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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

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150 Stories

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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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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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