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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2019
Submitted to Contest #270
Pete squeezed his way down the side passage to arrive at the back door. The fist above his head grazed the raw walls. He had to duck to fit it into the kitchen.From the hallway, the party rumbled like a pot coming to a simmer. Jesse arrived in the kitchen seeking napkins for the blood flowing down his face. “You’re here!” He said. “The others are already in the living room. I’ll take you.”He led the way back towards the hall, wiping his nose with his sleeve. “Jesse.” A woman blocked their way. She put a hand to Jesse’s cheek. “Look at you.” ...
Submitted to Contest #105
Friendly, tidy, young professional, the application had read. I suppose I never thought to ask what kind of professional, but you usually assume something in IT or finance or maybe marketing. Gabrielle Poole: non-smoker, meat-eater, does not play the accordion. I assumed that was a bit of humour. By that time I had already had a few people round to visit the flat: one sweaty young man with a creased shirt who had asked exactly how often the landlord usually came to visit, an exceedingly tall woman who felt inclined to kick each inch of skirt...
Submitted to Contest #78
The city no longer knows day and night. Blue light burns coldly through windowpanes, bleeding out of screens which never go dark, people are tapping away at keyboards and taking calls without rest and projects are debated and created and completed by the minute. The flow of traffic is constant, a plateau, regardless of the time on the clock, like a faceless production line. Off the costs and in the industrial areas, machinery operates non-stop, land and watercraft skip past, manned from control centres where the shifts are twenty-four hours ...
Submitted to Contest #59
There is something extraordinary going on in this place. Colours line up beside one another and jostle for space, creating bulges and valleys, arching in resistance, pressing tensely against each other in uneasy compromise. Space has become colour and colour is an inconsistent kind of geometry. There is no forward and backward or up and down; we are no longer subject to these habits of perception. There is just thick and thin, dark and light, and even these notions flirt with one another and with unreality. If you move your eyes too fast, ...
Submitted to Contest #55
The sun is yellow, there are people everywhere, and we are hidden in plain sight. I eye my comrades guardedly. Once again, several of us have found ourselves gathered at the usual place at the same time, seemingly by chance. I am too aware of how little we understand of the patterns of the world to believe that this was not somehow arranged. Myself, I am not clear about how I came to arrive at this part of the park today, but I am in no doubt that this is a meeting of our secret society. Smeed, my most familiar ally, pats the ground around...
Submitted to Contest #51
“Where on Earth did you get a plane from?” Dad asked with alarm. A moment before, he had called on the Good Lord to explain what he saw before him. They were in a large, stark, wood-and-concrete hangar on a disused airfield. Tom stood there beside a plane.Actually, it was more of a plane-in-progress. Mum and Dad came to realise this as their initial shock wore off a little. When you got a side-view of it, you couldn’t help but notice that it had no seats and that where there should be a control panel, there was nothing but a view into the ho...
Submitted to Contest #50
It's such a pretty evening. I’ll put Masterchef on, shall I? Our favourite. You're so fluffy and peaceful after you've just eaten. So calm and benign. We get along. Actually, I might open a window before we sit down. There we go.No, no, Princess. Come and sit with me. Look. It’s starting. No, there’s nothing out there. What are you looking at? What are you – don’t jump out! Oh, my God, she’s gone! Princess! Don’t move, I’ll come round out the front door.Where are you? Oh, thank God. What are you doing out here? It’s sofa time, right? The bes...
Submitted to Contest #49
The carpet is thick and porous like time. It insulates the conversations of the waiting people, cushioning their edges so that they melt together into one mellow hubbub. The lobby is opulent: gilt patterns tattoo the deep purple walls and heavy red curtains weigh down the archways which lead to the stalls and to the stairs for the circle, making them look like the sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes of some exotic animal. A camel, perhaps, with its dreamy, drunken gait. A bar adorns one end of the room like a living exhibit with the great, intriguing ...
Submitted to Contest #48
We had to leave the town I grew up in because the place was filling up with strange people. Colourful, uneven, unsettling people with nowhere to go who just stood stiffly at the end of the street, in the supermarket, in the corner of your eye, smiling a banana smile with too many teeth or waving a squashed-spider hand: circle palm, six stick fingers. Sometimes they appeared in groups, glued together by the ends of their rigid arms like paper dolls. Once or twice, my family – Mum, Dad, baby Finch and me – would come up against an uncanny mirr...
Submitted to Contest #31
The pickpocket danced down the road, drunk on his riches. He was the Pied Piper of paraphernalia. He came to his usual spot and brought himself a stop on the rough tarmac of the pavement. It was beginning to get dark. A single streetlight had sprung on with a low twang and now it glowed uncertainly, like a conspicuous singleton at a party. The two parallel rows of houses were obscured by greyish dimness that hung in front of your eyes and defied you to try to blink it away. The street was faceless. The pickpocket kept to the dark side of the...
Submitted to Contest #8
Each place I make landfall, I try to find a telephone, a post office. Nobody here speaks English, nor appears to be much interested in my flail-armed charades, or the desperate sounds that come out of my mouth. I’m somewhere in the Pul’chi archipelago, and I only know that because I’ve traced the outlines of the islands painstakingly in the Aquiver. Their shapes make a map in my head: a map that matches one my father once had me draw, kneeling at the coffee table in our living room of my childhood. Once, I scratched Pul’chi? into soft ...
Submitted to Contest #7
I had a best pal - Richie. We liked to do all sorts of stuff together. For a long time, our favourite game was at lunchtime at school we would spin in circles. You have to stand on the grass and look up at the sky and hold your arms out at the sides, then close your eyes and spin and spin as fast as you can. Sometimes we bashed into each other or other people like two pinballs in a pinball machine – that’s what the arms-out were for. You had to keep going, no matter what, until one of us shouted STOP and we had to stop still and open our eye...
Shortlisted for Contest #6 ⭐️
Carrie’s car feels lopsided. I lean uncomfortably against the passenger door and don’t mention it. When I had asked if she had a flat tyre, she snapped at me. Her view out of the rear window is obscured by our cases and bags jammed in the boot and it’s putting her in a foul temper. Every so often, when we pull up at a junction, she’ll mutter morbidly that there could be absolutely anything behind us, she can’t see a thing. I’ve decided that it’s best to stay quiet and just point the way to Louca’s house.“God, this is uncomfortable.” Louca co...
Submitted to Contest #5
Eventually, my bookshelf got so heavy that it fell from the wall in the middle of the night. The crash jolted me awake. I jerked upright, my eyes straining wide against the dark before I realised what it was. Even then, my heartbeat clattered around the room for a few more moments before reason managed to tame it. I didn’t know what to do: it was the middle of the night and there were books all over the floor.In the morning, I realised with a kind of morbid awe that the shelf had torn a great chunk of plaster out of the wall with it. It had ...
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