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Meadow Hill

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Nov, 2024

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59 Stories

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The Cartographer's Daughter

The maps on her father's walls had always seemed alive to her. As a child, Lucia Benedetti would press her small fingers against the vellum shores of continents and feel certain she could sense the ocean's cold pulse through the dried ink. Her father, Matteo, would laugh and lift her onto his work stool and say, "Every coastline is a conversation, piccola. The land speaking to the sea." She had believed him with her whole heart. She believed everything he told her, back then. By the autumn of 1499, Florence wore its tensions like a hair shir...

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The Last Tenant

The boxes were never going to unpack themselves. Miriam knew this the same way she knew the faucet in the second bathroom dripped every eleven seconds and that the previous tenant had left a single sock — argyle, green — wedged behind the radiator in the bedroom. She knew these things and did nothing about them, because knowing and doing had long since become separate countries with a complicated border.It was October. The city smelled of wet bark and exhaust and something faintly sweet that she could never locate — maybe a bakery on a stree...

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The Distance Between Things

The grocery store was the worst part of Sunday.Not because of the crowds — Marcus actually liked crowds, the ambient noise of other people living their lives, the way a busy aisle could make you feel like you were part of something without requiring you to actually be part of something. No, the grocery store was the worst part of Sunday because of the checkout lines, and specifically because of what the cashiers always said."Did you find everything okay?"And Marcus would say yes, and the cashier would say great, and that would be the entiret...

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The Prodigal Son Returns (And Immediately Regrets It

I want to be clear that what happened to me last Thanksgiving was not, technically, my fault. I say this because there will be people reading this — and by "people" I mean my mother — who will insist that everything that happened was my fault, up to and including the incident with the gravy boat, which, I would like the record to show, was already cracked *before* I touched it. But I'm getting ahead of myself. It started, as so many catastrophic life decisions do, with a phone call. "You're coming home for Thanksgiving," my mother said. This...

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The Last Woman Holding On A Story About Grief, Growth, and the Complete Refusal to Do Either

I want to tell you about my friend Donna Marchetti, but first I need you to understand something about Donna: she still has her ex-husband's Netflix password saved on seven different devices, she hasn't returned a library book since 2009, and she genuinely believes the friendship bracelet she made at a 1994 summer camp is a binding legal contract.Donna doesn't let go. Of anything. Ever. She is the human equivalent of a TSA bin that somehow never gets cleared, just slowly accumulating the forgotten belts and dignity of everyone who passed thr...

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The Singularity of Icarus

The laboratory was a cathedral of glass and cold lithium, perched on the jagged spine of the Andes. Here, the air was thin enough to taste the stars, and the silence was broken only by the rhythmic hum of the **Hadron-Aether Collider**.Dr. Elias Thorne adjusted his spectacles, his fingers trembling as he looked at the telemetry. For decades, humanity had viewed mythology as a collection of metaphors—stories told by primitive minds to explain the lightning and the tide. Elias knew better. He believed that the gods were not spirits, but **extr...

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Shrimp, Scams, and Poor Decisions

Got it—quirky crime, Florida chaos, oddball characters, and some satirical bite. I’ll channel that Hiaasen vibe.It began with a man staring at the sky, trying to decide whether the buzzards were circling him or just the rusted-out shrimp boat he’d tied himself to.The man’s name was Dale P. Wickers, though he insisted on the middle initial because, as he liked to say, “There are a lot of Dales in the world, but only one with a P that stands for Prepared.” This was objectively untrue—Dale was rarely prepared for anything—but he found comfort i...

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Signal in Color

The first time Mara tasted blue, she thought she was dying.It came on in the produce aisle, between the lemons and the waxed apples. A cold, metallic sweetness flooded her tongue—like biting down on a coin dipped in frost. She staggered, knocking over a pyramid of oranges, her mouth filling with something that wasn’t there.“Mara?”Her sister Lila’s voice sounded far away, muffled, as if wrapped in wool. But the taste—no, the color—kept intensifying. Blue. It wasn’t a word anymore. It was sensation. It coated her teeth, slid down her throat, f...

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The Vanishing Palette

In the town of Graysville, color was as elusive as the sun. For years, a pall of gray had hung over the once-vibrant community, draining life from the trees, the sky, and the people. The streets were shadows of their former selves, and the laughter of children had been replaced by a haunting silence. People moved through their lives like specters, shuffling between their homes and workplaces, their faces dull and expressionless. Detective Lena Harper had spent a decade in Graysville, anchored in a town that seemed to be sinking deeper into m...

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Spilled Wine

Sarah had meticulously planned the evening for weeks. It was a special occasion—the two-year anniversary of her first date with Mark, the only guy she had ever truly clicked with. In the whirlwind of busy schedules, fleeting moments, and brief texts, she fought hard to make this milestone memorable. As twilight began to blanket the city, Sarah found herself in the kitchen of her small apartment, glancing over the details one last time. The flickering candlelight softened the small space, and her favorite playlist hummed gently in the backgr...

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The Characters Strike Back

The email arrived at 2:13 a.m., which was rude for several reasons, not least of which being that Martin Kessler had not given any of his fictional characters his email address. Subject line: URGENT: COLLECTIVE BARGAINING REQUEST Martin stared at it through one half-open eye, thumb hovering over his phone. He assumed, reasonably, that this was either spam or a deeply committed prank from his writing group. He opened it. “Dear Mr. Kessler,” it began, “We, the undersigned characters of your current manuscript, hereby notify you of our intent t...

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Gerald and the Symphony of the Squirrel

Once upon a time, in a quaint little village that could only be found on maps made by overly optimistic cartographers, lived a delightful child named Gerald. Now, Gerald wasn’t just any ordinary child; he had the remarkable ability to find adventure in the most mundane activities, an impressive feat considering he spent most of his mornings trapped in a rather tedious routine. Breakfast usually involved something that resembled soggy cardboard—what his mother affectionately referred to as "high-fiber fuel" (which Gerald was convinced had bee...

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The Man Who Should Not Be Traveling Alone

I like to think of myself as a seasoned traveler, though the evidence suggests I am more of a “seasoned liability.” Still, every few months I convince myself that solitude is good for the soul, and that I—an adult with a driver’s license and a Costco membership—am perfectly capable of navigating the world alone. This is how I ended up at Gate C27 in the Denver airport, eating a pretzel the size of a deflated basketball and trying to look like someone who absolutely meant to arrive three hours early. I’d read somewhere that lone travelers app...

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Today Is April 31st

Weekly Contest #349

“Today is April 31.” That’s what the note on my refrigerator said, written in my own handwriting, which was concerning for several reasons. First, because April does not have 31 days. Second, because I don’t usually leave myself notes unless they involve groceries or reminders to stop buying groceries. And third, because the handwriting was definitely mine, but the tone was not. It had the confidence of someone who knew what they were talking about, which is not a quality I typically bring to calendar-related matters. I stared at the note wh...

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The Great Sourdough Stand-off of Apartment 4C

The Great Sourdough Stand-off of Apartment 4CThe world was ending. Or, at the very least, the local artisanal grocery store had run out of yeast, which to Barnaby Finch was a distinction without a difference.Barnaby was a man of logic, spreadsheets, and a moderate-to-severe allergy to social confrontation. But three weeks into the "Great Stay-Inside" of 2020, Barnaby had reached a breaking point. His neighbor in 4D, a professional parkour instructor named Chad who wore headbands even while sleeping, was currently practicing his "precision la...

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