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Lisa Lange

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Mar, 2020

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140 Followers
14 Following

4 Stories

1109 karma pts

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Under the Weight of Your Absence

Weekly Contest #365

You had the same exhausted face you’d been wearing since the winter the river froze through. A year? Two years? You packed your green canvas suitcase, the one with the broken brass zipper. You laid your key on the laminate counter. “The silence in this house is crowding me out,” you said. “It’s too heavy to push past anymore.” Before the walls began to move, the mold came. Greenish fur grew on the kitchen base boards. It went up my nose and made my mouth taste like copper. I tried to describe the taste to Dr. Harris. I saw him write audito...

10 likes 2 comments 2
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A Fixer Upper

Shortlisted for Contest #217 ⭐️

Am I a Jonah or a James Bartley, I wonder? It’s my own fault. Too much wine, some pot, an allergy tablet. I fell my way into this old Victorian–my friend Emily’s house–during our lady’s book club sleepover. I thought I was headed for the bathroom at 3 a.m., but I stepped off the widow’s walk. Emily and her family moved out. I don’t belong to anyone in this house. I shouldn’t belong to this house. But when you die in a house, it has a way of holding onto you, or rather, you let it hold onto you. You get complacent, you find your niche, you s...

27 likes 8 comments 8
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Apples and Trees

Winner of Weekly Contest #172 🏆

Mom works. She never picks me up from school, and two miles is too close for a bus pickup, which is fine by me because I like cutting through the woods. Especially on autumn days, when the air is cool, and the flies and mosquitos are gone, and basketball practice hasn’t begun. I like the quiet. I like the wordlessness of the walk. A pretty sugar maple dressed in vivid orange frills beckons me off the path. I stand to look at her. I sound like a weirdo, I know. A sixteen-year-old boy calling a sugar maple pretty. It was Dad that taught me to ...

241 likes 461 comments 461
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Amelia and the Beautiful Big Red Handbag

Shortlisted for Contest #126 ⭐️

           Our first encounter was on New Year’s Eve. I was picking up a few last minute good-luck foods for the evening – black-eyed peas, cornbread, pickled herring, grapes – walking from my apartment to the grocer. It was cold. That’s what I remember first when I feel the memory in my senses, when I feel the depth of the memory. I feel how cold it was, how the sharp absence of smells in the air precipitated my noticing the details.I remember I noticed the last brown leaf hanging from ...

29 likes 5 comments 5
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