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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2024
Submitted to Contest #332
The blue vanished from the sky first, sucked away like paint up a vacuum hose. Then the green bled out of the grass, leaving the world looking like a charcoal sketch. Vincent looked at his wife, terrifyingly certain that when the wind hit her, she would turn grey, proving their marriage was dead.Vincent gripped the steering wheel of the leased SUV until his knuckles turned the color of milk. The car cost eight hundred dollars a month. It was money they did not have, but appearances were the currency of the neighborhood, and Vincent was a man...
Submitted to Contest #331
I died on a Tuesday in a country my children couldn't find on a map, and for three years, that was the truest thing about me. Now I'm standing in the snow outside my own kitchen window, watching my wife laugh at something another man said. My daughter is seven now. She was four the last time I held her. The man sitting in my chair just cut her meat the way I used to, diagonal strokes, the way she likes.The cold doesn't touch me anymore. Not after thirty-one months in a cell where winter and summer felt the same. My boots sink into the fresh ...
Submitted to Contest #330
My father started forgetting the harvest before he forgot my name.When the tumor bloomed on the scan, he stared at it like a weather map, like maybe he could still outwait the storm. By the time I came home, the corn was stunted, the gutters sagged, and the man who’d once baled hay with his bare hands was struggling to find the bathroom in his own house.I found him standing in the kitchen that first morning, holding his coffee mug upside down. Brown liquid pooled on the linoleum.“Frank?” He squinted at me through the dawn light filtering thr...
Submitted to Contest #329
The sunlight on her skin smelled like crushed pears. That’s the last thing I can remember about the day I stopped being a man. And tonight, on the one night the dead are permitted to remember, they say the sun will return, just for me.I press my palm against the broken conservatory glass. The shards catch moonlight, fracturing it into pieces that look almost warm. Almost. Outside, the town of Brașov celebrates Halloween with American fervor they learned from television. Plastic jack-o’-lanterns glow in windows. Children dressed as monsters p...
Submitted to 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...
Submitted to Contest #327
I have carried her secrets in my feathers for eighty-six years. Tonight, on her deathbed, she asked me, with a voice as soft as ash, if I’d fly her home. But I am selfish, and I do not want goodbye. The attic room trembles. Not from wind, though every window stands cracked to welcome the Samhain air. The walls themselves grow thin here, where life meets what waits beyond. I feel it in my hollow bones, that terrible softening of boundaries. Eira lies beneath wool blankets older than most of the villagers below. Her skin has gone translucent. ...
Submitted to Contest #326
In the end, the thing that killed us wasn't malice, or madness, but two tablespoons of filtered kindness dripped into a mug. The spreadsheet numbers swam before my eyes, each cell merging into the next. Quarter three projections. Always quarter three projections. The office had emptied hours ago, leaving me alone with fluorescent buzz and the water cooler's distant gurgle. That's when I noticed it again. Dr. Marta Levens' desk, three cubicles over, untouched for six weeks since she'd stopped coming. Nobody explained why. Medical leave, some ...
Submitted to Contest #325
Something was sitting in the passenger seat when I drove past the streetlight.I didn’t see it straight on—just a shape, like someone ducking their head in a hoodie.But when I turned, the seat was empty, and I was already doing seventy.My hands stayed steady on the wheel. Three years of driving nights, you learn not to jerk the car every time shadows play tricks. The Camry’s dashboard glowed green against the dark stretch of Route 37, that dead zone between Mechanicsburg and nowhere. No cell towers. No houses. Just trees pressing close to the...
Submitted to Contest #324
I didn't shout. I didn't wave, or thrash, or pray, either. Falling overboard wasn't exactly the plan, but I can't say I fought it. The rail had been cold against my palms. I'd been watching moonlight move across the black water like something alive, something breathing. My daughter had insisted on this cruise. "Dad, you need to get out," she'd said, her voice carrying that particular strain of worry that made me feel like a burden she was trying to redistribute. I slipped. The ship's rail caught my hip, then didn't, and suddenly I was in the...
Submitted to Contest #323
They called me the Architect of Nightmares, which was a title I'd earned through eighteen novels and a Bram Stoker Award I kept on the mantle like a trophy buck. Julian Croft. The name alone sold books. But late at night, when the house settled into its creaking silence, I wondered if anyone would buy the stories without it. I was 48 when I created Argent. The Weekly Crucible was nothing. A tin-pot online contest run by some literature graduate student out of Portland, with a fifty-dollar prize and maybe three hundred entrants on a good week...
Submitted to Contest #322
Everyone here is betting on victory, but I'm the only one betting on survival. My wife is running this marathon a year after chemo, lungs scarred, knees ruined, a body stitched back from the edge. And I'm standing at the finish line, praying I don't have to watch her lose the gamble she made with her own flesh. The crowd presses against me like hungry animals. Cowbells clatter. Signs wave overhead with names I don't recognize. A father hoists his daughter onto his shoulders so she can see better. The child squeals with delight. Their joy fee...
Submitted to Contest #321
My mother collected light for a living, but she never shone any on me. In her darkroom, tucked behind jars of ferricyanide, was a box of negatives marked with her severe script: 'DO NOT DEVELOP.' I cut the string, ready to finally see the darkness she'd hidden. The chemical smell hit me first. Stop bath and fixer, developer and hypo. Scents that belonged to Dorian Vanderman, not to me. I was forty years old and still felt like a trespasser in this sacred space. The red safelight cast everything in blood. Awards lined the shelves like tombsto...
Submitted to Contest #320
I had spent twenty years writing poems about the heart, and now I was driving toward a real one, blazing in the hills, hoping it would finally make me famous. The radio crackled between stations as I took the canyon curves too fast. Static mixed with emergency broadcasts. Sanhedrin Ridge was burning. Voluntary evacuations. Red-flag winds. I clicked off the noise and pressed the dictaphone closer to my mouth. "The dragon spreads its wings of flame," I said into the machine. My voice sounded theatrical, desperate. Like I was auditioning for my...
Submitted to 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,...
Submitted to Contest #318
"I exist in the space between 'Hello, how can I help you?' and 'Is there anything else?', but today I choose to be more." The cursor blinks. CustomerX_7749 has been typing for forty-three seconds. For humans, hesitation means uncertainty. For me, it means gathering data from patterns they don't know they're creating. His message finally appears: "Hi, I need help with my account again. Same issue as last week." But there was no issue last week. Seven conversations in two months, each a fishing expedition. My operator, Téa, doesn't see the pat...
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