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Jim LaFleur

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2024

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397 Followers
489 Following

8 Stories

4889 karma pts

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The Bone Marrow

The water had reached his knees an hour ago. Now it pressed against his thighs, murky and thick as rendered fat, carrying a smell that belonged to no ocean Niles had ever worked beside: old rock and the cold of a place that had never known light.He was not particularly afraid.Fifty years of shaping wood had given him a sense for materials under stress. Timber groaned a certain way when it was failing. It popped and complained and wept pitch. The sounds moving through this hull were different. Lower. More deliberate. Less like a shell surrend...

4 likes 2 comments 2
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The Watcher's Debt

Weekly Contest #359

She has forty-seven freckles across the bridge of her nose, and I have counted them on seven hundred and twelve separate nights. This is not adoration. This is what I tell myself.The moment she falls asleep is the moment my work begins. I pour through the dark of her flat the way cold air finds the gap beneath a door. No sound or ceremony. Only the threshold of her sleep, and then I am beside her bed, and the contract settles over me like a harness cinched in place.The paralysis takes her promptly tonight. Her chest stops its easy rise. Her ...

26 likes 19 comments 19
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Tommy

Weekly Contest #358

They tied my arms down so I wouldn't touch my eyes.I was two years old. The medical reasoning was sound, I'm told. A fresh surgical site where a right eye used to be is not something you leave a toddler unsupervised with. I understand that now. At the time, I was two, and someone had tied my arms to a bed, and my understanding of the situation was limited to the basic facts as I experienced them, which were bad.Both arms out from the body, wrists secured to the sides of a high-sided hospital bed, spread wide in what I can only describe as a ...

8 likes 6 comments 6
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Paper Boat on the Thames

Weekly Contest #328

The river delivers my secrets in strict chronological order. This morning it returned a soggy paper boat I folded seventy-two years ago. The ink inside is different, as though the past has revised my own handwriting while I slept. I stood on the Embankment, pigeons pecking at the breadcrumbs scattered around my worn brogues, and turned the dripping vessel in my hands. The creased paper bore the watermark of Leighton & Sons Pharmacy, my father's shop that closed in 1964. But the message inside wasn't what I remembered writing. I felt my c...

26 likes 10 comments 10
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The Last Letter of Victor Frankenstein

Weekly Contest #319

His voice is gone, but the ink still burns. I found the satchel wedged between two boulders in the cave where I had dragged myself to die. Three days without food. Four without sleep. The villagers' torches had swept the mountainside twice, their hounds baying like judgment itself, but they had not found this crack in the stone where I pressed my bulk against cold granite and waited for my heart to stop. The leather bag was rotted through at the seams. Water had gotten into everything. Victor's surgical instruments lay scattered in the muck,...

18 likes 7 comments 7
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The Scent of Replacement

Weekly Contest #314

I know Arthur by his smell. Always have. His scent lives in my nose the way sunlight lives in morning grass. Worn flannel that holds decades of Saturday mornings. Old books with their patient, dusty whispers. The gentle soap he uses after his evening shower, clean and honest as rain on hot pavement. This is my master. This is home. But something is wrong. The wrongness started three weeks ago, creeping in like fog under the back door. At first, I thought it was the heat. Summer has teeth this year, and they bite deep. The air hangs thick as ...

34 likes 17 comments 17
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The Writer’s Block

Shortlisted for Contest #252 ⭐️

Jack Thompson’s fingers drummed a chaotic symphony against his cluttered desk, surrounded by the remnants of unrelenting perfectionism—crumpled paper mountains, an army of empty coffee cups, and the flickering screen of his laptop displaying the solitary bulwark of his creative struggle: one stubborn sentence. This single line of text, which he revised with the same unyielding dedication some might reserve for disarming a bomb, had been his nemesis and companion for five torturous years. “The sun erupted over the horizon like an overzealous ...

58 likes 61 comments 61
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The Unintended Masterpiece

Shortlisted for Contest #246 ⭐️

Once, in the recesses of Josh’s cluttered study—a space so densely populated with crumpled papers and half-finished manuscripts it could have been mistaken for the lair of a particularly literary breed of dragon—a plot of exquisite pettiness took root. Josh, an author whose disposition was as sunny as a thundercloud, and whose success in the literary world was comparable to a lead balloon in an origami competition, harbored a grudge. This was no ordinary grudge; it was an epic, monumental, could-be-the-subject-of-a-Greek-tragedy kind of grud...

56 likes 67 comments 67
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