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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

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150 Stories

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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 collecti...

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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...

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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...

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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 impo...

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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 o...

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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, ...

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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 whis...

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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...

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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 rope...

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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. “Fath...

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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 neighborho...

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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—ther...

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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 orang...

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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. Be...

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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 ...

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