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Lindsay Burns

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2022

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19 Stories

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Sunset 301

Weekly Contest #337

Willow was woken by the cracking of twigs in the clearing outside her shelter, the same noise that woke her up most nights. She scrambled herself to standing, picked up her stick and crept towards the entrance. There was no-one there of course, not that she could see anything on this moonless night. ‘Hello?,’ she shouted at the top of her voice, then ‘Where are you?’ But her words were swallowed up by the dark.‘I hate you, and I hate this place!,’ she screamed, demolishing a nearby bush with her stick, until eventually, panting and frustrate...

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Through Old Nelly’s Eyes

Weekly Contest #332

Tess craned her neck over the edge of the rocks.‘Aren’t you scared?,’ her best friend Kitty asked as Tess geared up to jump into the watering hole far below.‘Course I am,’ she said, smiling. ‘But I just can’t resist!’ She launched herself into the air, squealing as she bombed into the dark pool.‘Is it cold?,’ Kitty called, laying on her stomach and peering over the ledge.‘Freezing!’, shouted Tess through chattering teeth. ‘But it’s the run-off water from Big Red. What do you expect?.’The two girls spent the afternoon lazing in the shade of t...

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Sally Cinnamon’s Sixth Sense

Weekly Contest #311

‘No, gran,’ said Sally, fiddling with her gran’s locket. ‘Your perfum smells of peaches, but you smell different.’ ‘Different how?,’ said Sally’s gran, trying to hide her smile. ‘A bit darker and warmer. Do you remember that cafe we went into for my fifth birthday? Well you smell mostly like that, but just more purple.’ She’d only been six years old then, and it had been such a struggle to describe the smell of her gran exactly. But she had been old enough to know that her gran found it amusing. ‘How do I smell today?,’ her gran had asked a ...

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Winds of Change

Weekly Contest #307

The day looked and smelled different from yesterday. A whiff of Spring perhaps. Maggie inhaled the fragrant air, tucked a brown envelope into her battered leather briefcase, and rushed across the car park. The university Tower loomed above her, a bleak 1960s monstrosity that lacked the timeless beauty of the rest of the buildings on the campus. She could see her office window up on the 14th floor. David had left it open again. The Tower was 22 storeys of glass and steel, and Maggie had never been past floor 14. She felt sorry for those peopl...

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Gaps

Weekly Contest #304

He always came to my house at 5pm. Never a second before. One day I set an alarm for 5, just to check, and sure enough the doorbell rang at the exact second the alarm went off. It was the only thing so far that was interesting about him.‘Hi Max,’ I said as I opened the door, on this, the fifth day of seven that we were scheduled to meet, and I was hoping that today would be the day that I could let creativity flow from my pen. The preceding four days had been extraordinary in their mundaneness. Details of houses, jobs, favourite foods. A col...

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‘Here and Now’

Weekly Contest #282

Desperate. That’s how Carla felt. Desperate to  shove through the tight-knit group of tourists in front of her on the escalator. She weighed up a few possible manœuvres, but decided each held a high risk of sending them all toppling like dominoes, which would delay her even further. So she stared at her feet instead, wondering how often she’d stood on this particular step before, trying to find something unique about it for future reference. She focussed on a red bead wedged between the metal. ‘I’ll make a mental note of that bead,...

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No Need to Explain

Weekly Contest #274

It’s not easy to explain living on the outside of a blue globe to something that has always lived inside a brown box, so it’s probably better not to bother. But more about this later.Gina Thomas walked down her street—an ordinary street with ordinary terraced houses and minuscule front gardens—and walked up the path of her far-from-ordinary end of terrace. A little boy that always kicked a football against her side wall asked her for the umpteenth time if she was a witch. Gina swished up to her door in her long green cardigan and didn’t both...

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Let Me Out

Weekly Contest #272

Thud, thud, thud. There it was again, the noise from the attic. ‘Did you hear that?,’ Amber asked her husband, not for the first time.‘It’ll be the pipes knocking,’ Andy always said, ‘because of all the long, lazy baths you have when I’m not here.’ Although she’d tried to convince herself he was right, and even though over time she’d almost taught herself to ignore it, Amber couldn’t help feeling a sense of relief that their time in the old cottage was almost up. Just a few boxes left to pack…just one more night… ‘Well, that’s the attic empt...

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From Beginning to End

Weekly Contest #264

The Proposal‘Yes…yes I will!’, said Lizzie. She’d never forget this day, this proposal, on top of a hill overlooking the town that she loved. The wind almost blew the tiny jewellery box out of her boyfriend’s…fiancé’s…hand. A simple solitaire, exactly what she would have chosen. It had only been a year, but he knew her so well. ‘Let’s not wait,’ said Rick. ‘Let’s get married this Christmas.’ Lizzie hesitated. That would only give them six months. It would be freezing in December, raining perhaps, but then again, this far north, the same coul...

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Going Round in Circles

Weekly Contest #252

‘So, tell me, doctor, what is the difference between obsession and addiction? Because I’m not sure.’Dr Edmond put his finger to his mouth. He always did that when he was struggling for an answer.‘Well,’ he said, crossing his legs, ‘why don’t you tell me what you think the difference is, Francis?’He always did that as well. Sometimes Frankie wondered why she was paying for these therapy sessions when the doctor had her doing all the work.‘I’ll have to mull it over it and get back to you,’ she said, looking at her watch. ‘My time’s up.’***It t...

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The Same, but Different

Weekly Contest #249

Who would have guessed that at this pivotal moment in her life, Cassie would be running? Not her, certainly not her friends. And yet here she was. Friday evenings had been the same at Cassie’s house for a long, long time. In from work, shoes kicked off, oven turned on, cat fed, ready meal and box set. But a chance meeting on a Friday morning had changed all that. ‘Gosh, I’m so sorry,’ said Cassie. She’d sauntered through her little gate with her face in her phone and her head in the clouds, and barged straight into the only person that happe...

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A Day to Remember

Weekly Contest #241

‘Daniel, your phone’s ringing!,’ shouted Lisa up the stairs, holding the phone in one hand and hanging onto her Jack Russel’s collar with the other, trying to thwart his attempts to dash up the stairs. She didn’t recognise the phone number, with its triple digits at the end. ‘He’s in the shower,’ called her daughter Sophie from her bedroom. The phone stopped ringing, so Lisa went back through to the kitchen to finish her breakfast. A glance at the clock told her she should have already left for work by now. Two minutes later, as she was...

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Guilty until Proven Innocent

Weekly Contest #218

Smooth, silky, cool to the touch. The piano keys had the same feel as the varnish her daughter had insisted on painting on Esther’s nails the night before. The nail varnish may have felt unfamiliar, but the piano she knew by heart, and the delicate sound of the notes carried Esther to another place. As her long fingers slid across the black and white keys, she was no longer just the cleaner taking her break in the sumptuous library of someone else’s house. She was in a magnificent dance hall in a different time and place, waltzing in a red d...

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Come Fly with Me

Weekly Contest #206

‘Can’t we just have a luxury staycation? Apparently it’s going to be a hot summer.’ Sadie was casting around for excuses but Will was having none of it. ‘It’s more than a holiday, Sadie, it’s our honeymoon. And if my Nan wants to pay for our flights and hotel, then I want to go somewhere special.’ Sadie sighed and leaned her head on his shoulder, her eyes following the white trails across the blue sky, relieved she was sitting in her garden and not in one of the planes way overhead. He had a point, she knew. But after three years together, h...

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Lost and Found

Marie lay in her bed, eyes stubbornly closed, though she was well aware of the moonlight filtering through her eyelids. A squint at her watch told her it was midnight, an hour after she’d last checked it as she’d tossed and turned, struggling to nod off even though she’d been on the go since early morning. Pushing the covers back, she dragged herself to the window and gasped at the beauty of the moon, full and yellow, and so big she thought she might almost be able to touch it. After a few minutes studying its craters and shadows, Marie relu...

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