain began before dawn and never really stopped.Not the cinematic kind that crashes against windows in righteous fury. This rain was thin and cold and stubborn, hanging over Seabrook like a gray bedsheet. By noon, the gutters along Saint Brendan’s Cathedral were overflowing, and every mourner entering the church carried the scent of wet wool and damp umbrellas.Inside, incense tried and failed to conquer the smell.The vestibule buzzed with whispers.“He was one of the bravest men I ever knew.”“He also once punched a hole through a newsroom...

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70 x 7

Father Lance Lake had a drawer he never opened.It sat in the bottom left corner of the old oak desk in the parish office of Saint Brigid’s, swollen slightly from humidity, the brass handle tarnished by years of neglect. Parish records filled the other drawers. Baptismal certificates. Funeral arrangements. Donation receipts. The ordinary paper trail of ordinary souls trying to find God between weddings and wakes.But the bottom left drawer held something else entirely.Lance unlocked it only when no one else was around.Inside was a collection o...

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Lonely But Not Alone

The parish house was too quiet after nine o’clock.That was the hour Father Lance Lake hated most.The phones stopped ringing. The church secretary had long since gone home. The sacristy lights were dark. The last old ladies who lingered after novenas had finally shuffled to their Buicks and Cadillacs. Even the neighborhood dogs seemed to stop barking after nine.And then there was only the ticking clock in the rectory kitchen.Tick.Tick.Tick.Lance stood at the sink in shirtsleeves and collar, rinsing a coffee mug he did not even remember dirtyi...

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Home Is Wherever I’m With You

The key stuck for half a second in the lock.That never happened.Sam Ihle stood in the dim hallway of the Harbor Arms Apartments with one hand braced against the frame and the other still gripping the stubborn brass key. The fluorescent light overhead buzzed like a dying hornet, washing the corridor in pale yellow misery. Somewhere three doors down, somebody’s television blared an old game show theme. A baby cried. Pipes rattled in the walls.Sam closed his eyes.“Come on,” he muttered to the lock.The key finally turned.The apartment door swung...

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Our Alma Mater Dear, We Sing This Song To Thee

“I remember…”The words slipped out of Daniel Mercer’s mouth before he even realized he’d spoken them aloud.He stood in the middle of the old quad with his hands buried deep in the pockets of his charcoal coat, watching autumn leaves skitter across the brick pathways of what was now officially called John Arthur University. Twenty years ago, when he had first arrived carrying two duffel bags, a secondhand typewriter, and enough anxiety to sink a battleship, it had still been John Arthur College.Back then, the stone archways had seemed impossi...

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A Mighty Rushing Wind

The first thing Daniel Mercer noticed was the shoes.Not the screaming.Not the light.The shoes.A pair of little pink sneakers sat neatly beside a shopping cart that rolled slowly through the grocery store parking lot, bumping lazily against a concrete divider until it stopped. One sneaker had a cartoon rabbit on the toe. The other had tiny glittering stars.No child stood in them.Daniel stared through the windshield of his rusted Honda Civic, fries halfway to his mouth.A second earlier—he swore it—a little girl had been there, tugging on her m...

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Going Home

The first thing the night nurse noticed was that Mr. Elias Rowan was no longer asleep.That, in itself, was not unusual. The residents of Sunnyside Home for the Elderly drifted in and out of sleep like tides—memories pulling them under, aches and years nudging them awake again. But what was unusual was the sound.A thump.Then another.Then—impossibly—the quick, sure rhythm of feet hitting the floor.Maribel paused outside his door, her clipboard hovering midair. Mr. Rowan hadn’t stood without assistance in over a year. He was ninety-three, bones...

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Never The End of Care

The first thing Anubis noticed was the smell.It was not the smell of rot—he knew that scent too well, knew it the way sailors know the sea or shepherds know the wind. This was something sharper, cleaner, threaded with chemicals that bit the air and left it sterile. It reminded him faintly of natron, though altered, refined, distilled into something both harsher and more controlled.He stood just inside the doorway, unseen.The room was white. White walls, white lights, white steel tables. No painted hieroglyphs. No incense coiling like whisper...

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Good Cop, Bad Cop

The coin always sounds louder in interrogation rooms.Not because of the acoustics—though the tile and glass and bad decisions do make everything echo—but because of what it means. A tiny disk of metal deciding who gets to be the monster tonight.I flicked it with my thumb. Old habit. Older than the badge, older than the city, older than most of the buildings that scraped at the smog-heavy sky outside.“Heads,” I said.Across the table, Marcus leaned back in his chair, boots up, arms folded behind his head like he was settling in for a movie. Wh...

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I’ll See You Someday On Fiddler’s Green

The house on the bluff had already begun to forget him.Curtains hung still where once they had billowed with his laughter. The study smelled faintly of pipe smoke and varnish, but the chair by the window sat empty now, its cushion remembering the weight that would not return. Even the clocks—three of them, each set to a different port he loved—seemed to tick more softly, as if unwilling to disturb the quiet left behind.But the Gertrude remembered.She remembered in the way old vessels do—through the creak of her beams, the sigh of her ropes, ...

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A Thiarna, Déan Trócaire

The house was quiet in the way a battlefield is quiet after the last cry has been swallowed.Not peaceful—never that. Just… emptied.Father Tristan Greene stood in the center of the living room, cassock damp with sweat and something darker, something he did not want to name. The crucifix still hung heavy in his hand, though his fingers had long since lost their strength. The candles had burned low, their wax collapsed into pale, exhausted puddles. The air smelled of incense and ozone and the metallic edge of fear.It was over.For now.“Father?”H...

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