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Kevin Lind

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2026

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12 Stories

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The Fall of Elias Larson

Weekly Contest #360

The clock on the wall behind Dr. Wentworth read 3:50, and in that moment Elias Larson knew that he was not going to pass. Nothing had been said, but he read it all the same in the body language of his doctoral committee like a farmer reads the weather in the sky – a drop in air pressure rather than by anything stated. Dr. Okonkwo’s pen had stopped moving twenty minutes ago and had not moved since. Dr. Hendricks kept folding and unfolding the corner of a page as though it personally disappointed her. And Dr. Wentworth, who had guided Elias’ l...

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A Yearning Rebuked

Weekly Contest #359

The dye stung where the razor had nicked the Emir, Abd al-Rahman III. He remained still in spite of it, shutting his eyes with a grimace while the servant worked the black paste through his beard. The grey vanished stroke by stroke. The red hair his mother had gifted him also diappeared. He had not let a soul in Córdoba see his natural color in twenty years. His chamberlain read to him while the servant worked. A border tax, and a marriage among the Banu Qasi. Abdul, as he was known, was to bless it. Or forbid it. Whichever suited his fancy...

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Treasonous Love

Weekly Contest #357

Ibrahim al-Manzur found the younger man, not much older than a boy, in his courtyard at an hour when the hammers of the smith’s forge were still working late into the night. What grew between them began over a cup of wine, and in the broken tongues of three different languages. Ibrahim, known as The Wolf was the General of the armies, Warden of the northern marches, came in from the stables and discovered a stranger in clothes no loom in al-Andalus could have woven. He spoke in a tongue that echoed strangely against the mosaic tiles. The boy...

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Estranged in the Interregnum

Weekly Contest #356

Strasbourg, The Feast of Saint Denis Dmitri, This goes by Conrad the wool-merchant, who is honest and cannot read. Your last letter reached me whole with the seal intact. I have read it enough times that the creases in the vellum are going soft. But I do enjoy reading your words, even though you are sparing with them even on parchment. I am glad that I taught you to read and to write there at that table where we sat together, your hand under mine. I will not now pretend I regret arming you with this skill as it has proven useful. I am stil...

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The Order of Love

Weekly Contest #355

I Hear now what was given, and what was withheld, on the morning two prisoners walked up the steps of the platform below the Great Mosque of Córdoba. After nine days of detention, Lubna had begun to admire her interrogators. They had been most patient with her in a way she had not anticipated. They began the process not with a hot iron, but with a conversation. It had been long, courteous, and almost scholarly, with questions focusing on the apothecary’s garden and the cataloguing of plants and their derivatives, conducted by a man whose Ara...

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Promises Kept

Weekly Contest #354

It was a Tuesday evening when the wind stopped blowing. It hadn't stopped for nine straight days, scouring everything it touched with dark sand. For nine days, James had been stuffing wet rags under doors and into windowsills to keep the sand from penetrating. For nine days, his mother had been coughing in the back bedroom. Finally, all at once, the wind stopped, like a clock that had been wound down. James went out onto the porch to see what remained of his land. He had expected the air to smell of dust, but it smelled clear and clean. Gri...

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An Unfamiliar Winter

Weekly Contest #352

“You need to listen.” Elias whispered against the rotting timber of the doorway. Dmitri had placed him there to escape the pressing crowds in the street and the cold of the winter wind. “Find a paper, a decree, a church bulletin… Anything with a date on it!” His breath plumed grey against the air. Dmitri nodded as his eyes scanned the street with a predator-like focus. “I see a place,” he said. “There’s ink and vellum… perhaps a scribe can be found there.” “Go,” Elias said. “I’ll wait.” “Stay back against the door, and pull your hood...

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A Library After An Earthquake

Weekly Contest #351

The nurse spoke to me with kind eyes. I looked at his name tag, but I couldn't read it. It was just a jumble of symbols and colors. And that was when I understood that something had gone really bad. "Do you know where you are?" he asked. I thought about it carefully. It should have been a simple process, like solving a math problem; but this problem required knowledge I had never been given. It had never been taught to me; and I didn't know the equations for it. My gaze shifted from the nurse to the clock on the wall, to the telev...

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Vino, Verdad, y Vergüenza - Wine, Truth, and Shame

Weekly Contest #350

The trouble began with the second bottle of Rioja. The four were seated at a wrought-iron table on the rooftop terrace. The air smelled of orange blossoms and jasmine. Below them, the old city of Córdoba spread out in a warm, amber sprawl, and the floodlit walls of the Mezquita rose above the rooflines like a lantern someone had left burning for a thousand years. Dr. Elias Larson was forty-one, a tenured professor at Sofia University where he taught Medieval Islamic History. He was the only man at the table, the only American, the only one ...

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Promises of Dust and Ruin

Weekly Contest #349

Dodge City, Kansas – Autumn 1934 “How bad is it?” James Whitmore asked, though he already knew. “Three thousand, two hundred dollars,” Thomas Brennan said with a steady voice. He’d practiced it. “Plus the accrued interest. We received your last payment over a year ago.” James was a big man, the kind built for work, his strong forearms darkened by the sun. He wore his best shirt. The blue one. The one he always wore to church. Three years ago, on a Sunday, Thomas had unbuttoned it in the dark of the storage shed behind the church, knowing...

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The Disappearance of Rosa Ortiz

Weekly Contest #348

The day they took Rosa Ortiz, I was thinking about my grocery list. Rosa had just relieved me at the nurses' station. She was laughing at something – a joke from one of the aides, I think – and I remember thinking how rare that sound had been in recent weeks; how the hospital had grown quieter. More of us were being cut early as fewer patients sought medical care, and as a result our earnings and benefits were being slashed. But I still needed to stop for groceries on my way home, because eating is a basic necessity. I was standing at the t...

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Little Bird

Weekly Contest #348

The smell of stale beer and chewing tobacco was violently replaced by crushed jasmine, baked stone, and the metallic taste of blood in his mouth. Elias gasped, his lungs filling with an impossibly dry, hot air. He wasn't on the sticky floor of The Rusty Spoke anymore. He was on a cool, tiled mosaic. He pushed himself up, his head throbbing with a rhythm that matched a distant, rhythmic clatter. Was it hoofbeats? No, it was hammers. He blinked, his vision swimming. Above him, a sky of deep, impossible indigo was pricked with stars that looke...

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