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N. S. Streets

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2025

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114 Followers
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33 Stories

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Nine Minutes in the Capulet Vault

Nine Minutes in the Capulet Vault11:51 PMTHE BELLI am iron in a tower over Verona in the rain. I have nine, and I am counting, and I count them in the vein of a girl who is not dead tonight, though every soul in town has agreed upon the story, and has written the story down. There is linen at her jawbone. There is rosemary and dung and the bell has not yet rung.They have laid her with her cousin, who is four days into rot, in a cellar full of Capulets who wanted what they got. There are candles going sideways. There is water on the stair. Th...

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The Jumpsuit Monologues: What the Phoenix Wears Between the Burnings

The Jumpsuit Monologues: What the Phoenix Wears Between the Burnings I.Step right up, step right up, don't you blink or you'll miss the show, a bird that dies right here tonight and you'll watch her do it slow, no net beneath her, no trick of the light, no mirror and no wire, just feathers going gold at the tips and a whole life catching fire!Step into the jumpsuit, darling, zip it up past your chin, this one's stitched from every ending you have ever climbed back in, you won't believe the color when the whole thing starts to burn, stick ar...

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The Miscount of Wildland Fire Walsey

Weekly Contest #366

The Miscount of Wildland Fire WalseyBeing a True and Faithful Account of a Man as Bright as a Wall, as Exciting as a Wall, and, in the End, About as Self-Aware as a Wall, Who Met a Legend and Walked Away Without Noticing There is a particular kind of man who does not so much occupy a room as furnish it, present in the way a wall is present, load-bearing in the technical sense and otherwise entirely without opinion, and such a man was Wildland Fire Technician Cletus Walsey, who had spent eleven years patrolling the dry brush and burn-scarred ...

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The Jumpsuit Monologues

Weekly Contest #366

The Jumpsuit Monologues, or: A True Account of Everything That Did Not HappenBeing a faithful record of things I witnessed from inside the thing that wore me Step into the jumpsuit, zip it to the throat, I'll tell you everything I know about nothing, pull up your darkness and sit in the light, the truth is admission, the lie is the door, pay what you owe to the self that you borrowed, and listen to silence describe what it heard.Step into the jumpsuit.I said step in.On one bright night in the middle of the day a living man lay down and would...

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Lo Que Vive En La Grieta

Lo Que Vive En La GrietaWhat Lives in the CrackBeing a True Account of the Thing That Came Through the Space Between Two Brothers The crack in the wall of my father's house was there before I was born.I know this because my mother told me, in the specific and offhand way that mothers tell you the things that will matter most, without knowing they are mattering, without ceremony, just a thing said over a sink full of dishes on an ordinary Tuesday that I have carried every day since like a stone in a pocket I cannot empty. She said the crack ...

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Grandma Does Not Bake Cookies

Grandma Does Not Bake CookiesBeing a True Account of a Boy Who Was Mistaken for a Wolf and the Long and Unfinished Work of Proving Otherwise Grandma does not bake cookies for pups.This is the first thing I knew about the world, before I knew the world's name, before I knew my own, before I understood that knowing a thing and being able to change it are two entirely separate countries with no road between them and no bridge being built. I knew it the way children know the things that will shape them, not as information but as weather, as the...

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The Saga of Deputy Tika, Who Was Legend in His Own Telling

Weekly Contest #364

The Saga of Deputy Tika, Who Was Legend in His Own TellingBeing a Dark and Faithful Account of the Most Woeful Misadventure Ever to Befall a Man of Considerable Muscle and Insufficient Sense, Recorded Just Down the Road from Where Bob Once Failed, In the Same Wood, Under the Same Indifferent Stars Down the same long road from the clearing where Bob once stood and squinted his way into legend, past the bend where the Whispering Run forgets itself in a culvert and remembers itself again on the other side, there is a stretch of two-lane blackt...

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The Ballade of Bob, Ranger of the Wood, Who Was Not Good

Weekly Contest #363

The Ballade of Bob, Ranger of the Wood, Who Was Not GoodBeing a Dark and Faithful Account of the Most Woeful Misadventure Ever to Befall a Man of Forest Authority, or Indeed Any Man at All In the deep and dreaming wood where the old pines press their fingers into heaven and the mist moves through the undergrowth like something that has forgotten what it was looking for, there dwelt a darkness older than memory, a silence older than speech, and a forest ranger named Bob who had once cited a badger for loitering. The wood kept its counsel. Th...

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Dad's Tacos

Weekly Contest #362

Dad's TacosIn memory of the man who made the table worth coming to Begin with the pork. Begin there, as all good things begin, with patience and smoke and a man who understood that the best meals are not cooked but conjured, drawn out of raw and ordinary matter by a kind of love that does not announce itself but simply tends the fire, simply keeps the heat where the heat needs to be, simply knows, as the knowing men always know, that time is not the enemy of flavor but its collaborator, its silent partner, its oldest and most faithful frien...

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Juliet and the Wolf

Weekly Contest #361

Juliet and the WolfA Tale Told in the Old Way In the country of Verona, where the cypress trees grew tall as gallows and the wells ran red with the iron of the hills, there lived a girl named Juliet. She was thirteen winters old, with hair the color of rusted keys and a temper her nurse had tried, unsuccessfully, to drown in milk and prayers.Her mother had been a girl once too, sold to the House of Capulet at fourteen. Her grandmother at twelve. Her great-grandmother at eleven, and so the line stretched back into the mist of the country, a ...

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A Dreamer of Two Thresholds

Weekly Contest #359

A Dreamer of Two Thresholds Scott would tell you that life was a gift and that you should live it to it fullest everyday. But Scott never “lived” a full day in his existence. What he did get to live was others lives through dreams. As a child Scott was told by the Wolf that the dreams were the devil speaking through him. This was never true.You see, Scott is a well. Not a bottomless black hole like you are thinking. No Scott is a well in the way water flows through the ground and is drawn to one spot to be collected. Dreams flow though all ...

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The Rock That Dug Itself Up

Weekly Contest #358

The Rock That Dug Itself Up I. What the Weight Taught MeYou think I do not know your wheels.You think because I did not speak I did not count them. You think because I lay flat I was content with flatness, that the lying was a choice, that the ground consents to being ground simply because it does not rise.I’ve news for you.I was here before the road. Let that land in you the way your wheels landed on me, year upon year upon year, the specific grammar of your passing, each axle a sentence I was never permitted to finish, each load-bearing ti...

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Sally Speaks from the Velvet Mouth of Night

Weekly Contest #357

Sally Speaks from the Velvet Mouth of NightI was not born.I arrived.There is a difference.Birth belongs to lambs and daughters wrapped in linen, pink things passed from woman to woman like blessings.I came claw-first from the throat of midnight while the moon hung above the world like a blind white eye sewn into rotten velvet.The chimney coughed me into existence.The house learned my name afterward.Sally.Sally, they called me, after a rag doll girl stitched from grief and thread, after a woman built by other hands who still dared to wander.G...

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The Station

Weekly Contest #356

The StationBeing a record of one November, in the crossing The rain falls upward here.It has always fallen upward — pearling from the obsidian floor in slow, defiant drops that hover at eye level before drifting toward a ceiling that does not exist, has never existed, which is either the station's great cruelty or its great honesty, depending on what you believe ceilings are for. She has watched it for three hundred years. Perhaps four. Time moves strangely in the crossing, the way grief moves strangely in the body — present without location...

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Mic and Mandy

Weekly Contest #355

The street below Mandy’s apartment smelled of wet concrete, cigarettes, and flowers left too long in a vase.Midnight dragged its black gown across the city.Mic stood beneath her third-story window holding a ring in one hand and a dead bird in the other.He had not meant to bring the bird.It simply arrived.Its neck bent backward like a snapped question mark. Rain glossed its feathers silver. Mic could not remember picking it up from the sidewalk, only that his fingers refused to let it go.Above him, Mandy leaned from the window in a white slip...

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