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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

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150 Stories

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The Quiet Static of Willowbrooke

No one remembered when the color left.They remembered that it left—like remembering a storm without recalling the rain—but the exact moment had been rubbed smooth, like a coin passed through too many hands. In Willowbrooke, memory itself felt secondhand.The sky was always a pale, exhausted gray, stretched thin like worn linen. Trees stood in ashen silhouettes, their leaves a uniform shade that might once have been green but now resembled the ghost of something living. Even the roses in Mrs. Delaney’s garden—once the pride of the neighborhood...

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Red Is The Rose

The garden behind St. Brigid’s Convent was not large, but it felt like a world.Stone walls, older than any of the sisters, enclosed it in a quiet embrace. Ivy crept along the mortar as if time itself had grown roots there. Lavender bushes lined the narrow paths, their scent rising gently with the morning sun. There were herbs near the kitchen door, neat and practical, and beyond them, a small orchard of apple trees that bent slightly with age, as though bowing in perpetual prayer.And at the center—where the paths met in a humble cross—there ...

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The Particular Metallicity of Red Velvet Cake

There are people who say the world is full of color.There are fewer who can taste it.And then there is me, who cannot escape it.The first thing I ever remember tasting was sunlight.Not the warmth of it on my skin—that came later, when I learned language and sensation had names—but the color itself. Yellow. It came in bright, sharp notes that hit the back of my tongue like citrus peel. Not sweet like lemonade, not soft like butter. Tangy. Piercing. Alive.I was two, maybe three, sitting on the kitchen floor while my mother peeled an orange. Su...

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Robin & the Hoodies

Robin Hopper had perfected the art of invisibility.Not literal invisibility—nothing supernatural, nothing out of a comic book—but the quieter, more reliable kind. The kind that came from sitting in the back row, from raising your hand only when called on, from wearing neutral colors and keeping your head down just enough that teachers described you as “pleasant” and classmates described you as “uh… who?”Robin liked it that way.Or at least, she told herself she did.At Seabrook High, loud people got attention. Attention got you noticed. Being ...

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The Masked Myrtle

The first sign that the Masked Myrtle had been there was not the missing coin, nor the slit purse, nor even the quiet absence of a man who had once thought himself untouchable.It was the leaves.Three of them. Always three.Glossy, dark, and fragrant when crushed between the fingers—myrtle leaves, placed with deliberate care. Sometimes on a windowsill. Sometimes on a corpse. Sometimes tucked beneath a ring or pinned with a dagger into oak.The people whispered.Some said she was a ghost.Some said she was a devil.Others, quieter, said she was jus...

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The Ghosts of Barbers Point

I used to think ghosts only came out at night.That’s what people say, right? Midnight, full moon, creaky doors, all that. But if you grow up on a place like the old base at Barbers Point, you learn pretty quick that ghosts don’t care about schedules. They show up whenever they feel like it—sun blazing, wind howling, ocean glittering like nothing bad ever happened.My name’s Caleb Reyes. I’m seventeen, and I’ve lived most of my life on a base that technically doesn’t exist anymore.Well… it exists. Just not officially.My auntie calls it “in bet...

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Ohana Community Baptist Fellowship Comedy Hour

The banner over the stage read, in ambitious, slightly crooked letters:OHANA COMMUNITY BAPTIST FELLOWSHIP OF OAHU PRESENTS:A STAGE ADAPTATION OF The Pilgrim’s ProgressSomeone had added a palm tree sticker over the “i” in Pilgrim’s.That someone, as it turned out, was also in charge of the fog machine.1. The GatheringThe entire congregation had turned out.They filled the auditorium with the warm hum of potluck-fed contentment—bellies full of teriyaki chicken, mac salad, and Sister Lani’s very experimental guava casserole that no one could quit...

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The Making of an Empire

thump… thump… thump…It was faint at first—so faint that any mortal ear would have mistaken it for memory rather than sound. But to Janus Augustus, it was a summons.thump… thump… …thumpA dying rhythm.He stood beneath a sky heavy with snow, its silence broken only by the whisper of wind across the Neva. Lanternlight shimmered against frost-crusted stone, gilding the façades of palaces and townhouses that rose like monuments to pride. This city—this St. Petersburg—was unlike any he had walked before. It did not carry the dust of antiquity or th...

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01101100 01101100 01101111

Dr. Elias Virek had spent most of his life listening to silence.Not the absence of sound—he had long ago learned that true silence doesn’t exist—but the vast, indifferent quiet of the universe. The hiss of cosmic background radiation. The faint, rhythmic pulses of dying stars. The occasional crackle of solar interference. All of it fed into the arrays, filtered through algorithms, translated into data streams that scrolled endlessly across his monitors.It was a kind of faith, really. Not in anything divine, but in the possibility that somewh...

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As You Wish

The first time the plow struck metal, Elias thought he had broken something important.The sound rang wrong against the steady rhythm of soil and iron—a sharp, hollow note that did not belong to earth. He halted the mule, wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve, and crouched down into the furrow. His fingers brushed aside clumps of dark soil until something dull and yellowed emerged, half-buried like a relic that had grown tired of hiding.It was a lamp.Not the kind his wife kept on the table for evenings—no, this was older, curved in an el...

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Rule #3

The rules were never written down.They didn’t need to be.Everyone who survived long enough learned them the same way you learned fire burned or that broken glass cut—through pain, through loss, through the quiet, irreversible arithmetic of cause and effect.Rule #1: No loud noises. It attracts the Sleepers.Rule #2: Always go for the head or neck.Rule #3: Someone gets bit, they get the hit.Boom. One shot. Mercy, if you could call it that.Eli Carter had never broken a rule.Not once.Not in the five years since the Outbreak turned the world into ...

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Welcome Home, Elena

The listing had been sitting for months, the way certain houses sit in photographs—caught between memory and neglect, waiting for someone to decide what they are worth.“Seven acres,” Elena said, scrolling slowly, reverently, like she was reading Scripture. “Original farmhouse, late 1800s. Restored greenhouse. Barn, stables, paddock. And look at that silo—oh my goodness, Daniel, that silo is gorgeous.”Daniel leaned over her shoulder, not really looking at the silo.He was looking at the shadows behind it.“Mm,” he said, noncommittal. “Yeah. Gor...

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Suspicious Minds

The newsroom of the Seabrook Viking News was never truly quiet.Even at nine in the evening, when the sun had long since dipped behind the low skyline and the fluorescent lights hummed overhead, there was always something—keyboards clacking, phones ringing, the distant whir of the printing press below like a heartbeat beneath the building.Sam Ihle sat hunched at his desk, sleeves rolled up, tie loosened, glasses sliding down his nose as he stared at a blinking cursor.He had been staring at it for a while.“Writer’s block?” a voice called.Sam f...

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The Story Michael Had Been Telling Himself

TRIGGER WARNING: Deals with the subject of racism and racial biases. Michael Brown had always believed he knew the truth.Not the kind of truth you argue about on talk shows or in comment sections. Not the kind you hedge with “on the one hand” and “on the other.” His truth was simple, solid, inherited—like a family heirloom passed down without question.Family is everything. Community is everything. And the world outside of it? Dangerous. Oppressive. Not to be trusted.That was the lesson.It had been told to him in stories at the dinner tab...

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Starry, Starry Night

The first time it happened, Daniel Mercer thought he was dying.There was no flash of light, no dramatic tearing of reality—just a sudden, violent absence. One moment he stood in his cramped apartment kitchen, staring at a sink full of dishes and a life that felt like it had quietly gone wrong somewhere along the way. The next—He was somewhere else.The air smelled different. Thicker. Earthier. There was the faint scent of oil paint and tobacco smoke. And silence—not the hum of refrigerators or distant traffic, but a rural quiet that pressed g...

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