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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

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150 Stories

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Seven Friends, Three Things Wrong, and 2,983 Miles to Aurora

Jack Marino’s plan was perfect.That was the first problem.The van was the centerpiece of the plan: a faded sunflower-yellow Volkswagen bus from the late seventies that Jack had borrowed from his uncle Sal, who had once lived in it for an entire summer while following a band around the country.“Authenticity,” Jack had said when the others asked why he didn’t just rent a car.The van sat outside the dorms at New York University, looking like it had rolled straight out of a vintage postcard. The paint was chipped. Peace signs decorated the doors...

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Eight Spirits

A Story Inspired by Matthew 12:43–45 and Luke 11:24–26 The first time Father Tristan Greene came to the Mendes house, it had been raining.A thin, steady rain that turned the streetlights into blurry halos and left the sidewalks slick and glistening. Tristan remembered it clearly because rain always made him think of baptism—water washing away what should not remain.That night, they had faced one.One voice that was not the girl’s.One presence twisting through the house like smoke.One long night of prayer, scripture, and the stubborn endura...

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The Traveling Man

The suitcase lay open on the bed in the cheap motel room, its faded blue lining looking far too small for a man’s whole life.Jesse Carpenter stood over it with his hands on his hips.He had faced a lot of things in his thirty years—winter winds on construction sites, twelve-hour shifts framing houses, angry subcontractors, broken guitars, long nights on lonely highways—but nothing quite like this.How did you fit your whole life in one suitcase?He scratched the stubble on his chin and looked around the room.The neon sign outside flickered red...

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Road Trip Playlist

The car hummed along the highway like a low, patient animal.Six hours and twenty-one minutes.Sam Ihle had checked the route twice before they left Seabrook at dawn. Interstate, state highway, interstate again, then the long approach north toward the gray waters of the bay and the prison perched like a fortress over them.San Quentin.He didn’t say the name out loud.The sun had just cleared the low fog when the first song began on Sam’s carefully assembled playlist. Johnny Cash’s voice—live, raw, echoing with prison acoustics—rolled out of the ...

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Truth Before Tide

THE SEABROOK VIKING NEWS“Truth Before Tide.”Founded 1898CRIME WAVE OR SUMMER PANIC?Break-Ins, Vandalism, and One Strange Calling Card Leave Seabrook on EdgeBy Staff WritersJune 3SEABROOK — A string of late-night break-ins across downtown Seabrook has left residents rattled and local police searching for answers.Since May 19, twelve businesses along Harbor Street and the surrounding boardwalk have reported forced entry between the hours of 1:00 a.m. and 4:00 a.m. Stolen items range from petty cash to electronics, though in several cases, noth...

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Butterfly Effect

He had failed once beneath a gray English sky.The first time he had tried to change history, the blade had slipped in his sweating palm as the sword rose over the neck of Anne Boleyn. He had shouted himself hoarse in Tudor French and mangled courtly English, but guards had seized him before he reached the scaffold. He remembered the way she had looked at him—not frightened, not hopeful, merely curious, as if he were a strange footnote interrupting the main text of her life.History had righted itself with brutal efficiency. Steel fell. The cr...

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Five On Four

The first thing Darren Charles noticed about Hartford University was the clock tower.It rose from the center of campus like a patient, judging finger, brick and ivy and old ambition. His father had a picture of it framed in his study—twenty years younger, hair thicker, arm slung around a bronze plaque that read THETA MU – EST. 1891. Legacy wasn’t just a word in the Charles household. It was oxygen.Darren stood in the quad with two suitcases and a garment bag, staring at the tower as it chimed noon.Freshman year. Legacy student. Future Theta ...

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Yea, Though I Walk

Every night, it begins with the sound.Not the bugles. Not the shouting.The wind.It combs through the elephant grass with a dry, whispering hiss—like breath dragged across old teeth. Then the sun burns through a white-hot sky, and the red dust rises in choking spirals. And Jim Pruitt knows, before he looks down, that his boots are already sinking into the clearing.LZ X-Ray.He wakes every morning tasting cordite.Jim Pruitt is seventy-three years old, with hands that tremble when he lifts his coffee and eyes that never quite rest on the present...

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For Time & All Eternity

Dr. Elias Rowan did not build the machine for glory.He built it because he could still hear her laugh in the kitchen.The house was quiet now—too quiet. The kettle did not whistle because no one remembered to fill it. The wind chimes did not sing because he had taken them down after the funeral. He could not bear music that moved without her.Her name was Mara.He said it aloud sometimes in the lab, just to make sure the air still knew it.The lab itself had once been a municipal planetarium on the outskirts of the city. When funding dried up, t...

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A Matter of Minutes

The first siren does not sound like a siren.It sounds like a mistake.Eddie Malone pauses mid-step and tilts his head. “You hear that?” he asks.They are five sailors in dress whites, caps squared, shoes shined to a mirror. Sunday morning. The air is soft with early light, the kind that makes even the barracks look forgiving. They are walking the narrow road from base toward the chapel, laughing about nothing important.Tom Malone, Eddie’s cousin—same black Irish hair, same long jaw inherited from brothers who worked shipyards back in Boston—sh...

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Bandidos

The town of Mercy Gulch had a way of introducing itself politely before it killed you.First, the wind would come—dry as old bones and just as talkative—whispering through warped shutters and half-hung signs. Then the sun, sliding down past the mesas like a blade being drawn from a sheath. Then the silence.And then—if you were unlucky—boots.Sheriff Elias Boone stood at the edge of Main Street, thumbs hooked in his gun belt, watching that silence settle in like dust on a coffin lid.“They’ll be here by sundown,” said Deputy Martin Hale, who was...

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Trial-By-Combat

No one in Gravenhold remembered the year the world ended anymore.They remembered the last good summer.They remembered turkey legs wrapped in foil and dripping grease down their wrists. They remembered the smell of kettle corn and leather and sunscreen and wet hay. They remembered laughing men in foam armor clanking together in choreographed duels while someone in a velvet doublet announced, in a voice too large for his own chest—“MY LORDS AND LADIES, WELCOME TO THE KINGDOM OF GRAVENHOLD!”Back then, the stone walls had been plywood painted gr...

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Sister Mary Therese

The bell for Lauds rang at 5:00 a.m.It always rang at 5:00 a.m.Not 4:59. Not 5:01.Five. On the dot.Sister Mary Therese was awake before it rang, as she had been every morning for the past twelve years.There was something about routine that became less like a choice the longer one kept it. It hardened around you like plaster. What began as discipline became habit; what began as habit became instinct; what began as instinct became identity.Before she was Sister Mary Therese, she had been Vivian Navarro.Vivian had loved mornings too—but for dif...

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The Stoning of Saint Stephen

The interruption came just after the Gospel.Father Benedict Varner had just finished proclaiming it—his voice still warm in the rafters, the last syllables hanging like incense smoke beneath the hammer-beamed ceiling—when the first sound came.Clack.It was so small, at first, that it could have been mistaken for anything. A dropped hymnal. A cane striking tile in the vestibule. One of the altar servers fidgeting with the brass thurible chain again, though Benedict had made it very clear to Thomas that the sanctuary was not the place for “curi...

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It Says Love Thy Neighbor, Not Love-Hate Thy Neighbor

The walk-up on Decatur Street had a personality.Not charm. Not character.Personality.It groaned in the winter like it was personally offended by the cold. It sweated in the summer like it had something to prove. The pipes clanged with the kind of righteous indignation usually reserved for comment sections and family group chats. The banister wobbled just enough to make you wonder if today was the day.Thomas O’Rourke—Tommy to literally everyone but his boss and his dentist—lived on the third floor in Apartment 3B, where the radiator hissed li...

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