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Krystal Renee

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2025

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36 Followers
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19 Stories

448 karma pts

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The Lives We Bury

Weekly Contest #376

CW: Grief, illness, and suicidal ideation “I tried goat cheese today, and I still hate it. And I know, I know, I’m supposed to try it again, but I’m telling you, it’s awful.” I whisper the last part, as though someone might overhear me insulting cheese in a cemetery. My breath clouds the air, hanging between me and the headstone before disappearing. “I know you’d find this eerie, visiting you at night. You loved the sun. Not me.” I pull my jacket closer to my jaw. The cold has glued my fingers together. I work them apart inside my sleeves...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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An Etch A Sketch I Carry

Weekly Contest #369

The sun catches the orange pill bottles scattered across the counter, lighting them like tiny lanterns of hope or faith. But they are also a reminder that each day, I am rehearsing for his death. My heart breaks now because he fades a little each day, like an Etch A Sketch I carry through the house with both hands, afraid that one careless movement will erase what remains. No matter how delicately I hold him, he continues to disappear. What do you call grief before death? Is it permissible to mourn the living? Am I selfish for doing so? ...

5 likes 0 comments 0
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Survival Always Sends an Invoice

Weekly Contest #360

The same crinkled white paper crackles beneath me like newspaper every time I move my leg. The paper never changes, and I wonder if all doctors coordinate with the manufacturer. The texture is always dry, thinner than petals, ripping with small movements like drawing breath, and never protecting from anything other than direct flesh against an exam table. I move my bare feet back and forth like a pendulum. My ankles collide, and I allow the bones to ricochet off one another, a reminder I am still alive. A new doctor. I came for prescripti...

20 likes 1 comment 1
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The Last Thing That Still Works

Weekly Contest #353

My hand is no longer a hand. It is bone and blood and something that won’t obey me. Daisy didn’t run. She bolted, threw me hard enough that the sky disappeared, and I waited for the second impact—the one that finishes you. But she stayed. Trembling. Breathing as if the world had ended again. And then her hoof came down. Nine hundred pounds. There is a sound a body makes when it stops being whole. I heard it before I felt it. Now the pain pulses behind my eyes, turning the skyline into shadows that move when I don’t. My fingers are wro...

17 likes 8 comments 8
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What Cannot Be Replaced

Weekly Contest #338

The pages nearly tear against my calloused fingertips, stripped thin from years of desperate turning. They hold fingerprints and dried tears from those before me, feverishly searching for answers that were never there. I know I am looking for something I will not find, and calling this a book is an insult. It should be hauled by horse and buggy, given its size—pages bound together over time, not meaning. It’s not a book. It’s a trap. Labeling policy as literary—as if tens of thousands of pages have ever brought anyone justice. My eyes ski...

14 likes 7 comments 7
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The Boy Who Chose Me First

Weekly Contest #330

Jared was my first boyfriend, though he didn’t arrive with butterflies, giggles, or secrets. He came quieter than that, like an undercurrent beneath the ribs, something steady humming beneath all the noise of being fourteen. He was the first boy who let me try on a version of myself I hadn’t lived in yet, someone normal, someone unbroken, someone not defined by disease. We used one another as shields, two kids pretending we knew how to be the people everyone else expected us to be. He needed the safety of saying he had a girlfriend; I need...

14 likes 6 comments 6
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Between Memory and Oblivion

Weekly Contest #328

People are destroying my home today. They’ve brought heavy machinery, handheld tools, nails, saws, and hammers. The floors will crumble to dust, and the machines will screech through the halls. As I go room to room, making sure nothing is left on the floor, a box pokes out from the closet in my office. I should have tossed it. I crouch, rifle through it, and find a journal buried at the bottom. My stomach twists. I push the journal away as if it’s poison, and then, despite myself, I open it. Ink floods the pages from a time I tried to bury....

8 likes 1 comment 1
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Porcelain and Steel

Weekly Contest #318

I am the puppet master. I tinker, rebuild, polish. Most shine beneath my hand. But this one, this girl is stubborn, damaged, unworthy of the stage. I acquired her through an accident. The other masters turned away, unwilling to waste their craft on her fractured frame. Her performance embarrassed them; her limbs betrayed her. But me? I have always liked a challenge. I can fix her. I can get her to perform again. The show must go on. Her limbs collapse, dangling like wet spaghetti. I pull harder, the wires slicing into my own flesh, but ther...

12 likes 2 comments 2
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The Art of Withstanding

Weekly Contest #314

It was the hottest day of the year. As I turned my back to the sun’s rays, blisters danced along my shoulders, and each breath filled my lungs with fury and hot air. Smoke drifted into my nostrils, and I grinned, knowing it wasn’t me who was on fire. I pressed my hands to the crimson-red wood of the deck, and as water dripped from my fingertips, the planks sizzled like a hot pan. My hands were cool but puckered from being submerged in water. I stood on tiptoes to reach the deck, the crinkled floor beneath me flooded and etched lines into my...

5 likes 3 comments 3
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She Calls Me Monster

Weekly Contest #313

“Are you there, God? It’s me, The Monster. Or so that is what she calls me.” I am bewildered by her hatred of me. I had spent nearly a decade in preparation, studying, outlining, and training for when the time was right to strike. I lay low for years in my study and all for her. She never saw my sacrifices or effort; she simply went on living her life without acknowledging me at all. I want to scream, “How dare you?!” each time she curses my name or cries in agony. She is unaware of my power, my abilities, and, most of all, that I am saving...

12 likes 4 comments 4
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Where the Dark Leaked Out

Weekly Contest #310

Sparkle, wonder, magic, and fantasy worlds exploding with vibrant colors were the eclipse to her sorrow. Pretending she was good at it, you’d never see anyone put on such a well-executed facade, and the imagination that ignited when she closed her eyes made her money. She could fill the darkness with color as if scribbling over black with a rainbow could ever mask the night. She was an author of magic, and wrote all the things into books that she was not equipped with, and she was good at it. Published author well known for igniting childli...

19 likes 5 comments 5
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The Shadow That Didn't Follow

Weekly Contest #309

Standing in a dark room, I look around and find emptiness, nothing. Where am I? I turn and see a bit of reflection, a window, but there is no light coming from the window, just more darkness. I would have never seen it had I not begun tracing the walls with my fingertips to find where the walls joined, to find where they became corners. I wasn’t panicked, I wasn’t even agitated, but curiosity filled my insides. What was this place? I approach the glass and place a single finger against it, cold. The glass is cold. Is this how I get out? I tr...

13 likes 3 comments 3
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A Shoreline Without Footprints

Weekly Contest #308

The intensity of waves crashing against boulders sent vibrations from my toes to my legs. I could feel the crashing force and beauty by simply standing right here at the edge, and I could see the beauty and rhythm of the ocean by looking down. The sun was causing my shoulders to blush gently with its warmth. I could allow my feet to be planted here forever; they’d eventually sprout roots, and I could become one with the very cliff I now stand upon. I didn’t want to leave the cliff’s ledge, razor-thin difference between up here and becoming p...

9 likes 6 comments 6
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Fracture Lines: Craniotomy Notes, Day One

Weekly Contest #306

June 23rd, 2021 AM Another day, another dollar. I am doing my best to remember these daily entries to keep myself focused and composed. Composed? How cute that I think I could ever be composed. I am feverish to write and yet never quite know where to start or end. Irrelevant, these cheap little writing exercises I give myself upon waking feel tiring. I am writing, though. Every day I am writing, it is a habit, a ritual, and a promise I keep to myself. I am a bit anxious today about some meetings at work, maintenance is coming to the house d...

15 likes 13 comments 13
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I Was Never Going Nowhere

Weekly Contest #305

Feeling the thump of bass in my bones from the blaring music, I felt alive. My ears rang from the songs playing far too loudly, but I didn’t care. I had no care in the world. My foot on the gas didn’t feel heavy or tired; it felt only effortless. My foot was as committed to getting where I was going, and to who I was chasing, as my heart. I was chasing freedom. I had changed my entire life and direction in just a few months. I was no longer held hostage by the restraints of my inabilities or insecurity. I was about to become brand new. I sa...

10 likes 5 comments 5
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