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Niki Sykes

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2020

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4 Stories

29 karma pts

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The Light in the Window

Weekly Contest #377

Jamie woke beneath the old horse chestnut tree with three conkers in his coat pocket and one clear thought in his head: he must get home before the cocoa went cold. The street looked almost right. The houses stood shoulder to shoulder as they always had, their windows glowing amber against the blue November dusk. Paper bats still clung to a few garden gates, damp at the wings, and a pumpkin on Mrs Green’s wall had collapsed into a cheerful orange grin. Yet everything seemed softened at the edges, as if the whole neighbourhood had been wrappe...

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The Hunger Beneath the Ash

Weekly Contest #376

By the time the last road vanished beneath the snow, Vaelith Marr had been alone in Greywake House for eighty-three days. He counted them by the black marks cut into the mantel, one for every dawn he survived without answering the hunger. Eighty-three narrow wounds in old oak. Eighty-three mornings in which he had woken with his own hands clenched around the bedframe rather than someone’s throat. The distinction mattered, though less with every passing day. Greywake stood above the drowned valley like a tooth left in a dead jaw. Its windows ...

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Snow Angels

Weekly Contest #77

Stefan closed the door behind him and surveyed the landscape before him through the safety of the split screen glass. For miles and miles as far as the eye could see lay a blanket of snow, largely untouched by footfall or human hand. It was hypnotic, somewhat trance like and somewhere from beyond there was a slight haze of pink and purple casting an almost ethereal light across the landscape. If he didn’t know better he may well have been dreaming. Everything about this place was beyond perfect and that was exactly how he needed things to be...

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With Intent

He deserved it and more besides. I will pay my penance but I am not sorry and I refuse to feel any level of remorse – not for him. He isn’t worth the time of day. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. I was not always the criminal that stands before you today. I did have a normal life to begin with, way back when. I was born nineteen years ago, Kathryn Louise Singleton, over the years this has had many incarnations. These days it is just Kate, plain, simple Kate, unassuming, unpretentious Kate Singleton. Reasonably anonymous, which if you...

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