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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

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150 Stories

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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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Baby, You Can Never Hold Back Spring

There were some people you met and forgot before the week was over.Some you remembered for a year or two—long enough for a story, a sigh, or an occasional “whatever happened to…”And then there were the ones who lived somewhere beneath your skin.Lance Knigtly didn’t believe in reincarnation.Not really.He believed in things that could be footnoted, cited, graphed, peer-reviewed, and defended in a faculty meeting full of people who liked to say phrases like best practices and data-driven outcomes. He believed in locking his car, in meal-preppin...

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Three Words, Eight Letters

She had almost texted him three times.Once at noon — You don’t have to come tonight. The boys have homework and I’m exhausted and honestly we can raincheck.Once at four — Traffic is bad, you should probably just head home after work.And once at six-thirty — a blank message she stared at for a full minute before deleting it and tossing her phone onto the couch like it had personally offended her.Instead, she stood at the kitchen counter and chopped vegetables she had already decided she wasn’t going to use.He had told her not to cook.Which wa...

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Almost

Hotchner Hall had never been this quiet.During the semester it hummed—doors slamming, someone’s speaker leaking bass through drywall, laughter ricocheting down the stairwell. But three days into Winter Break, after the snowstorm shut down half of Connecticut and sent the rest of Hartford University fleeing home ahead of schedule, the dorm felt like the abandoned set of a movie about the end of the world.Jason Adler stood in the lounge doorway and listened to the radiator knock like a hesitant knuckle against a coffin lid.“Okay,” he muttered ...

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Can You Hear Them, The Ghosts of Culloden?

The wind off Drumossie Moor had teeth.Fergus MacDonald felt it even though he no longer should have. It cut through the long wool coat he’d borrowed from another century, threaded its way beneath the collar, whispered against skin that had not warmed itself since April of 1746. The wind carried the smell of peat and damp earth and old sorrow, and it stirred the coarse grass that bent and straightened again like penitents at prayer.Culloden.He had sworn—by God, by the saints, by the blood in his veins that was no longer blood—that he would ne...

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In Conclusion

They had picked the booth because it was still there.That was the first thing Jonah noticed when he walked into Murphy’s Diner—the chipped vinyl seat by the window, the wobble in the table, the faint smell of burnt coffee that never quite left the place. Everything else had been updated in the way old places pretended to be new: sleeker menus, a chalkboard with artisanal nonsense written in looping handwriting, Edison bulbs hanging like they were trying too hard to be nostalgic.But the booth? The booth had survived.“Do you remember…” Jonah s...

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Fancy Meeting You Here

Sam Ihle first saw Melissa Sass reflected in the glass of the coffee shop pastry case.It was the laugh that did it. Not loud—Melissa had never been loud—but pitched just so, airy and confident, like she’d always known she was being listened to. The sound cut through the murmur of Seabrook’s Saturday morning crowd and lodged itself somewhere behind Sam’s ribs, a place he’d boarded up years ago and labeled Do Not Enter.He froze mid-reach for a blueberry scone.For one absurd, treacherous half-second, his heart did what it used to do back in Mic...

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My Tribe

Sam Ihle learned early how to disappear without leaving the room.It started in elementary school, the kind with low ceilings and scuffed linoleum floors that smelled faintly of milk cartons and disinfectant. Sam was the kid with his nose always in a book—thick ones, usually, with dragons or footnotes or both. He wore glasses that slid down his nose no matter how often he pushed them back up, and he spoke with the careful diction of a boy who thought before he talked. That alone would have been enough.But Sam also loved the wrong things.He lo...

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Dearest Francesca

Dearest FrancescaBeing a correspondence preserved between the years 1862–1865Letter ICamp near Manassas Junction, VirginiaMay the 14th, 1862Dearest Francesca,I write to you by the light of a borrowed candle, its flame trembling as if it, too, were uncertain of the night. The men are settling into a restless sleep around me—some snoring, some murmuring prayers, some staring into the dark as though the darkness might answer back. I find that I cannot sleep, not while your face insists on appearing every time I close my eyes.Charleston feels a ...

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The Signal Beneath The Sand

The call came in at 4:17 a.m., the hour when truth is weakest and lies are most convincing.Dr. Mara Kline was awake anyway.She always was.The Nevada desert lay beyond the observation window—flat, moon-bleached, seemingly empty. A lie so old it had grown comfortable. Groom Lake shimmered faintly in the distance, the runway lights of Area 51 muted to pinpricks, as if embarrassed by their own existence.Mara closed the quantum telemetry readout she’d been pretending to analyze and answered the secure line.“Kline,” she said.“They’re here,” said C...

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Aslan

I know the sound of the house before it wakes.That is the first thing I know every morning: the way silence breathes. Walls sigh as the night loosens its grip. Pipes click like old bones. The refrigerator hums low, steady, the way a contented animal hums in its sleep. Even before my eyes open, my ears have already counted the rooms.Upstairs: three heartbeats. Downstairs: one clock, ticking too loudly, and the ghost of yesterday’s coffee.They think I wake when they wake.They are wrong.I wake when the world shifts—when intention stirs.My name ...

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