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Justin Burkholder

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2025

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15 Stories

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Weekly Contest #330

Email — May 18, 2019 From: Ethan Park e.park@mit.edu To: Marcus Reed m.reed@uchicago.edu Subject: That panel on “boring companies”Marcus,You were the only one there who didn’t look half-asleep while the VC circled the words workflow automation fifty times.I’m the guy who asked about small-business accounting. You rolled your eyes at the moderator at the exact same moment I did. It felt like some kind of sign, or maybe just mutual irritation.You mentioned you’d done a class project on automating paperwork for your dad’s auto shops. I’ve been ...

15 likes 2 comments 2
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The Castle

Weekly Contest #329

They woke me with iron teeth.The castle had been crumbling since the year of the long winter, yet it still held its bones high on the ridge above the river, squared Norman stone against the Northumberland wind. Men had chipped at it for centuries. Reivers prised out steps to repair their byres. A justice of the peace took the lead from one turret and blamed the Scots. Lovers bracketed their names in the mortar with penknives. None of that reached me. I slept beneath the motte, inside the clay that remembered older gods than the Christ these ...

9 likes 1 comment 1
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Chalk Room

Weekly Contest #321

The day the moving truck coughed into the cul‑de‑sac, the old house woke like a dog hearing keys. Pipes clanked, the stair rubbed its aching knee, the front door pulled a draft across the hall as if sniffing. Poppy knew its moods better than she knew her own. She had grown up here, grown invisible here, and learned to read the house the way abandoned people learn to read weather.She sat on the bannister and watched through the lace of the window screen. A boy swung down from the truck, headphones around his neck, a thin scar splitting one ey...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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The Fixer

Weekly Contest #319

The first thing they always noticed was the teeth.Row after row, jagged and uneven, crowded in his mouth like broken glass. Cameras loved that part - the way the light caught when he snarled, or when fear made him bare them in self-defense. Nobody ever showed the hands, though. His hands were delicate, careful things, shaped for work that demanded precision: soldering hair-thin wires, teasing circuits awake with a breath and a touch.He lived beneath the eastern viaduct in a room the city had forgotten: a shallow cave of concrete and rebar th...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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New Odyssey

Weekly Contest #317

The box arrived at the archives without a sender, taped twice along every seam as though the packer believed in belts and suspenders. Noah Reed signed for it, because the job asked for signatures before questions, and carried the weight to the document room with the green-shaded lamp. When he slit the tape, a smell of old glue rose like a chord struck softly. Inside: manila folders the color of nicotine, an unlabeled microfilm reel, two amber-capped vials resting in hand-cut foam, and a note that knew his name.NOAH REED, the note read in a c...

7 likes 1 comment 1
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Flood Party

Weekly Contest #315

By the time the magician’s dove landed in the queso, I’d already decided that birthdays were a genre of performance art I was ill-equipped to perform. It was my fourth party of the day. The birthday boy, Wyatt, had two front teeth on perpetual sabbatical and a battle cry that could curdle hope. The magician was an Uber driver in a cape, whose finale, apparently, was a dove-shaped stain under a puddle of nacho cheese. The dove, a co-conspirator, looked deeply offended. A jury of mothers clustered, while the fathers hid in the kitchen, texting...

13 likes 3 comments 3
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Invisible

Weekly Contest #311

Note: This story contains themes of mental health (loneliness, anxiety, despair, emotional distress), and physical violence (implied assault, manipulation). The dust motes pirouetted in the sole shaft of morning light cutting through the grimy window of my apartment, each a fleeting, luminescent speck. I watched their indifferent ballet, a practiced observer of inconsequential motion. My existence was a muted hum, a sequence of well-rehearsed movements performed by a man who had mastered the art of vanishing into the fabric of the unnotice...

8 likes 2 comments 2
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Stillproof

Weekly Contest #311

May tossed the third overripe tomato into the compost and wrapped her arms around her belly. The porch light flickered, sounding like a trapped moth in the fog. Down the block, the neighbor’s rooster had been declaring victory, again and again, since well before daylight—a ritual less about hope than endurance, as far as May was concerned. Her yard, hemmed in by lopsided chicken wire and feckless weeds, sloped toward stunted tulips and a single apple tree that kept its distance from thriving. Gardening, for May, was an accident she repeated ...

10 likes 1 comment 1
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Sunken City of the Saco

Weekly Contest #310

NOTE BEFORE READING: This story explores themes that some may find distressing. It includes depictions of long-term grief and trauma, psychological manipulation, kidnapping, and scenes of physical violence. Please proceed with care. The bookshop was a mausoleum of paper and dust, a quiet monument to a love of stories Elias Thorne had inherited from his older sister, Eleanor. Ten years she’d been gone, vanished like a character from one of the folklore books she’d adored, leaving Elias the sole keeper of her legacy and the struggling busine...

5 likes 2 comments 2
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The House

Weekly Contest #309

Eleanor Birch’s attic in Boston was filled with old paper and dust. She worked there as a sound archivist, surrounded by stacks of outdated media. Her daily routine involved playing and preserving magnetic tape for museums. Her real focus, however, was a private set of reels labeled with dates and her daughter’s name: Lillian.Lillian had died in a fire three years earlier. The only things left were some damaged audiotapes and Eleanor’s memories. She wanted to recover Lillian’s voice, to piece together her daughter’s early sounds and words. A...

11 likes 2 comments 2
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The Speech

Weekly Contest #306

The ballroom ceiling was a long-ignored mirror, warped with years, but still capable of catching the glint of champagne and poor decisions. A pair of pale pink spotlights drifted like searching eyes across the lacquered floor, grazing sequins and shadows with equal indifference. And right there, under a chandelier that trembled like it might leap to freedom and end it all in a shower of crystal, stood the least likely person to be holding a microphone: me.“Hi. Wow. I didn’t even plan anything. Which—if you know me—is deeply in character.”Lau...

12 likes 3 comments 3
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Leave to Lead

Shortlisted for Contest #305 ⭐️

Dale stood in the break room, watching his leftover salmon circle slowly inside the microwave. It steamed inside a stained Tupperware he didn’t recognize. The smell had already settled into the ceiling tiles. It was 10:04 a.m.The employee bulletin board beside him offered nothing useful. One flyer: “Q3 Wellness Push: Hydrate With Gratitude.” Above it, another: “De-Escalating Workplace Feedback With Smile-Based Language.”The microwave beeped. Dale opened the door. Steam hit his glasses. He dug in a fork, blew once.The break room door swung op...

32 likes 11 comments 11
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Clock Me In, Clock Me Out

Weekly Contest #304

Trent hadn’t slept in thirty-two hours. His fingers trembled over the keyboard, not from the triple espresso he'd pounded at 2:41 a.m., but from the mortal terror of missing the deadline for the ThistleCraft Rebranding Campaign—a PowerPoint deck, of all things. The kind of job that could get you fired for a bad kerning decision. The kind of job that made you want to marry a toaster.Across the office, the motion-sensor lights flickered back on as Trent waved his hand in front of them like a drowning man begging a helicopter to notice. It was ...

11 likes 3 comments 3
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The Line Uncrossed

The first bullet had missed by inches. Not that it mattered. The second didn’t.Elias Harper collapsed in the snow, the high beam from his truck casting his falling body in an unnatural white. His wife, June, stood beside the road, the gun still warm in her gloved hands, her breath rising in sharp little clouds.She didn’t shake. Not yet. That would come later, when the fire in her chest gave way to the collapse of everything else.Earlier that week, June had sat across from the sheriff, nursing a styrofoam cup of diner coffee. “You’re not goin...

3 likes 0 comments 0
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The Smile Tank Diaries

Shortlisted for Contest #303 ⭐️

I didn’t have a choice.I know that sounds dramatic. Everyone says that when they’re trying to sound like a victim. But in my case, it was literally true. I was legally required to participate in the Personality Compliance Program.Because I failed the Empathy Calibration Assessment. Twice.I know what you’re thinking: How can someone fail empathy? Easy. They ask you to watch a video of a cartoon otter losing its job at a tech startup and record your “emotional reactions” while measuring your blood pressure and brow micro-twitches. I blinked at...

32 likes 15 comments 15
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