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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2023
Submitted to Contest #331
He hurled the bedclothes off and sprang upright, punch-drunk and basted with sweat. The violence of the dream was still with him. He swung his fists until the effort forced him to suck down a great lungful of the sour, heavy air, which made him crumple into a vacuum against the side of the bed. It had been the same dream, of course: blind and thrust into the cavity of an overloaded television, every sense blunted out by static with the only cracks admitting the faint sound of his father’s voice. He had heard only the low warmth, as usual, no...
Submitted to Contest #287
There had been just the one knock at my door, and my reflex had been to blame the wind. I went to check nonetheless and saw that her forehead had thumped against the wood when her legs gave out. When I opened the door, she fell headlong into my chest in a swarm of frustrated mumbles, and I carried her to the couch. She’s still there now, her legs plugged in and charging, the gorgeous sweaty porcelain wetware of the rest of her twitching in uneasy dreams. She stayed awake for a good twenty minutes after I tipped her onto the couch cushions, l...
Submitted to Contest #220
The GPS coverage was starting to get patchy. Arnold slowed down to a crawl and squinted through the windshield at the trees. If any of the blotchy shapes blurred by the weight of the rain resembled three ancient oaks standing in line, with two others facing them, that meant he had arrived. Martin had described the location for him so many times and in such detail that Arnold almost thought of it as a childhood memory. It was a curious feeling, pulling up to a remote location in a region of the country he had never visited and finding the lan...
Submitted to Contest #206
TW: Alice had been formal on the subject: there was no question of them buying anywhere even within an hour's drive of their old place. Edgar had wheedled and grimaced and negotiated at work, but had been forced to accept reality. Either he consented to yank out the roots sown by five generations of his family and move to the other side of the country – which might as well have been another planet, in his heart – or he could wave goodbye to the gorgeous, mesmerising and compassionate woman just as life was running a wetted finger around t...
Submitted to Contest #197
Illuliolq sat cross-legged in the crater smoothed into the middle of his cabin’s floor. As soon as he closed his eyes, he felt the deafening voice of the world smash into his chest. This was normal. He distilled his breathing into a viscous bubble of calm around himself, gradually kneading flat the ripples of distraction until everything had settled into a vitreous flatness, the gleaming meniscus of a lake of molten sugar. Now, he could begin to heal. A thorn was working its way into the silence of his healing. He tried to smudge out its b...
Submitted to Contest #195
It is time for the guilty pleasure of the day. You have collapsed, inert and bandaged, under your blankets in the massive bed under the corrugated plastic skylights. Today’s case was one of the easier ones: just a matter of muscling through the security, abseiling down the high-rise with the hostage clinging to your chest and sitting with her outside the building until her parents arrived. At least, that’s what you told me, and I always know when you’re lying. When you’ve burst through a door and seen something that will rake your dreams ove...
Submitted to Contest #194
When the sun rose shortly after five a.m. on a warm Saturday in late August, it was toasted in hushed voices by a thicket of revellers. They had topped up their flutes with lukewarm champagne and were waiting for the Hub to open for breakfast. In the other gardens forming a dotted circle around the estate, the silence was almost sentient. One man lay comatose on the grass outside Number 5; his determination to make it home after the party had clearly taken him to his previous front lawn, but no further. Although it had been an annual event...
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