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Jethro Pili

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2021

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150 Stories

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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...

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Fish Be With You

Father Tristan Greene unlocked the rectory door with hands that were still trembling—not with fear, but with the aftershock of exertion, like a runner who had crossed the finish line and only then realized how hard his heart was pounding.The exorcism had lasted nearly four hours.Four hours of Latin prayers spoken hoarsely through a throat that felt flayed raw. Four hours of incense thick enough to sting the eyes. Four hours of resistance—violent, cunning, and cruel—pressing back against every word of Scripture he pronounced. Four hours of st...

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Taco Split

Hunger, at first, is a small thing.It is the polite clearing of the throat inside the body. The gentle tap on the ribs. The whisper that says, Hey. We could eat.It is not dramatic. It does not yet have opinions.This is where the hunger begins for Elena Morales—sitting cross-legged on the floor of her apartment, back against the couch, laptop open but unwatched, the soft blue glow of a paused documentary washing over her walls. Outside, Los Angeles is doing what it always does in the evening: humming, breathing, pretending it is not tired.Her...

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Colcannon For The Long Winter

The pot had been sitting on the back burner for hours, not quite simmering, not quite resting—just existing in that patient, domestic way food does when it knows it will be needed later. Colcannon was like that. It did not rush. It waited. Potatoes softened into themselves beneath a lid fogged with steam, kale slumped into submission, butter melting not in a hurry but with dignity. It was a dish that understood winters, understood patience, understood that hunger was not always loud.Samuel Joseph Ihle noticed the smell before he noticed anyt...

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Accidentally On Purpose

Something was burning.Not “something might be burning,” not “is that a faint hint of smoke?” No—this was the kind of thick, unmistakable, coughing-inducing smoke that barreled out of an oven like it had been storing grudges inside.Sam Ihle froze mid-paragraph, his Parker pen still tapping lightly against the edge of his notebook—one of the nice ones Danny Van Hoosier bought him so he’d stop chewing the caps off Bics like they were a nervous man’s chewing gum. The tapping stopped. His eyes narrowed. His nose twitched once, twice.“...Jodie?” h...

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The Wind That Blows The Dove

The fog had rolled into Seabrook like a tired gray animal, stretching its limbs across the coastal town until everything felt muted—streets, storefronts, even the gulls themselves. It wasn’t an unusual morning on the Southern California coastline, but something about this fog felt heavier, denser, as if it carried secrets in its folds.Hannah Reyes stood outside Fire House 87 Café, hugging her navy cardigan tight around her shoulders while she waited for her to-go order. The old firehouse, now a coffee shop and museum, always smelled faintly ...

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Two Men I Trust In A Storm

The wind hit the cruise ship like a hammer.Julius Turner braced himself against the railing of Deck 10 as the Pacific churned below, the once-calm turquoise now a furious slate gray. Lightning webbed across the sky in white jagged flashes. The air tasted like metal and rain. Even the deck beneath his sneakers thrummed with the deep, guttural vibrations of engines pushed to their limits.His twin sister, Juliet, tightened her hoodie strings with trembling fingers.“Dad said this weather was supposed to stay north,” she muttered, shifting her fe...

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The Day Seabrook Vanished

It started—innocently enough—with the fog.Seabrook had seen fog before. Being a coastal Southern California town, it was practically built on the stuff. Fog clung to the cliffs on quiet mornings like a sleepy cat refusing to get out of bed. Fog rolled across Highway 1 as if testing whether drivers were awake. Fog drifted through the harbor so consistently that locals jokingly called it “the Sixth Resident.” They had Tinsel, the wandering pelican; Buster, the German shepherd who always escaped his backyard; and Fog, who was simply Fog.But thi...

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The Weight of Stones

If there was one thing the men and women of the Essex County Sheriff’s Department agreed on—aside from the fact that Dunkin’ coffee tasted better after three hours of paperwork—it was that Sheriff Stanley Bennett-Meyer never, ever got sick.It wasn’t that he bragged about perfect health, because bragging wasn’t in his nature. It was just something everyone knew, the way everyone knew where the spare keys were or who hid the emergency chocolate in the supply closet (Deputy Lorraine Judge, though she denied it with suspiciously passionate indig...

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The Quiet Miracle

No one ever tells you that waiting rooms have their own weather.Not just temperature—although they were always cold enough to make your pulse sluggish—but weather in the emotional sense. A heaviness. A sense of suspended time. A strange mix of dread and stubborn hope that seemed to cling to every wall like condensation.Evan Harwood had spent enough time in them to learn their patterns: the rustling of magazines that no one actually read, the hum of vending machines, the squeak of rubber soles. He could predict when the automatic doors would ...

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The Night They Couldn’t Stay

The knock came at 11:58 p.m.Not a timid tap, not a polite “are-you-awake?” kind of knock.It was frantic—almost panicked—fast enough to shake the frames on the nearby wall.Lena Rivera sat bolt upright on her couch, where she’d dozed off finishing a crime novel. For half a second she thought she’d dreamed the sound. But then—BANG. BANG. BANG.No one knocked like that unless something was very wrong.She jumped up, heart pounding, and hurried to the door.When she opened it, cold night air spilled in—and on her doorstep stood her older sister Emil...

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The Prydwen Sails Again

Part IArthur “Art” Llewellyn had never been much of a believer in destiny. He believed in coffee, in deadlines, in the quiet tick-tick of the clock above his apartment door as he worked late into the night. He believed in his cat, Melon, who reliably sat on his keyboard whenever Art tried to finish a sentence. Mostly, he believed in keeping his head down, minding his business, and avoiding any problem that looked remotely mythic, catastrophic, or even mildly inconvenient.Which was why the package on his doorstep at 6:12 a.m. on a wind-whippe...

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ASK A FRIAR — EPISODE 47: “THE FOOTBALL FIASCO”

“Dear Father Spencer Vale, what is to be done about our parish priest? A fellow parishioner was in the very back pew on his phone watching football. Broncos vs. Chargers. Instead of reprimanding him, our priest yelled from the pulpit, ‘What’s the score, son?!?’ then proceeded to hoot and holler, fists in the air when the Broncos scored a touchdown. It was a disgrace, Father! What do we do here?” PART I — THE SETUP: CAMERA, CASSOCK, ACTIONFather Spencer Vale leaned forward toward the camera, his brown Franciscan hood draped loosely behind him...

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Where Two Roads Meet

The bell tower of St. Athanasius Seminary rang with a kind of solemn cheer that first morning—cheer for those beginning a great vocation, solemn for those realizing how far from home they now stood. Autumn lay like a coppery quilt across the grounds: rust-gold leaves, crisp air, the scent of cedar from the cloister walk. New students—wide-eyed, anxious, hopeful—moved through the campus like pilgrims trying to pretend they weren’t lost.Tristan Greene stood among them, though slightly apart.He was tall, thin, sharp in the angles, with thoughtf...

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The Longest Parting

Dani always hated endings.She said that once while sprawled across her favorite corduroy beanbag in my dorm room, twirling a pen between her fingers. “Endings suck,” she declared. “I like middles. Middles are comfy. Middles are where you can breathe.”But life, as I would learn again and again, doesn’t ask for our permission before it ends chapters. It just turns pages.That truth arrived for me on a fog-thick November morning, years after she first said it—when the world felt like it was drifting apart at the seams, and I was clinging to the ...

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