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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025
Submitted to Contest #329
Haunted by LoveA baby’s cry. Slipping through the chink where the shutters do not quite meet. It threads the rafters, gathers in the corners, grows until it fills the cabin like smoke. I sit at the table, hands wrapped around an empty cup, and wait for it to fade. It never does quickly. Grief doesn’t, I’ve learned. It lingers, like damp in stone. The fire on the hearth is low. It never quite remembers when it began. Some nights I cannot recall laying in the wood. Yet there it burns, sullen and begrudging, as if offended by its own persisten...
Submitted to Contest #324
50 YearsHe stood at the edge of the pier, staring at the water.The sea was calm tonight, almost kind. It had taken so much, and yet it still came back—again and again—like someone who didn’t know how to stop loving.The gulls had gone quiet. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. The air smelled of salt and roses, faint as a memory.Thomas rested his hands on the railing. The wood was swollen from rain, cold beneath his fingers. He’d come every night since she died. Not for prayer, not for peace. Just to listen. The sea spoke in a language h...
Submitted to Contest #323
Day One“Come back,” she whispered.I opened my eyes to the taste of river silt and candle smoke.Cold stone kissed the back of my skull, and a breath I didn’t remember taking burned up my throat as if I’d swallowed an ember. For a long moment I only listened—to the wind fingering the gaps in the walls, to the river murmuring along the outer wall.“I remember the spear,” I said at last. “The mud.” My tongue felt thick, my throat raw with river. “Dying.”The sound of it startled her; the tremor of her hands betrayed what the voice tried to hide.“W...
Submitted to Contest #320
Eleven YearsDetective Corven Ash rang his wife when his Land Cruiser bogged on the Pale Hollow Trail within Ravenspine Forest. He stayed on the line with her for nearly an hour—until he suddenly said, “Oh…shit,” and the line went dead. Despite extensive searches, not a single trace of him has ever been found. No body, no phone, no sign of struggle. It’s as if he stepped off the map.This is his story.I wasn’t on the roster. Two days’ leave left, a weekend promising nothing but sleep and the smell of Mara’s hair in the morning. But the cold-ca...
Submitted to Contest #317
Day 63They give me a new world.A small blue stone, river-veined and cloud-bright, threaded by one pale moon. The comet is already visible in the observatory mirrors, a chalk mark scrawled across the firmament. Trajectory holds. Impact in sixty-three rotations.Routine mission: survey, catalogue, keep the ledger. I sign my name where signatures go, accept the seal, and step through the gate.The portal opens on a river bend.The water is winter-cold, iron-clear. The air smells of smoke from peat fires and the sharp green of frost-bitten nettles....
Submitted to Contest #316
The manor had no windows left, only holes like blackened teeth. Wind prowled through them and carried whispers down the corridors, though no one dared live there. And yet, on the eve of Saint’s Vigil, they gathered. Madame Irelle arranged her candles with the patience of a surgeon setting his tools. Each flame bent low as if unwilling to burn, though she coaxed them upright with muttered words. The chalk circle was already drawn—symbols etched on stone that should not have held their shape so long. Ser Aldric watched with arms folded, jaw se...
Submitted to Contest #314
No one really saw the boy arrive. He wasn’t born in the village, and none of the old women recalled his mother waddling swollen with him through the market stalls or moaning in the birthing hut. Yet one day, as the sun carved its way across a cloudless sky, he appeared beside the cracked fountain in the square. Barefoot. Dusty. Eating a peach. He said his name was Lyre. When asked whose son he was, he shrugged. When asked where he came from, he looked up. "Where the sky broke," he said. "Past the line of trees. Beyond the bones." That summer...
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