Menu

More apps built by Reedsy

Assemble a team of professionals

The writing app for authors

Writing courses, events and memberships

Get your book reviewed

Weekly writing prompts and contests

Menu
Prompts
Contests
Stories
Blog

Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

Stories
Comments
Library
31 Followers
42 Following

150 Stories

345 karma pts

?

The Perfect Contrapasso

I’m going to tell this straight, like it happened, because dressing it up would be a lie—and lies are what got people killed.The call came in just after dawn, when the city still smelled like wet concrete and old coffee. Red Hook. Warehouse district. Homicide.Detective Lance Shields was driving, one hand on the wheel, the other already fishing for a cigarette he wouldn’t light until we were out of the car. Lance always said he’d quit when the city stopped killing people in inventive ways. He was still smoking.“Red Hook,” he said. “Too early ...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

To Be Continued…

The room had been prepared hours earlier, though nothing about it felt prepared enough.The windows were shut and curtained. The lights were dim but not low—Father Tristan insisted on clarity. Darkness invited imagination; light revealed what was truly there. A small table stood against the far wall, draped in white linen, holding the crucifix, the holy water, the Ritual book, and the oil. The cross on the wall above the bed had been tightened earlier that morning; Father Galen remembered testing it himself, twisting the screw until it would ...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

They Say When It Rains, Angels Weep

Father Wayne McKnight anointed the forehead first.“In the name of the Father,” he said softly, thumb warm with oil, tracing the sign of the cross on skin that had grown thin and nearly translucent. The rain outside tapped at the hospice window in a steady, patient rhythm, as if the sky itself were kneeling.“And of the Son.”The man’s breathing was shallow now, a tide that barely reached the shore before retreating again. His name was Thomas Avery—Tom, everyone had called him once, though there was no one left in the room to say it now. No wed...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

The Quiet Between Battles

The bell over the door of St. Brigid’s Books & Bindery rang with a soft, apologetic chime as Father Lance Lake stepped inside, shaking rain from his umbrella and folding it with military precision before tucking it under his arm.The shop smelled like old paper, beeswax polish, and coffee that had been sitting on a warmer just a bit too long—the holy trinity of bookshops everywhere. Wooden shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, bowed slightly under the weight of theology, history, philosophy, poetry, and more than a few well-loved paper...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

All I Need Is A Little Coffee & A Whole Lot Of Jesus

The rain had finally spent itself.Not in a dramatic tapering-off, not with a last heroic peal of thunder or a cinematic bolt of lightning, but the way exhaustion ends things—quietly, almost sheepishly. When Father Tristan Greene pushed open the door of the house on Willow Row, the hinges no longer screamed in protest. The wind had gone slack. The air smelled rinsed clean, like wet stone and crushed leaves, and the early sun lay across the street in pale gold bands, warming puddles into steam.He stepped out into the morning like a man resurfa...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

Adventure At Waverly Hills Sanatorium

They parked at the bottom of the hill and shut the engine off at the same time, the sudden quiet making the cicadas sound louder than they had any right to be. Waverly Hills Sanatorium loomed above them, its long brick body stretched across the crest like a sleeping animal that might wake if disturbed too loudly.“Still can’t believe this place was a tuberculosis hospital,” Cedric said, craning his neck to look up. “You’d think sunshine and fresh air, not… this.”“That’s why it’s up here,” Kurt replied. He was the oldest, or at least he carrie...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

The White Oak

The box arrived on a Tuesday, which Roseanne Van Helsing would later decide mattered.Tuesdays were supposed to be quiet. Tuesdays were grading days, laundry days, days when the world politely kept its distance and allowed her to exist unnoticed. Nothing ever arrived on Tuesdays except bills and grocery flyers and the occasional catalog she never remembered subscribing to.So when the parcel sat on her doorstep—long, narrow, wrapped in brown paper and tied with actual twine—she stopped short like she’d found a snake sunning itself on the welco...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

Have We Met Before?

They always met the same way.Not with thunder or prophecy or a flash of light—but with a pause. A hesitation. A moment when the world seemed to lean in and hold its breath across vast oceans of time.And one of them would say, softly, uncertainly:“Have we met before?”I. Medieval England — 1191The abbey bells were ringing for terce when Eleanor spilled her basket of apples in the cloister garden.A knight in travel-stained mail bent at once to help her gather them. His hands were battle scarred, his movements careful, reverent—as if each apple ...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

Not What We Planned

The wagons came in at dawn, when the sky over the high plains was the pale blue of a robin’s egg and the grass still held the night’s cold. From a distance, they looked like beetles crawling toward water—dark shapes against the endless sweep of land. Up close, they were scarred and dusted and stubbornly hopeful, canvas tops patched and reins mended with care.The Calder family had been traveling for nearly six months when they reached the town that would—so they believed—be the end of their wandering.It was called Cottonwood Ford, a place tha...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

The Second Star to the Right

She learned early how to listen for wings.Not the wings of angels—those belonged to church ceilings and oil paintings and the gentle lies told to children who asked too many questions—but the particular sound of boyish wings: a quick, silvery flutter like laughter caught in a throat. If you held your breath just right, if you leaned out far enough, you might hear it over the rasp of your own lungs.The sanatorium sat on a hill above the town, a long white building with verandas like outstretched arms and windows tall enough for dreams to esca...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

The Journal Entries of Roseanne Van Helsing

The Journal of Roseanne Van HelsingVampire hunter. Loyal friend. Fierce protectress. Dutiful adopted granddaughter.1. 14 MarchGrandfather says a journal is a weapon.Not in the way a stake is a weapon, or a blade, or even a prayer whispered through bloodied lips. He says memory itself can kill—or save—depending on how faithfully it is kept. Write it down, he told me, pressing this leather-bound book into my hands. The truth rots when it is left only in the mind.So here I am, ink-stained fingers, candle burning too low, trying to write what I ...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

Cold Night, Colder Dawn

“It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark.”The words would have sounded trite if anyone there had spoken them aloud, the sort of thing a dime novelist might scrawl with a shiver of false poetry. But the cold that night was no metaphor. It was the kind of cold that crept in through seams and memories alike, that turned breath into a visible confession and made even seasoned men wonder—just briefly—whether this was how the world ended: quietly, under snow, with no one to bear witness but the dark.They had stopped in th...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

Do Not Go Into The Waldock Woods

No one remembered who first said it.Only that everyone did.At Waldock College, warnings moved the way ivy did—slow, persistent, clinging to stone. They were whispered during orientation tours, scribbled in bathroom stalls, passed between upperclassmen with the gravity of inherited sin.Don’t go into the woods.The guide would smile when a freshman asked why.“Oh, just superstition,” they’d say, gesturing vaguely to the dark tree line behind Waldock Hall.“Local legend.”But legends didn’t press themselves against the windows at night.Waldock Hall...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

I Am The Count

They always begin with the end.With the blood on the marble.With the scream swallowed by velvet curtains.With my name hissed like a curse—the Count, as though that were explanation enough.So allow me the discourtesy of beginning earlier.Before the iron gates.Before the silver crucifix clenched in a trembling hand.Before I learned how quickly love curdles into legend.I am the Count because the world required a shape for its fear.But once—long before they sharpened stakes and stories alike—I was merely a man who learned too slowly that time is...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

Welcome To The Happy Ray

Sam Ihle decided—about three seconds after opening the menu—that this was a mistake.Not a relationship mistake. Not a career mistake. Just a restaurant mistake.Across the small candlelit table, Jodie Williams-Ihle watched his eyebrows climb steadily north, like twin explorers who had found something deeply unsettling on the horizon.“Oh no,” she said, folding her hands around her water glass. “You’re doing the face.”“I am not doing the face,” Sam said, still staring at the menu. “This is a completely new face. This is… academic concern.”“That...

0 likes 0 comments 0
Read story