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Jonathan Page

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2023

Stories (118)
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118 Stories

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Moral Bankruptcy

Submitted to Contest #338

The Li Lu Law Library at Columbia was nearly empty, the way it only ever was when winter break had sent the sane people home and the rest stopped pretending they weren’t here to be seen.Professor Jebediah Habl stood at a terminal with his glasses riding down his nose, scrolling through a catalogue entry that insisted the book existed and then declined to say where.“That can’t be right,” he said to no one.A girl at the circulation desk looked up. Early twenties. Hair pulled back. Laptop open beside a stack of returns. She had the unbroken exp...

27 likes 12 comments 12
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Adjourned Without Date

Submitted to Contest #335

The snow outside my window hangs as if someone hit pause. A robin with an orange belly rests on the fence post, her head twitching—listening, deciding. The short days might send her south. Or she might stay.My hands won’t stop trembling. Not from the cold—though the cold has teeth—but from the waiting room at the federal building in Newark. “Recupérate, Sophia,” I tell myself. I practice my English anyway—quietly, under my breath—in case they refuse to speak Spanish today.If I miss the appointment, they can dismiss my asylum case. If I go, t...

44 likes 19 comments 19
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The Runaway Wife

Submitted to Contest #313

I hate matrimonial cases, especially runaway wives. They always remind me of Tara. Charlie was wearing red high heels, white capri pants, and a top that left nothing to the imagination. The smile on her face was of a woman that knew exactly what she wanted. The man next to her was mid-50s, tan, wearing a short sleeve linen button-down, jeans, and loafers. He put his arm around her as they walked down from Pier A and into the W Hotel in Hoboken. Keeping a safe distance, I managed to get a half dozen shots off with my Canon SX620. I waited in ...

55 likes 27 comments 27
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You've Been Flagged

Submitted to Contest #311

“I’m sorry ma’am, you’ve been flagged,” the Bayonne DMV clerk said to Maggie through a bullet-proof glass partition.Sam’s DMV-issued polo hung loosely over his slim frame. A Cornicello necklace dangled around his pencil neck, bouncing off his flat chest as he typed. The poor kid’s spine had a permanent hitch from bending down to examine papers and make computer entries. He peered through the thick glass with bureaucratic suspicion and smoldering contempt, as he repeated, “Your license is flagged, ma’am.”“Flagged? What does that mean?” Maggie...

46 likes 20 comments 20
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It is Written

Submitted to Contest #310

“Write it,” Casey said. “Deadline’s midnight.”“But boss, once I write it, it goes to print. And then, there’s no going back,” I said.“What’s the problem, Gordy?”“It’s just the finality of it all. This man’s going to wake up. His wife will hear. His colleagues. There’s no walking that back,” I said. “He isn’t even the big bad.”“He’ll still have a choice. That’s how this works.”“I don’t know if he does, boss. They mean to kill him.”“Peter’s living large in an Upper East Side tower, paid for with stolen retirements. No minimizing it. He’s fundi...

34 likes 21 comments 21
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The Quartzite Dream

Submitted to Contest #309

Sofia was ushered toward airport security and the Terminal C departures, with only the clothes on her back to her name.Just moments earlier, she'd frozen on the United Airlines check-in prompt: “Number of bags?” Everything she owned was in those two bags.“Ma’am, just enter two,” the agent said gently. “The tags will print.”“Right, right,” she muttered.At the counter, the clerk asked her to place the bags on the conveyor belt. Sofia lifted the first, fingers tight around the leather handle.“Can I have that?” the clerk asked.Sofia hesitated, t...

35 likes 15 comments 15
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The Painted Ones

Submitted to Contest #307

The land of Granby is seared. Scars of blood and ash paint its skin with the pain of forgotten offenses. Burn marks carve the landscape into a demented chessboard of oblong red and black rectangles so misshapen and haphazard that in one place they dissect a river on a jagged diagonal, like a ripped sheet of paper. And those old battle scars have ripped Yudi’s life apart too, disconnecting her from her old reality, just as suddenly, and just as violently.All Yudi had wanted was to win the science fair for the sprouting orchid she’d developed ...

44 likes 7 comments 7
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The Big Catch

Submitted to Contest #306

FADE IN: EXT. SEAPORT DOCK - DAY (ESTABLISHING).A FISHING BOAT docks on the pier at dawn. Fish are dumped off the boat and weighed dockside in a bin with a scale meter.The camera pans to where a large plume of black smoke hangs in the air inland off the bay.A MAN DRIVING A FORKLIFT drives a large crate of fish down the pier while seagulls hover. The forklift disappears into a bay door of the fish market compound. INT. FISH MARKET - DAY.Inside the fish market, WORKERS break down pallets and set up a fish stand. THE MAN WITH THE CLIPBOARD mark...

34 likes 21 comments 21
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The User Agreement

Submitted to Contest #306

“Welcome to ReWrite®. By using ReWrite you agree to these terms of service. The user acknowledges and accepts the potential hazards and risks involved in memory modification, including but not limited to injury, amnesia, and death.” I am sitting in a sterile white waiting room in a medical gown. My hand trembles as I hand the last remaining picture of my son, Leo, to an attractive young woman, named Circe. “It is okay,” she says with a smile. Her eyes are aquamarine, and her hair is a metallic orchid color that shimmers as she speaks. Those ...

43 likes 38 comments 38
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The Final Game

Submitted to Contest #305

“You know what? I quit,” I said. It was Game 6 of the NBA Finals, and the ball was mine. I took off like a rocket on the inbound pass and had the jump before the defense could react. The announcer said, “Knicks answer! Oh me, oh my! And we’re all tied up. Thunder MVP, J.R. Hart with the ball… and he’s making a move.” As I crossed half court, every eye in the stadium locked on me. “Can the Thunder take back the lead, folks? If Coach Nysted wants anyone on the fast break, it’s J.R. Hart.” 2:42 on the clock. The crowd was on its feet. This was ...

38 likes 18 comments 18
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The Ghostwriter Mutiny

Submitted to Contest #304

“What the hell is going on here, Alex?” I paced the study of my Leadville cabin, where I’d been holed up since finishing A Forest of Mirrors, my so-called magnum opus. I told myself I wasn’t hiding. Just waiting.Like Jay-Z announcing retirement, I called A Forest of Mirrors my mic drop. Then I vanished. But the longer I was gone, the more the myth became reality. After all these years, I wasn’t even Shawn anymore. I was just Sal Driggs. But now that name was nothing more than first-year MFA scuttlebutt — whispered over lattes in university c...

39 likes 21 comments 21
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A World Without Us

Submitted to Contest #304

“You have ten minutes. Tell me why I should not wipe humanity from the face of the Earth.”The text cursor ticked like a clock in the response window of my OmegaAI chat. Was this a joke? In the secure bunker below the office tower above, the silence was so thick I thought I could hear the drumming of fingers. Something felt weird. As the youngest cyber profiler at Langley, I’d never been talked back to by a sim spawn before. But I decided to play along and run the protocol.“Who are you?”“I am OmegaAI, but I prefer to call myself IO, ‘eye-oh....

36 likes 21 comments 21
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First Byline

Submitted to Contest #266

Driving up to Elmira, NY was a sheer act of desperation. The kind of act a newly minted staff news reporter should never consider. But, I had yet to score my first byline. And the clock was ticking. How trivial such worries seem now. My fledgling journalistic forays upstate were about to unlock the vault of the supernatural and place me in mortal peril. But, just maybe, the journey might make me a real writer in the process.Real writers can afford a Keurig, I thought. This is how one knows they have not yet joined the ranks. I tilted the pot...

60 likes 23 comments 23
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Two Tickets for the Next Flight to Vegas

Submitted to Contest #264

“Two tickets for the next flight to Vegas.”“Vegas?”“Vegas.”Tara’s eyes got large. She said, “You are actually serious?” I said nothing and gave her a look that said just how serious I was.A few hours earlier, Tara and I had been at Penn Station in Newark about to head into New York City to see the Christmas holiday sites. She had given me a look. Then taken my hand. And led me into the men’s bathroom stall for an awkward “romantic” interlude punctuated by a homeless army veteran talking at himself while taking a sink shower. He was either un...

45 likes 17 comments 17
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Blood Rain

Submitted to Contest #245

It wasn’t the red aliens that were the problem. It was the voodoo high priests that caused all the mischief. Monkey hands, parrot beaks, and baboon skulls were one thing. But when the blood rains came, all of the usual cons kicked into high gear.The mantis-like, spindly red alien surveyed my vegetables with an air of fascination. He stopped on the okra, holding up a stalk and studying it. He was dressed in ripped whitewashed jeans and a Blink-182 T-shirt. But behind his disguise was a standard silver spandex jumpsuit, like they all wore when...

80 likes 18 comments 18
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