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Jonathan Page

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2023

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121 Stories

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First Byline

Weekly 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

Weekly 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

Weekly 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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Wall Street Wiseguys

Weekly Contest #244

Not for nuthin’ but this stugots had it comin’. If you are gonna treat your subordinates like fuckin’ dogshit, maybe one of them might push back a little. You know what I mean or no? A few minutes earlier, I was doing something very uncharacteristic and taking a selfie for my dating profile. I was that hard up. It was either that or I could start paying for it. After all, I was an accountant. We had the dubious distinction of being over-represented in the percentage of our ignoble profession to become CEO and the percentage that were still v...

53 likes 25 comments 25
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Lazaretto in Space

Weekly Contest #243

Enzo dreams of home. He cannot remember how long he has been away or why he is in space. Only that he wanted to go. But why? Why did I leave? The dream is so real that it is more real than reality. Family and friends are laughing. Sitting around a picnic table with a buffet, including a bowl of tossed salad, ten ears of freshly boiled and buttered corn stacked in a basket and steaming, a plate of grilled cheeseburgers, split poppy seed buns with pesto mayonnaise, sliced tomato, garlic, and onion. He looks around at these familiar faces, but ...

64 likes 38 comments 38
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La Luna Negra

Weekly Contest #242

Isabella’s note said, “I am sorry, my love. I’ve decided. I won’t be coming back.” His heart seemed to stop beating.Gabriel journeyed out among the thin outline of the green coast, traversing the rough crags bordered by multicolored thatched rooves of sailors’ homes which clung to the slopes and cast terrible shadows down along the coastline. The shadows looked like the menacing fingers of a deformed giant trying to reach down and snatch living souls.Isabella had erased his entire history. Was he an amnesiac? A stranger to himself? He could ...

48 likes 36 comments 36
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Dead Man’s Hand

Weekly Contest #241

We took drags off Marlboro Lights out on the basketball court before the next round of Texas Hold ‘Em started. Ken looked at me blankly and said, “So what would you do if I fucked Alli?”“I would fucking kill you. That’s what I would do,” I said.“Okay, but if she was the one that was interested in me and you are such a courtly love motherfucker, wouldn’t it be hypocritical for you to deny her happiness?”“Go fuck yourself, Ken,” I said, and we went inside to play poker. One thing I knew for sure is that Ken would never break code and make a mo...

60 likes 38 comments 38
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Beating the Wind

Weekly Contest #240

When the police cruiser came to a stop by the #123 bus stop, Freddie Storm recognized the officer in the passenger seat and ran for his life. Freddie turned left on Newark Avenue and tore down the long straightaway to Dickinson High School, a fortress on the flat hilltop above. The evening breeze kicked up and buffeted Freddie’s skin, slapping his face. The wind snapped him out of the fitful thoughts screaming in his brain as he tried to work out what was happening. Freddie knew from what was happening that he’d made a terrible mistake. But ...

43 likes 18 comments 18
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Twist in the Wind

Weekly Contest #240

A black cloud blotted out the sun. The wind kicked up, and I gripped the flaps of my pea coat to cover my ears while I waited to be let in. The air was wet with a coming storm and the clouds rushed by, grumbling above the world of man like a hungry beast. Bates’s office was a few blocks down from the courthouse. It had seemed like an easy walk, but as I made my way down to Summit Avenue, I knew that I had underestimated the weather. My first day on the job was looking to be a dreary one. Dead ends. Dark skies. And a feeling of dread in my st...

24 likes 4 comments 4
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Carried Away

Weekly Contest #240

“Is it true that the winds still blow in the North?” the boy asked.“It stands to reason, boy,” I said. “But why would that matter to you now?”“Don’t call me boy. It is Jeavon. Jeavon Hanley,” he said.“Ahh, yes. Kim Hanley’s boy.”The boy was looking for a guide to the Northern lands. A commission I’d been known to accept if the price was right. But, never for such foolish reasons. Of all days, he had arrived on March 4th. The anniversary of the Doldrums. The eighteenth anniversary of the day when all the wind in Borealis ceased forever. The d...

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Lost and Found

Winner of Weekly Contest #240 🏆

On my last shift as a lighthouse keeper, I climbed the seventy-six spiral iron stairs and two ladders to the watch room, the number of steps the same as my age. The thwomp and snare of each step laid an ominous background score. Something wasn’t right. At that very moment, Richie Tedesco was pointing a fire extinguisher at the burning electrical panel in the engine room of his boat a few miles offshore.The placard in the watch room read “Marge Mabrity, Lightkeeper—First lighted the depths on March 2nd, 1985, and hasn’t missed a night.” Alrea...

168 likes 136 comments 136
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Just Deserts

Weekly Contest #239

It is impossible to resist a hitchhiker on a road to nowhere. And that was exactly what my cousin Shane’s wedding to Raven the following morning was going to be.It was strange that we all gathered to wish them well when none of us would be there in two years when the ineluctable breach of the sacrament was ratified by the divorce judge after Shane’s degenerate, pathological gambling resulted in the foreclosure of Raven’s overpriced Bungalow-style home in Boulder City, which she would naively agree to mortgage to the hilt to bail him out, set...

42 likes 12 comments 12
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The Book of Alternate Endings

Weekly Contest #239

I only met her once before she died. Rachel, with her duffle bag slung like a shield and storm clouds in her gaze, somehow found her way to the threshold of the parsonage. I often had visitors, but no one knocked, let alone knocked hard five times. So, her entrance stood out. I was close to burnt out and felt I couldn’t handle one more thing. But there she was, like a dark, unbidden angel.It was a cloudless Friday afternoon, the day she arrived. The clock hands ticked pokily above a porcelain coffee cup that stayed warm for hours, wafting a ...

47 likes 27 comments 27
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The River of Vipassana

Weekly Contest #238

I have an allergic response to woo-woo stuff, so the last thing I want to do is spend a week and a half wooing around with a bunch of woo-woos in Peru. But things are going completely off the rails. Everything is on the table.“Alexa. Brew espresso,” I say, shouting at a receiver down the hall of my luxury canal-side flat on Orsman Road in Shoreditch, London. My DeLonghi Magnifica espresso maker hums and whirs. Pulling the sheets over my head, I reach to the other side of the bed and grab my iPhone. What have we here?The notifications from th...

33 likes 15 comments 15
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Not on My Shift

Weekly Contest #238

People like me are more likely to die from suicide than in the line of duty. With Stella moving out things have gotten insufferable. The more friends and colleagues who “Exit Stage Left,” the more it seems like an option. It seems odd that those of us who answer the call to save lives at all costs, somehow can’t find a reason big enough to save our own.The emergency tones had beeped loudly from a dozen places in my apartment, startling me out of a whiskey-induced coma. Just after ten in the morning, on my day off, no less. “THIS IS A NATIONA...

52 likes 24 comments 24
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