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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

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150 Stories

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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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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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