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John Merino

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2021

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106 Followers
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6 Stories

464 karma pts

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Sunrise at Night

Content Warning: historical racism, intense depiction of weather Sunday September 8th, 1901 from the desk of Lydia Leaning Galvez Hotel, rm. 201 Last year I saw the ocean stand up and eat everything. ~ As I write this, I can almost smell the great pyres, the mounds of tangled flesh, entire lifetimes twisted together like string and shoved into the surf. I know it is ridiculous to think this way, to dwell. The fires stopped burning many months ago, the horrid smells have been pushed away by the Gulf breeze, the human wreckage paved over i...

3 likes 1 comment 1
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Welcome to Texas

Weekly Contest #335

Now, in Russia, they got it mapped out so that everyone pulls for everyone else... that's the theory, anyway. But what I know about is Texas, and down here... you're on your own. - from Joel and Ethan Coen’s Blood Simple People go just where they will. I never noticed them, until I got this feeling that it’s later than it seems. - Jackson Browne There is no later. This is later. - Cormac McCarthy, The Road 1 We danced close on the wooden porch, holding each other so tightly, trying to make love again through our clothes. My music came thr...

11 likes 0 comments 0
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The Natural Machine

Weekly Contest #174

The foul breath of technology choked everything. Sunlight was the color of urine from bad kidneys, and every day was lived underneath the churn of the new engine. Fumes spilled from East to West, oozing over California and then reaching down through the length of the Pacific in a striated arch, until the winds of the southern hemisphere caught them up again in a sharpened line of clouds that skewered the whole of South America like a rusted fishing hook, pushing into the continent at Chile and poking out at the border between Uruguay and Bra...

15 likes 0 comments 0
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Made for Breaking

Weekly Contest #161

“It doesn’t matter what happens later. It doesn’t matter how you got here. Just think about how good you feel! You can already feel the beautiful acceleration can’t you, the vertiginous thrill running up from your toes into your groin, like taking your foot off the gas pedal and gliding over a hump in the road at top speed? It’s a feeling you haven’t felt since the old, experimental school days. It’s the feeling of true freedom Mike, of traveling past the limits of your feeble biology, escaping the police-state of worry you’ve lived in since...

6 likes 0 comments 0
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Ordinary World

Weekly Contest #126

Ordinary World By John Merino I haven’t tasted whisky in ten years. Warmth is reaching up from my insides, a pleasant burn that pushes against the late December air sliding across my bare arms. The flavor isn’t pleasant, but it’s a discomfort that’s all my own, a bitterness I’ve chosen to taste. This bar patio is my home for the next few hours. I don’t know where I’ll go or where I’ll sleep when they close, but right now this seat is mine, this drink is mine, the table and the ashtray on top of it and the cigarette smoldering inside the ash...

18 likes 6 comments 6
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Sleep Story

Winner of Weekly Contest #117 🏆

"Now blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep: it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; 'Tis meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. 'Tis the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man even. There is only one thing that I dislike in sleep; 'Tis that it resembles death.” ­- Don Quixote “I have to practice staying alive and preparing to die at the same time.” - Ch...

200 likes 65 comments 65
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