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N. S. Streets

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2025

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21 Stories

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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...

6 likes

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The Boy Who Was Kept

Weekly Contest #354

The Boy Who Was KeptA Tale Told in the Old Way Once upon a time, and this is the truth, though truth wears the skin of fairy tales when it is too terrible to tell straight, there was a boy named Scott who lived in a house that smelled of Southern Comfort and fear.The house was not remarkable from the outside. White paint peeling. A porch light buzzing with dying moths. A mailbox that read Walker in letters faded to the color of old bruises. The neighbors waved when they saw the family. What a nice man, they said. What a quiet boy.They did n...

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The Goddess Who Kept Her Own Name

Weekly Contest #353

The Goddess Who Kept Her Own NameA dark fairy tale Long before the first king carved his name into stone, before the first priest decided which mouths could speak to heaven, there was a goddess called Shiva. The men who came later would try to take her name, would dress it in a beard and a trident and call it theirs, but the old women remembered. They whispered her into their daughters at the moment of birth, the way one might press a coin into a small fist for safekeeping. Shiva. Shiva. You are hers, and she is yours, and no one will ever ...

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The Quiet Kingdom of Grey

Weekly Contest #352

The Quiet Kingdom of GreyA Dark Fairy Tale Once, when the world was younger and the moon hung lower in the sky, the colours lived together in a great cathedral made of light. Red roared from the rose windows. Yellow gilded the floors. Blue pooled in the rafters like trapped weather, and Green grew out of the cracks where the stones met. They were vain, all of them, and loud, and they spent their long days arguing over which of them the world loved best.But there was one colour who never argued.She lived in the spaces the others did not want....

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The Girl Who Ate Dreams

Weekly Contest #350

The Girl Who Ate Dreams Once upon a time—though not a good time, not a kind time—there lived a girl named Crystene in a village at the edge of a forest that had no name.She was seventeen, with hair like spun honey and a laugh that made strangers stop in the street. When she smiled, you felt chosen. When she tilted her head and asked you questions—real questions, the kind that made you feel seen—you would have given her anything.And she took it. In the village by the nameless wood, There lived a girl misunderstood. Her smile was bright, her...

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The Naming of Things

Weekly Contest #349

Once, in a kingdom where the rivers ran the color of rust and the trees grew crooked as old lies, there lived a creature called Hollow.Hollow did not know it was a monster.It had been born in the deep woods where no one planted names on things, where mushrooms grew without permission and the rain fell without apology. It had hands, yes, though they were longer than most. It had eyes, yes, though they caught the light in ways that made the dark seem to stare back. It had a voice like wind through a broken window. But it had never thought to c...

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The Wolf and the Book

Weekly Contest #347

Trigger Warning: Substance abuse, abuse. It was a dreary Sunday in March. A day full of grey and minutes that zigged instead of zagged. Nix could feel the weight of this Sunday pressing her down, pinning her soul making a shadow that pooled at her feet. Her shadow had weight, this she could feel. This shadow wanted to be free of the weight of this particular Sunday. Or for Nix to sink within to their hiding place she spent so many Sundays hiding from the Wolf.But this Sunday had more weight than most. The figure the Wolf called her mother wa...

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Seven Things She Took

Weekly Contest #345

The house had been eating her for years.Not all at once. It was patient, the way old houses are — the way old families are. It took small bites. A habit she'd loved, gone by winter. A word she used to say, swallowed by spring. By the seventh year she could not remember the sound of her own name in her own mouth, only in his, and in his mouth it had always sounded like a leash.She waited until the blood was dry on the kitchen floor. His blood, not hers — for once, not hers — though it was only a nosebleed, only the edge of the table where he'...

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The Book That Borrowed Me

Weekly Contest #338

There is a library in London that does not appear on any map.I know this because I have looked. I have traced my finger along the streets of Bloomsbury and Holborn, followed the thin grey lines of alleyways that lead nowhere, searched for the gap between buildings where I know—where I remember—the door once stood. But maps are liars, my grandmother used to say. They show you what everyone agrees to see. They cannot show you the underneath.I was eleven years old when I found the library. Or when it found me. The distinction matters less than ...

18 likes

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Dad's Potato Salad

Weekly Contest #333

Dad's Potato SaladThe recipe is wrong.I know it's wrong because I'm the one who wrote it down, eleven years ago, standing in the kitchen of the house on Maple Street. The one with the cracked linoleum and the window over the sink that stuck in summer. The one before the apartment, before the complex, before the running, before all of it.I was twenty-eight. He was forty-four. He stood at the counter with his back to me, a cigarette burning in the ashtray by the stove, and I asked him to teach me because I thought we had time. I thought I'd wa...

56 likes

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The Cursor Blinks

Weekly Contest #329

The cursor blinks. 2:47 AM. Mikayla's hands hover over the keyboard, not quite touching, as if the keys might burn her. Or save her. She isn't sure which.The writing community's weekly prompt glows on her second monitor: Write a story about a character who is haunted by something or someone. She's read Clive Barker since she was fifteen—she knows haunting. She knows how desire and dread weave together until you can't tell which thread is which. But knowing and doing are different animals, and right now, sitting in her apartment with the radi...

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HUSH

Weekly Contest #329

CW: Mental health, physical violence, abuse Amanda drifts through the parlor wall—or is it the kitchen? The rooms shift when she's not looking. Not the rooms. Her. She's the one shifting. Today she knows her name. That's good. That's a clear day. Amanda. She died in 1324. Plague. Or was it childbirth? The memories scatter. She can't hold them any more than she can hold her own hand. She knows she's been here a long time. The house wasn't this house when she died. It was a smaller dwelling. Wooden beams. Thatched roof. The current structure g...

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3 AM

Weekly Contest #329

I write at 3 AM because I have to. Not "have to" like a deadline. "Have to" like breathing. Like my fingers start twitching around 2:45. Like if I don't sit down and open the document, something inside me will claw its way out. George and Fred know. They're already on the desk when I come in, two black smudges in the blue light of the monitor. Waiting. They're always waiting. I've been writing the same story for eight months. A psychological thriller about a woman who can't tell if she's losing her mind or if her apartment is trying to kill ...

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