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N. S. Streets

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2025

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114 Followers

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32 Stories

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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 ...

21 likes

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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....

6 likes

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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...

10 likes

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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...

8 likes

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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...

3 likes

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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'...

20 likes

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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...

36 likes

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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 ...

14 likes

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Midnight's Gift

Weekly Contest #329

Late September air carried the scent of dying leaves and wood smoke through the open window of the cramped attic apartment. Jasmine hunched over her makeshift altar—really just a corner of her kitchen table—hands trembling as she measured dried lavender into a brass mortar. The petition spell. She had to master the petition spell. Three weeks until the Autumn Equinox ceremony. Three weeks until she either joined the Thornwood Coven or remained alone, cut off from the magical community that had always felt just beyond her reach. "Clockwise," ...

13 likes

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To remember who I am.

Weekly Contest #328

Present Day Jess sat at her kitchen table at 2 AM, surrounded by notebooks. Seventeen of them. Three years' worth. Every day documented. Every memory preserved. She'd started keeping them after the accident. The doctor had said memory loss was normal with traumatic brain injury. Write things down, he'd told her. It helps. So she had. Every entry began the same way: "I remember..." It was supposed to make her feel secure. Grounded. Like she was holding onto herself. She opened the oldest journal. October 2022. Found the entry she was looking ...

27 likes

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Breaking Ground

Weekly Contest #327

The cat is in the tree again.Midnight—because of course the cat is named Midnight—sits on a branch about twenty feet up, tail wrapped around her paws, watching Meredith with that expression that says she knows exactly what she's doing.Three years since her mother died. Three years since the cat appeared on the back porch like an inheritance. Three years of this dance—the tree, the waiting.Meredith stands at the base of the old oak, hands trembling."Come down," she says.Midnight blinks slowly. Doesn't move."I have work to do. I'm in the middl...

30 likes

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The morning that lied about its intentions.

Weekly Contest #326

The sound coming from Sarah's mouth wasn't crying.It should have been. After a day like this—after everything—crying would have made sense. Screaming would have made sense. Silence would have made sense.But this sound, this broken-glass laugh that wouldn't stop, was something else entirely.She collapsed on the curb across the street from her apartment building, fire trucks idling everywhere, and laughed until her ribs burned. Each breath dragged across her throat like sandpaper. Her stomach cramped. She couldn't stop.The firefighters kept lo...

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