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Niveadita Razdan

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2024

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20 Stories

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By Feel

Weekly Contest #366

The box came wrapped in a plastic shopping bag inside a courier bag inside a cardboard box.Meera set it on the kitchen table and did not open it for four days.On the fifth day she cut the tape with a knife and the box exhaled: turmeric, old paper, the mustiness of an old steel cabinet. She had expected a recipe book. Something with a spine. Instead the box tipped sideways and papers spilled out across the table. A school notebook with a fat cartoon cow on the cover, spiral bent out of shape. A stack of paper napkins, translucent with old oil...

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Gesundheit

Weekly Contest #360

Priya was mid-gesture, fingers spread toward the green screen, mouth open, about to say warm front, when she sneezed so hard her earpiece bounced off Camera Two and slid across the studio floor.She straightened up.Marcus was wiping his nose on his clipboard.The cameraman had both hands over his face. His shoulders were going up and down.Priya looked at the earpiece on the floor. She looked at Marcus. Marcus sneezed again, a small one and looked personally offended."Cut," he said.***Emeka was reading the C-minus for the third time when he sne...

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One Feather

Weekly Contest #353

One FeatherA story of Garuda, son of Vinata They called my mother a slave.Not in whispers. Not behind cupped hands. They wound their coils around her wrists and said it the way you state weather, matter-of-fact, already bored by the truth of it. A wager. A loss. A life, handed over at the seam of a word. My uncles, smiled with their flat, lidded eyes and said: this is simply how things are.I broke the sky the morning I was born. They say it as a warning. I wear it as a name.I came out blazing. The gods on their peaks saw the light cracking o...

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The Blank Page

Weekly Contest #351

The notebook had been open for two hours.Mira knew this because the clock on the wall made a sound on the hour, a small hollow tick and she had heard it twice. The page in front of her had her name in the top corner, the date under it and nothing else. Twenty-two lines, all empty, going straight across like they were waiting for something to happen.Leo appeared in the doorway."Tell me a story.""I'm busy."He looked at the notebook, then at her. "You're not writing anything.""I'm thinking.""You've been thinking since lunch." He came in and sat...

15 likes 8 comments 8
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The Road That Painted the Sky

Weekly Contest #346

The Road That Painted the SkyA story about a painter, a choice and a road with no end "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference."~ Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken Part the First: The Two RoadsEveryone in the small river town of Salmara agreed that Mira was a perfectly sensible woman, except for the paint jars. She had seventeen of them; small, fat-bellied glass jars lined along her kitchen windowsill where most people kept salt cellars or photographs of relatives who never ...

28 likes 15 comments 15
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The Queue

Weekly Contest #345

Nobody remembered when the line had started.It stretched past the shuttered bakery, the school with the broken fence, the hill where an old water tower still wore its faded advertisement for a soda nobody made anymore. Beyond that, the road bent and the line bent with it, disappearing into a distance that nobody talked about. The line moved. Not always, not quickly, but it moved.Mara joined it on a Tuesday, or what she believed was a Tuesday. Canvas bag, resoled shoes, eyes on her feet. The man in front of her carried a sleeping child, adjus...

38 likes 23 comments 23
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The House Remembers

Weekly Contest #342

Two people live in a house that's too quiet.Watch them move through it in the morning. See how they both step over the third stair. The one that creaks.One goes first. Steps over.The other follows. Steps over the same place.They don't discuss this. They never have.There's no one asleep upstairs.There hasn't been anyone asleep upstairs in years.But they both step over it anyway. Careful. Automatic.Their bodies remember when noise mattered.When 6 AM meant stealth. When every sound could wake someone who'd just fallen back asleep after the 4 AM...

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The Visiting Hours

Weekly Contest #341

The nurse at the front desk doesn't look up anymore when I sign in. Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday. Sometimes Wednesday. I've been coming long enough that my handwriting has its own spot in the ledger, a crooked signature that leans left like it's trying to escape the page.Room 147. The number's burned into me now, the way phone numbers used to be before we stored them in machines. I know the exact number of steps from the elevator, thirty-two if I take the long way past the sunroom, eighteen if I cut through the activities hall where they're a...

36 likes 28 comments 28
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Crystalline

Weekly Contest #339

The snowflake caught on her fingertip like a whisper made solid.Maya had been standing on the fire escape for how long? Long enough for her coffee to go cold. Long enough for the city sounds below to blur into white noise. She'd come out here to think or maybe to avoid thinking, about the email still glowing on her phone inside. We regret to inform you. Another rejection. Another door closing.But then this: a single snowflake, landing with impossible gentleness on her outstretched hand.She should go inside. Her fingers were numb. But somethi...

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Ten Minutes

Weekly Contest #338

The cursor blinks at me. I've been staring at it for who knows how long.I'm at the dining table right now, laptop open, cup of tea going cold next to me. Something's playing on the TV in the living room, I couldn't tell you what. It's just noise. The good kind.My husband's on the sofa with his coffee, doing his own work thing. We're together but separate, you know? It's nice.Except I can't write.The prompt sits at the top of my screen: Write a story that includes the words "Shh," "This section is off-limits," or "We're closing in ten minutes...

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UNTANGLED

Weekly Contest #334

The alarm goes off at 5:47 AM. Not 5:45, not 6:00 but 5:47, because Gothel read an article about circadian rhythms and Gothel reads everything.Rae reaches for her phone. Except it's not there. It's never there. She has to pad across white carpet to the charging station by the window where Gothel places it every night after "content review."3,247 notifications since she went to sleep. Hearts, comments, strangers saying I love you to someone they've never met.Her calendar is color-coded. Pink for filming, lavender for "self-care content," beig...

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Okay.

Weekly Contest #333

The kitchen is dark when you flip the switch. Not late-dark, just that in-between hour when day hasn't quite let go but evening's already settling in. The fluorescent flickers once before catching, washing everything in that particular brightness that makes the rest of the house feel farther away than it is.You're not sure when you decided to cook. One moment you were sitting on the couch, staring at nothing in particular and the next your body was moving, feet carrying you here. Your hands already know what they're reaching for before your ...

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A Chance Encounter

Rachel adjusted the strap of her carry-on bag, wincing as it dug into her shoulder. Gate C26 was still fifteen minutes away according to the signs, and her connecting flight to Seattle wouldn't board for another hour and a half. The Detroit Metropolitan Airport hummed with the familiar white noise of travel: announcements echoing through the terminal, the steady rumble of rolling luggage, and snippets of conversation that blended into ambient sound. The artificial coolness of the recycled air carried the mingled scents of coffee, cinnamon pr...

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Backseat Diplomacy

Weekly Contest #293

The invisible line ran straight down the middle of the backseat. Emily hadn't drawn it, and neither had her brother Mark, but they both knew exactly where it was. It had been there for as long as Emily could remember, a border as real to them as any on her father's dog-eared atlas."Your elbow is over," Mark said without looking up from his handheld game, thumbs working frantically as tinny music leaked from his headphones.Emily didn't move her arm. "No it's not." She could feel the rough fabric of the seat against her skin, the slight depres...

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Echoes of Waking

Weekly Contest #291

Veda counted heartbeats instead of seconds while the ferry crossed the strait toward Ithaka Island. Thirty-seven days since the fever dreams began. Eighty-three nights since she last slept without jerking awake, gasping from visions of a lighthouse.Rain pelted the deck. Other passengers huddled inside the cabin, but Vedas stayed at the rail, letting droplets blur the boundary between sea and sky. The odd crescent scar on her wrist—appeared the morning after her first dream—prickled beneath her watchband. Her doctor called it a stress reactio...

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