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Meadow Hill

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Nov, 2024

Stories (29)

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5 Followers

21 Following

29 Stories

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🦢 The Time I Tried to Be a Swan in a Very Small Pond (and Almost Drowned My Husband in Glitter)

Meadow Hill

🦢 The Time I Tried to Be a Swan in a Very Small Pond (and Almost Drowned My Husband in Glitter) I’ve always felt a certain kinship with the swan. Not the elegant, gliding-across-a-lake-in-a-Masterpiece-Theater-special kind, oh no. I relate more to the vaguely aggressive, slightly unhinged-looking swan who hisses at children and thinks it’s being majestic while secretly plotting the demise of a perfectly nice duck.It was my turn to host the annual neighborhood “Spring Fling” dinner party. The theme, which I had suggested in a fit of delusion ...

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When Secrets Go Public

Meadow Hill

Chapter 1: The Accidental ReleaseElara's fingers hovered over the "Publish" button, a bead of sweat tracing a path down her temple. It wasn't the usual pre-publication jitters, the kind that came with hopeful anticipation. No, this was pure, unadulterated panic. The story she was about to unleash upon the world, "The Moths of Aethelred," was never, ever meant to be read by anyone but her. It was a digital diary, a raw, unedited catharsis penned during the darkest months of her life, a period she’d rather forget than immortalize in pixels.The...

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What the Lake Took

Meadow Hill

Every summer, like clockwork, I come back to the lake.It doesn’t matter where I am or what case I’m working, how many clients are demanding my attention at the firm, or what excuse I give my assistant. When the Fourth of July rolls around, I pack a small duffel, turn off my phone, and drive four hours north to Halcyon Lake. And every summer, I tell myself I’m just going for the quiet. The view. The nostalgia.But that’s a lie.I come back because I owe someone the truth. And because no one else even remembers there’s a truth to tell.Twenty-thr...

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The Dream Job

Meadow Hill

“Mr. Farnsworth, we have a problem.”I opened one eye. The left one. The right one was still drunk from the night before.“Tell the problem to go wait outside with the other problems,” I mumbled. “I’m full.”“You’re lying on a desk in the Mayor’s office.”Now that woke up the right eye.I sat up too fast and instantly regretted it. The room tilted like it had too many martinis and not enough olives.Sure enough, I was splayed across a mahogany desk large enough to host a tennis match. Around the desk stood two cops, a secretary with a tight bun an...

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The Passenger

Meadow Hill

Submitted to Contest #301

Rain streaked the windows of the Greyhound bus as it wound through the back roads of rural Pennsylvania. The vehicle rumbled with age, groaning over potholes and shifting under the weight of weary travelers. Seated in the middle row, Claire Forrester clutched her tote bag to her chest, her knuckles pale from the grip.She had left everything behind in New York—her job, her apartment, her entire life—after one mistake she couldn’t afford to let define her. The mistake wore a name: Darren Koenig. A charming investment banker who had promised he...

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My Bollywood Dance Debut (Sort Of)

Meadow Hill

Okay, so, picture this: me, Priya, in a full-on Bollywood dance costume. Not like, a cute little Anarkali suit I'd wear to a Diwali party. No, this was next-level extra. Think sequins, think fringe, think so much gold embroidery I was pretty sure I was setting off metal detectors at the airport. I mean, the whole ensemble weighed more than my carry-on luggage for a two-week trip to Europe. The skirt alone could probably double as a small tent, and don't even get me started on the bangles. So many sparkly bangles, everywhere you looked, hones...

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The Book of Denzel

Meadow Hill

Harold McAllister wasn’t your average movie buff. No, Harold didn’t just like movies—he lived them. And more specifically, he lived Denzel Washington movies.It started out innocently enough. A casual Friday night watching Training Day turned into a full weekend Denzel marathon. Then came the quotes. At first, they were sprinkled into conversations for effect.“King Kong ain’t got nothin’ on me!” he’d declare at work while trying to fix the office printer.“I’m leaving here with something,” he’d mutter at the grocery store checkout when the sel...

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The Illusion of Reality

Meadow Hill

The road stretched endlessly before Daniel as he drove through the thick fog, the headlights of his car barely piercing the dense mist. He gripped the wheel tightly, trying to shake the gnawing unease growing in his stomach. Hollow Creek wasn’t even on the map, but the directions had led him here—mile after mile of dark, towering trees lining the narrow, winding road.He glanced at the crumpled note in the passenger seat, the one he had found tucked inside his jacket pocket that morning. It had no sender, no explanation—just an address and a ...

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The Echoes of Hollow Creek

Meadow Hill

The Echoes of Hollow CreekThe road stretched endlessly before Daniel as he drove through the thick fog, the headlights of his car barely piercing the dense mist. He gripped the wheel tightly, trying to shake the gnawing unease growing in his stomach. Hollow Creek wasn’t even on the map, but the directions had led him here—mile after mile of dark, towering trees lining the narrow, winding road.He glanced at the crumpled note in the passenger seat, the one he had found tucked inside his jacket pocket that morning. It had no sender, no explanat...

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Escape From Fate

Meadow Hill

Elliot Grayson had always believed in fate. Not in the grand, mystical sense, but in the quiet, inescapable way life seemed to guide people down a preordained path. His father had been a fisherman, just like his father before him, and it had always been assumed Elliot would follow the same course. But he had dreams beyond the tides and the cold spray of the Atlantic.He had always longed to escape Fairhaven, the small coastal town that had held his family captive for generations. While others found comfort in familiarity, Elliot saw chains. H...

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The Hourglass Paradox

Meadow Hill

The Hourglass ParadoxThe old clockmaker’s shop stood at the very edge of town, tucked away between a crumbling library and an abandoned theater. Elias Wren, a man with silver-threaded hair and calloused hands, spent his days repairing watches and crafting intricate timepieces. But amidst the ticking of clocks and the gentle hum of gears, Elias kept his most prized possession hidden in a locked glass case: the Cosmic Hourglass.Unlike any other hourglass, this one did not contain simple sand. Instead, vibrant, swirling liquid cascaded through ...

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The Café Incident

Meadow Hill

The Café Incident"There’s this café downtown—"The Roasted Bean"—one of those fancy places where the baristas wear suspenders like they’re going to audition for the role of “Best Dressed Prohibition-Era Bartender.” You know the type. They roast their own beans, make their own almond milk, and serve everything with a side of disdain. It’s the kind of place where people sit with laptops but never seem to actually type anything.Now, I don’t fit in at this café. I wear jeans that don’t have a backstory, I don’t use words like “notes of citrus,” a...

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The Necklace

Meadow Hill

It was the kind of family heirloom that women of our family passed down as a form of tradition, like some mothers pass down recipes or the occasional perfect napkin fold. But my grandmother’s necklace wasn’t something that was casually tucked away in a drawer to be shown off at Christmas dinners, no. It was more sacred than that. It was the very essence of everything we were as women in our family—proud, resilient, and most of all, capable of wearing something a little too heavy for our necks, because, as my grandmother used to say, “It’s no...

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Fading Echoes

Meadow Hill

Fading EchoesMargaret sat in the cluttered attic of her childhood home, cradling an old photo album in her lap. The pages were yellowed with time, the images within blurred at the edges as if the memories themselves were beginning to dissolve. She traced her finger over the smiling faces of her parents, her younger self perched between them.Her chest tightened. She couldn’t remember the sound of her mother’s laugh anymore.Margaret had always feared obscurity, not in the grand sense of wanting fame, but in the quiet terror that her existence ...

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The Temporal Turbulence of Fredrick G. Plimpton

Meadow Hill

If there was ever a man less suited for time travel, it was Fredrick G. Plimpton, a mild-mannered insurance adjuster with a crippling fear of anything newer than a fax machine. And yet, through an incident that could only be described as a cosmic administrative error, Fredrick found himself catapulted 25 years into the past, specifically to the year 1998.The culprit was a vending machine. Not just any vending machine, mind you, but one of those newfangled "smart" ones installed at his office, the kind that offered kombucha alongside the more...

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