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Pamela Beach

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2025

Stories (24)
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24 Stories

462 karma pts

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The Ghost of Orion

Submitted to Contest #321

The dust motes danced in the slanted evening light, each a tiny ghost in the mausoleum of Frederick Brooks’ home office. For ten years, his life had been a collection of ghosts, but one reigned supreme: Lexi. Her face, a cherubic six-year-old forever frozen in a school photograph, stared out from the corkboard that dominated the room. It was a shrine to a ghost, a collage of maps, faded newspaper clippings, and timelines that led everywhere and nowhere. The case of the missing girl, Lexi, had been the magnum opus of his career as a detective...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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The Interview

Submitted to Contest #321

"Please, have a seat. Can I get you some water?""No, thank you. I'm fine.""Alright then. Let's get started. Your resume is… impressive, Sarah. Head of logistics at a global shipping firm is no small feat.""Thank you. I enjoyed my time there. Lots of complex problems to solve.""I can imagine. It says here you managed a team of over two hundred.""That's right. For the last three years.""Describe a time you had to make an unpopular decision that benefited the company.""Of course. In the second quarter of 2024, we had a major supply chain disrup...

26 likes 21 comments 21
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The Resident

Submitted to Contest #321

The apartment was less a home and more an algorithm. Ben’s new place, a top-floor unit in the brand-new "Aperture" building, managed his life with a quiet, sterile efficiency. The lights would brighten to mimic a sunrise, the coffee would brew the moment his sleep cycle registered as complete, and the ambient temperature was perpetually optimized for productivity. It was clean, it was simple, and after a month, it was driving him insane.The loneliness of it was a physical presence, a hum beneath the seamless technology. Which is why, at firs...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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The Linen Closet

Submitted to Contest #321

For six months, the door had been haunting David’s dreams.It wasn’t a monstrous door. It didn’t drip blood or whisper warnings. It was, in all its remembered detail, painfully ordinary: white paint, chipped near the brass knob, located in the upstairs hallway of the house he’d grown up in. The second of four identical doors. But in his dreams, it was always locked. And behind it, he knew with a certainty that survived the waking world, was something vital. Something he’d lost.This certainty became an obsession, a low-grade fever that blurred...

9 likes 2 comments 2
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The Ash-Stained Pines

Submitted to Contest #320

The fire in St. Jude's Forest was wrong.From the moment Connor crested the ridge, he knew it. There was no heat haze shimmering over the valley, no acrid, eye-watering smoke poisoning the August sky. There was only a profound and absolute silence. Below him, a perfect, three-mile circle of the forest had been turned to bone-white ash. It wasn't the charcoal-black of a burn, but the stark, sterile white of cremated remains. The pines stood like ghostly sentinels, their needles and bark intact but drained of all color, coated in a fine, pale d...

2 likes 0 comments 0
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A Shelter from the Fog

Submitted to Contest #320

The blank page glared at Clara, a pristine white desert mocking her completely empty mind. For the fifth time that hour, she squeezed the bridge of her nose, a familiar headache blooming behind her eyes. The digital pen felt alien in her hand, a useless stick. She was an illustrator, a creator of whimsical worlds filled with charming woodland creatures and sun-dappled glades. But the well of her imagination had run bone dry, replaced by the choking dust of deadlines and corporate-approved color palettes.So she had run. She’d rented a tiny, i...

7 likes 2 comments 2
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The Eater of Paths

Submitted to Contest #320

The branch whipped across Sage’s face, leaving a stinging, bloody welt on her cheek. She ignored it, sucking in a ragged breath that tasted of pine needles and panic. Behind her, the baying of hounds grew closer, a sound of slobbering, inevitable doom. Captain Varus’s voice cut through the noise, a drill sergeant’s bark that promised a slow, inventive death.Her satchel, containing the damning ledger, bounced against her hip, a constant, bruising reminder of why she was running. Two days. For two days she’d been crashing through the Mawwood, ...

12 likes 1 comment 1
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A Binding of Bark and Blade

Submitted to Contest #320

The rot had a scent. It was the smell of damp earth turned sour, of leaf-mold curdling into something venomous. I tasted it on the wind, a bitter tang that coated my tongue and sent a shiver through the leaves of my birch-kin. Pain, sharp and splintered, lanced up from the forest floor, a symphony of silent screams from roots being choked by a creeping, black ichor.My feet, bare and tough as bark, made no sound as I moved through the undergrowth. I was the forest’s vengeance, its silent hunter. My skin, the pale silver of new moonlight on ba...

9 likes 0 comments 0
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The Shield and the Sword

Submitted to Contest #319

My bones are granite and my blood is the slow, cool magic of the earth. I have never taken a breath, but I have felt the wind of a thousand winters wear at my skin. My heart has never beaten, but it has pulsed with the deep, resonant toll of the Great Bell in the tower above. For seven hundred years, I have been the silent guardian of the Cathedral of Whispering Stone, perched high on its rain-lashed buttress, a grotesque carved into a prayer. The humans who scurry below, like ants in their brief, frantic lives, call me a gargoyle. I do not ...

19 likes 18 comments 18
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The Guardian of Loch Cinder

Submitted to Contest #319

The village of Cinderwood huddled at the edge of the great loch, its cottages like nervous sheep pressed against the dark, unmoving water. For generations, the people of Cinderwood had lived in the shadow of a story—a cautionary tale that had hardened into fact. They spoke of the Beast of Loch Cinder, a creature of immense size and insatiable hunger that dwelled in the cold, black depths. Fishermen patched their nets with trembling fingers, always staying within a hundred yards of the shore. Mothers called their children indoors as dusk bled...

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The Observer

Submitted to Contest #318

The invitation had been addressed to his roommate, Cheri, plus one. Connor was the plus one. It was a role he was familiar with: the silent, social ballast attached to Cheri’s vibrant, effortlessly charming ship as she sailed through an endless sea of parties and events.Today’s port of call was the wedding of a college friend of hers, a woman named Olivia whose family apparently owned a significant portion of the state’s timber industry. The venue was a sprawling, vaguely European estate with more fountains than Connor had seen in his entire...

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The Archivist

Submitted to Contest #318

The official history of Sterling-Cross Industries was written in press releases and quarterly reports. Its unofficial history, the one that mattered, was written in the dust on Agnes’s fingers. From her small, neat desk in the basement archives, a place most employees didn't even know existed, Agnes didn’t just preserve the company’s history; she directed its future.For forty-seven years, she had been the one constant in a revolving door of ambition. CEOs rose and fell, hotshot executives burned bright and faded, but Agnes remained. She was ...

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The Bodyguard's Encore

Submitted to Contest #318

Arthur stood in the wings, a mountain in a tailored black suit, his presence as solid and unobtrusive as a piece of the architecture. From his vantage point, he had a perfect view of the grand ballroom, a glittering galaxy of chandeliers, champagne flutes, and the city’s wealthiest patrons. His eyes, however, were not on the spectacle. They were on one man: Robert.Robert was the center of this universe. A pop star whose fame had recently exploded, he moved through the crowd like a shark, all teeth and charm, feeding on the adoration. Arthur’...

4 likes 2 comments 2
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A Light of His Own

Submitted to Contest #318

The clinking of silverware against his parents’ best china was the soundtrack to Tommy’s life. It was a pleasant, rhythmic sound, but tonight it felt like a metronome counting down the seconds until he could gracefully disappear. He pushed a stray pea around his plate with his fork, crafting a lazy green spiral. Across the table, his older brother, Mark, was holding court.Mark had a way of commanding a room without ever raising his voice. He leaned forward, elbows on the lace tablecloth, his smile catching the light from the dining room chan...

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The Understudy

Submitted to Contest #318

Jenny laid the dress out on the king-sized bed, its deep emerald silk shimmering under the suite’s recessed lighting like captured water. It was a marvel of a gown, a column of liquid fabric that had cost more than her car. She ran a handheld steamer over an almost imperceptible wrinkle near the hem, her movements practiced and precise. Every detail had to be perfect. Tonight was Lila’s night. The culmination of a decade of relentless work, of auditions and rejections, of bit parts and finally, the role that had made the world see what Jenny...

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