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Mai Bo

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jan, 2025

Stories (11)

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Library

8 Followers

1 Following

11 Stories

161 karma pts

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Little Green Apples

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #340

When Sam, my niece, was a kid, she had a really bad stutter. Even after years of tantrums in the speech therapy waiting room, she could never manage her own tongue. When she was maybe six or so, it looked like the words choked her. Clumping in her throat like a gutter with too many leaves. I often snapped at her. It was just depressing…watching the words spill from her lips like drool, incoherent and muddled. It made her a quiet kid, never saying much past hello or thank you. Or perhaps she just gained the habit of not speaking because, most...

0 likes

My Own Shadow

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #319

I haven’t stepped outside for three weeks. Shades drawn and covered with old, thick duvet covers that I stapled. The fridge lightbulb unscrewed. Taped over the dull flickering smoke alarm light, the DVD player, the alarm clock, and the washing machine. I don’t want to see my shadow. At first, I thought it was just a trick of the light. Small twitches of my fingers that I hadn’t moved. My head moving one way, and my shadow the other. I could feel it creep behind me, even curl a finger or two around my shoulder, my neck, my hands. I thought I...

6 likes

Out of Sight Under The Spotlight

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #315

There’s more to dancing than just moving. That’s what you learn when you first step onto the stage, only strings hiding what you’ve covered most of your life, makeup heavy and thick on your face, and heels so tall you feel like a newborn fawn. Advertise yourself as if you're a fresh-cut diamond—even when you feel like a sick animal. Men won’t consume what you’re trying to feed them when your shoulders look heavy with insecurity. “What you’ve got is currency now. I don’t know where you came from or how you got here but in this place, there is...

2 likes

Sheepdog

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #314

When you’re a sheepdog, you’re born to work with mud between your toes, running through a dense, cold fog on a farm. Nights are supposed to be spent sleeping between heavy green hills kissed by spring. The moon is supposed to listen to the hymns of your howls as you chase stars like they’re clear raindrops falling from the sky for you to catch. Your breath is meant to billow before your snout as you run with the sheep you protect. You are meant to live with soil-soaked fur and nowhere to go but forward. Instead, I live in an apartment. I hav...

2 likes

The Train leaving New York

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #313

Ruth dusted off the bits of snow that fell through the small cracks in the overhang so Teresa could sit down. Teresa was a woman of many hair colors, often dying her soft short curls ginger one week and brunette the next. Most days she smells of ammonia and lemon from the tea she drinks every morning. Her heavy-set figure meant she waddled a bit with each step yet she hadn’t cared to lose an ounce of weight, despite being like this her entire life. “If I was all bones I’d freeze to death!” she’d say whenever Ruth voiced her unease about Tere...

7 likes

The Tracks

Mai Bo

All I’ve ever seen is the tracks. One foot after another, stepping over steel rails and rocky beds, evenly placed wood planks like ribs embedded into the earth. The tracks we all followed sat between two vast stretches of fields—there was no green or brush. Only yellowed and dried weeds. Sometimes we’d pass a tree or two, growing distantly in the plains. On the nights we rested, I dreamed of those trees. Feeling bark under my hands and leaves in my hair—tripping on the roots and splinters lodged in my fingertips. The scent of the sap and the...

0 likes

The Taxi Driver and His Passenger

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #293

The toll of my previous eleven-hour shifts five days in a row, with not much money to show for it, meant I let myself take a deserved nap in my parked taxi. After working odd jobs for give-or-take fifteen years, I became sick of staying in one place. Retail, construction, offices, whatever it was. I was fed up. Driving a taxi, even though I’ve got to clean up some drunks puke some nights, get yelled at by entitled white women, and I’m stuck in New York traffic 80% of the gig, I’m always movin...

9 likes

The Oil Stain

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #292

The commission was an honor—an elegant, regal gesture from Her Majesty, the Queen herself! To set upon a canvas and capture her clean, shimmering, opulent essence—-oh how I trembled as I bowed, accepting the task in front of the royal court. I worked—I pained! It’s near impossible even to describe the pure exhaustion I had bearing the weight of my vow to craft such a masterpiece worthy of the throne—-it nearly cursed me. I mixed the finest pigments derived from ochre and umber for her porcelain skin. Azurite—the...

10 likes

The Dust On Our Photo Albums

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #290

When you have to pick a picture of someone for their funeral, one that’s printed on the invitations and displayed at the front for all to see—it should represent their brightness. Their ability to light up a dark room with just their smile—embodying their happy character. But Olivia wasn’t that person. She was quiet and cold, a bit awkward, and almost timid. If you didn’t see her in the room it felt as if she wasn’t there at all. She hated social gatherings and even more, she hated having her picture taken. On the lowest shelf in our li...

6 likes

Forty-Five Minutes

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #289

The muffled boom of the music reverated through the thick tiled walls of the bathroom as I pushed her against them. I wrap my hands around her, one to roam around her body and another to keep me from toppling over. I kiss her, and she kisses me. There are no words needed. I can smell the alcohol on her breath—or is that me? She runs a hand down my leg, her fingers catch on a run in my stockings and suddenly I’m flooded with the reminder of my appearance and I pull away from her. “Fuck. I need to get ready.” “Wha...

14 likes

Old Fruit Stains

Mai Bo

Submitted to Contest #288

Alma, with everything she ever owned shuffling and bouncing in the back of her truck, chewed on the already sore part of her lip. Going 90 on the back road straight towards Texas where her ma and pa were waiting for her, probably sitting on the porch overlooking their family plot. Her daddy always had the idea they would fix their ranch up real nice but due to the limp in his left leg, he couldn’t tend to the land. Alma couldn’t have cared less about the land full of grass tall enough to tickle your elbows, or the old farm equipment so ruste...

11 likes