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Missy Matchstick

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025

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54 Followers
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36 Stories

783 karma pts

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Ember & Ice

Weekly Contest #342

The heat was already climbing when I reached the fruit stand on Alvarado, the kind of LA morning where the air feels preheated, like the city woke up inside an oven. People moved past me in little currents of sound—vendors calling out names, kids shouting nicknames, someone yelling for “Rico!” across the street. Everyone labeled, claimed, catalogued. I stood there humming with my own static, trying to look normal while my skin simmered with that familiar cedar-citrus-metallic warmth. A man beside me glanced at the glow beneath my collarbone ...

26 likes 3 comments 3
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Where She Goes, I Go

Weekly Contest #330

AUTHOR’S NOTEMy dog, Daisy, has always known when something isn’t right. This story is based on a time when everything around me — and inside me — felt broken. A time when I didn’t move much. Didn’t smile much. Didn’t feel like myself at all. But Daisy stayed close. She didn’t ask for explanations. She just waited. This is her story, told through her eyes. Because when I couldn’t speak, she still understood. And when it was finally time to start again, she came with me. Always. I knew something was wrong when she stopped opening the blinds....

24 likes 6 comments 6
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The Anatomy of My Exit Wounds

Weekly Contest #330

I. Heart — The Moment I KnewShe was standing in the kitchen with a fork in her mouth and a stranger’s laugh in her throat. I knew the sound before I knew the meaning. That’s the worst part. It hit me like déjà vu — familiar in the way a dream is familiar: wrong around the edges, too soft in the middle. It wasn’t her old laugh, the one with the stutter-start that always made me grin. It was airier, practiced, like she’d been rehearsing how to sound unbothered. The eggs were already sizzling when I walked in. She never cooked this early. Usual...

13 likes 2 comments 2
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Velvet Cherry #9

The fluorescent lighting had a high-pitched hum today. Not loud enough to complain about, but persistent enough that it felt personal. Sarah had been at the register for twenty-three minutes and already someone was arguing with Grace about undertones.“This is not warm,” thecustomer insisted, swipingthe same lipstick on theback of her hand for thefifth time.“Warm has more… warmth.”Grace didn’t even blink.“Warm is a spectrum,” shesaid.She said it like she wastalking someone down froma ledge.She was good at that—sounding authoritative insituati...

2 likes 0 comments 0
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The Pacific Trash Psalm

The ocean used to taste like salt. Now it tastes like battery acid and sunscreen. Ophelia can’t tell which she prefers. She balances on her raft—seven surfboards, a door, and a mangled billboard for Venice Beach Pilates—lashed together with orange extension cords. The sea is glass today, but not the kind you’d want to hold. Plastic reefs gleam below her, waving like the stained-glass organs of a drowned cathedral. Every few minutes something bright rises from the depths: a shoal of bottle caps, a dead drone, a rainbow tarp that still reads L...

5 likes 1 comment 1
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Neon Shards on Slauson

Weekly Contest #323

The court behind the shuttered elementary school wasn’t much. Two busted hoops, chain-link fences sagging like tired shoulders, asphalt cracked into a map of places no one wanted to go. Stray dogs padded along the edges, sniffing at chip bags and broken bottles. Shoes dangled from the power lines, swinging like trophies no one claimed. But when the streetlights hummed on—two working, three dead, one flickering red—the place became an arena. The Cracks’ arena. They weren’t much of a team either. Dented helmets, sticks taped together from scra...

20 likes 5 comments 5
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No Más que la Torre, Los Feliz

Weekly Contest #323

The chapel was not really a chapel, just a basement under a Los Feliz fourplex where the walls wept mildew and colored light leaked from stained glass scavenged from somewhere holier. Candles burned in bottles along the cracked floor, their wax puddling like melted bones. The air smelled of rosewater, cigarettes, and dust. They called it the Tarot Mass. Once a month, the congregation drifted in from the city’s margins—artists who had stopped making art, lovers who had run out of people to love, addicts still sweating out their poisons, stray...

15 likes 5 comments 5
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The Salt Flat Procession

Weekly Contest #323

The salt flats looked like a broken mirror dropped from the sky. Hundreds of small flames drifted across the surface—paper lanterns swaying in a slow procession, carried by bodies half–silhouetted in moonlight. From a distance, it was beautiful. Up close, it was a wake that had forgotten the name of the dead. They said it happened once a year, the night when Death Valley swallowed regret whole. Each person came with a lantern. Each person wrote a confession or a wish or a wound on thin rice paper, tucked it inside, and lit the flame. At dawn...

9 likes 1 comment 1
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The Medicine That Echoed in the Bells

Weekly Contest #322

Echo Park at twilight feels like a fever breaking in reverse. The air is thick, neon bleeding into the lotus pond until every ripple glows unnatural—pink, teal, a violet that doesn’t exist in daylight. Taco truck smoke curls upward and seems to hang in halos around the streetlights. I tell myself it’s just the way Los Angeles looks when you’ve been walking too long, but she tells me the city is speaking to us, reshaping itself because we’re together. Her hand is warm, always a little too warm, like she’s running on a higher setting than the ...

6 likes 0 comments 0
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Stop Cropping Out The Tents

Weekly Contest #322

The Santa Ana Riverbed stretched out like an open scar, a concrete artery running through the county, wide and dry until the rains came. Chain-link fences tried to hide it, but everyone knew what was below. Tents stitched from blue tarps, shopping carts stacked like ribs, smoke curling from burn-barrels. The city called it blight. To Tia, it was soil. She crouched low against the wall, can hissing in her hand. The desert bloom grew under her fingers—petals flaring, thorns sharp enough to draw blood if you leaned too close. A prickly pear the...

10 likes 4 comments 4
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When the One-Year Chip Wasn’t Claimed

Weekly Contest #322

I always got there early, as if being first could anchor me. The folding chairs had already been staked into the sand by the time I arrived, dug in like teeth. They wobbled when you sat in them, sinking a little deeper with each weight, like the beach wanted to claim us one by one. Tonight the circle gaped with an extra space, a hole waiting for her. I put my backpack down in the sand like a flag, like the universe needed proof I was holding it. The sky over Venice was doing its thing. Cotton-candy streaks smeared into smog, clouds dissolvin...

11 likes 0 comments 0
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San Quentin’s Hidden Library

Weekly Contest #322

The yard was a cracked stage under a white California sun. Heat shimmered off the asphalt, turning the razor wire into ribbons of light. The air carried a cocktail of smells: bleach drifting from the laundry, fried grease from the kitchen vent, sweat steaming off the metal bleachers. Plastic trays clattered in the chow hall behind the wall, the tang of instant coffee and toothpaste lingering in the breath of anyone who had brushed in a hurry before count. Women scattered across the space in little constellations—card games flickering like ne...

15 likes 2 comments 2
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Glass Eyes at Century City

Weekly Contest #321

Century City always gleams brightest at noon, when the sun hits the glass at the exact wrong angle and blinds you into believing you’re in heaven. That’s the trick of the place: so open-air, so landscaped, so drenched in citrus and eucalyptus, you forget it’s just a mall. I came here to shop, to watch, to be among the beautiful tide. Everyone says Century City is the crown jewel, and everyone is right. The crowd today is perfect—smiling, nodding, drifting past with bags swinging at their hips. The air smells of sunscreen, perfume testers, an...

12 likes 1 comment 1
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Santa Monica Eats Its Own

Weekly Contest #321

The pier smelled like rot and sugar, seaweed and funnel cake clashing in the same breath. Gulls wheeled and screamed overhead, scavengers with wings sharp as knives. Somewhere a band was playing out of tune mariachi, warped through blown-out speakers, and the sound carried under the planks as if the ocean itself had learned a new instrument. The Ferris wheel loomed at the edge of it all. A broken halo, half its bulbs dead, the rest too bright, flickering in seizures of white, red, and sickly green. People streamed toward it with the same sla...

13 likes 1 comment 1
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GloMart_0307.AVI: Playback Error

Weekly Contest #321

The GloMart always smelled like dust and incense and the faintest whiff of something sticky under the slurpee machine no mop could reach. It was aggressively overlit, the kind of fluorescent buzz that felt like it was actively trying to bleach your soul. Quinn had stopped noticing it around week three. They worked the graveyard shift, which was ironic, maybe. GloMart didn’t stock anything worth dying for—just tallboys, off-brand chips, discount tampons, and every energy drink known to man. But the graveyard still came. People with nowhere el...

4 likes 0 comments 0
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