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Manning Bridges

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2024

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23 Followers
14 Following

10 Stories

258 karma pts

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The Special

Weekly Contest #351

The back door had not closed true since the eighties, and Tony lifted it with his shoulder the way his shoulder knew, the shoulder that no longer asked him anything. The smell of the place was the smell of the place — yeast on the walls, a trace of oregano from yesterday, the faint metallic smell of the oven cooling overnight. He turned the lights on in the order he turned them on. Prep line, then front, then the switch for the red neon in the window, which read OPEN in red when he threw it and OPEN in darker glass when he threw it back.It w...

1 like 0 comments 0
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Confessions of a Comic Priest

Weekly Contest #299

The "Purgatory Comedy Club" sign flickered outside, casting a sulfurous glow across my dashboard. A demon with a microphone winked from the logo. Not the venue I imagined when I answered God's call fifteen years ago.I checked my watch: 9:40 PM. My evening off – the one weekly reprieve from parish duties that even Bishop Kelly insisted I take "for my mental health." I rummaged through my glove compartment for a mint, fingers brushing past a vial of emergency holy oil, three prayer cards, and a pamphlet on reconciliation that I'd been meaning ...

14 likes 4 comments 4
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The Collector and the Caretaker

Weekly Contest #298

My name is Theo Finch. I am twelve years old, and I keep dead things in glass jars on my windowsill. The jars line up like soldiers. My prized finds are—five beetle shells arranged by size, one field mouse skeleton I put together with tweezers and glue, three bird skulls with different shaped beaks.I dislike the smell of cafeteria meat, the sound of my mother's phone calls with the school counselor, and the way other kids watch me when I examine things on the playground. I like the weight of my specimen box in my backpack, the silence of my ...

16 likes 5 comments 5
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The Navigator

Weekly Contest #295

The book—her mother's collection of Jorge Luis Borges stories, dog-eared at "The Circular Ruins" where a man discovers he is merely another's dream—slipped from Eliza Merrick's fingers and landed with a soft thud on the living room floor. Her dreams lingered behind her eyelids even as she blinked into consciousness. Her dream city, named Amaranth, with its inverted gravity fountains, the library where books changed their stories depending on who read them, the clock tower whose mechanisms formed an elaborate musical instrument played by wind...

14 likes 5 comments 5
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Palimpsest

Weekly Contest #294

The sentence remains the same. Five words capturing today's writing exercise, in Eleanor's precise handwriting. Cobalt ink bleeding slightly into the cream-colored pages of her handmade Italian notebook—an occupational vanity she permitted herself despite her modest origins, a rebellion against her mother who whispered such luxuries weren't meant for "people like us." The vibrant Florentine cover, with its swirling marbled pattern of indigo and gold, had cost nearly a week's grocery money when she was still an Adjunct Professor. Profess...

30 likes 24 comments 24
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Measures of Malice

Weekly Contest #287

Bull's-eye paned windows drove November light into the kitchen of Matthias Aldrich's burgher house. Warped reflections cast warped shadows across the oak table where Matthias was measuring deadly herbs with the same brass scales he used for Lankan cinnamon and Moluccan mace. The scale’s tray cradled monkshood from Jakob Bauer's apothecary—which can mimic death by fever or, in sufficient dosage, actually cause it.Magda, the Aldrich's maidservant, was turning a spit roast pig with precision in the kitchen’s hearth and smoke curled up through t...

11 likes 5 comments 5
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True North

Weekly Contest #279

My office exemplifies order. Labeled shelves march along three walls. Their contents arranged by period, region, significance. Every artifact preserves its story in its assigned place—all except one. My hand glides across the empty space on the desk where my father's compass should rest in its worn leather case. Its absence throbs like a missing tooth.  The compass survived three wars. My father's fieldwork. My childhood. Then thirty years of my own academic life and archeological digs. Dad taught me how to read that compass on a dig. H...

14 likes 6 comments 6
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Cold Comfort

Weekly Contest #278

This story contains descriptions of crimes and physical violence and themes of death. In the ICU, time always moves wrong—too fast and too slow at the same time, like a warped record. The heart monitor struck out its time in precise electronic pulses. Elias, an oxygen masked hooked over his mouth and nose, struggled to breathe in the spaces between. A ragged inhale would race ahead, its subsequent exhale lagging behind the machine's steady count.  Outside the window, Manhattan's skyline smashed against an ink-washed sky, November ...

10 likes 6 comments 6
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The Rehabilitation of Professor Greymane

Weekly Contest #277

The fluorescent lights in Dr. Lamb's office stripped away all shadows, leaving nowhere to hide. Her wool caught their sterile glare like fresh snow, while my grey fur appeared dull, institutional—the same color as the tweed jacket I'd worn for twenty years of faculty meetings. A copy of my latest academic paper, "Predator Narratives in Post-Integration Literature," lay untouched on her desk beside a more recent document: "Incident Report #2847: Unauthorized Pursuit of Content Creator."I shifted in the human-sized chair, my frame too lar...

22 likes 24 comments 24
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Rosary Interrupted

Weekly Contest #262

You'd think the heatwave would've been my biggest concern that day, with all of Ireland roasting like a potato in the oven. But I was stewing in a secret that, once it came out, would make that scorching summer feel like an easy breezy Caribbean day. I was driving home for my parents' anniversary—on the hottest day of the year with that powder keg of a secret sitting in my closet—about to discover how quickly one family could combust. My rental car groaned as it crawled up the sun-baked lane toward the farm. Our homestead appeared, shim...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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