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Weekly Contest #345
— Hey. I can hear you breathing. So quit acting like you ain't there. The voice arrived in bad shape. Scraped raw by the sheet metal. Drowned by the shit water sitting in the pipes. By the time it came out of the bowl it wasn't really a voice anymore. It was a noise that had decided to be human.— You can hear me. I'm sure of it. Two months the hole next door's been empty. Two months I've been talking into this bowl and listening. And you know what comes back. My voice. Except it comes back with a taste it didn't have when it left.Somewher...
Weekly Contest #344
Witness Interview Transcript: Wayne Elrod Harlan County Sheriff's Office, March 14, 2009. Tape 1 of 1. Present: Det. R. Sizemore. I was about fourteen when I understood. What I put under the word normal didn't weigh the same as what other people put under it. We lived in one room. All of us. Live isn't the right word. Live is a wide word. Live is a word for people who don't count how many they are before going to bed. We fit in one room. Stowed. Like tools in a shed. Standing by day. Lying down at night. Counted by habit.No electricity. No w...
1895, Leonding, Austria.The first time a bee stung me I screamed and my father looked at me the way you look at a dog pissing on the carpet.The summer of his retirement, he brought home hives. Set them at the back of the garden, against the hedge. Nobody said a thing. In our house, nobody said anything. You made room and you shut your mouth.The garden had never been any good. In summer the earth cracked. In winter it was mud. Tall grass. Rusted tools. After the hives, it became his place.He made me put on the veil.The cloth stuck to my face....
My sister is not like the other little girls.On Sundays the girls of the village would put on their dresses. They would take a candy at the church door and laugh with sugar filling their mouths. They would walk down the road holding their mother's hand. Mercy did the same. She chose the mints, naturally. The ones that sting. She held them on her tongue with a patience the other children did not have, and nobody wondered why an eight-year-old girl needed to feel something burn in her mouth to stay still. When it was time to cross, it was not ...
Bobby Harlan was my best friend for nineteen years. I want you to know that. I want you to hold that between your teeth before you walk into this story. His mother used to say I was her second son. She didn't say it with violins. She said it between cans of beans at the grocery checkout. On the phone at two in the morning. She set it down like a plate on the table. Obvious. Normal. Here's Jimmy, here's Bobby, here's dinner. Bobby would've laughed. He found the knot in the sentence. The place where it hurts. And he pulled on it just enough to...
The problem with sleeping is you always end up waking.I opened my eyes to a gray sky. I didn't know where I was. I didn't know who I was. For a few magnificent seconds I was nobody. Then the world came back the way it always comes back, like a dog you kicked out that comes back anyway.I was on a bench. The wood was damp. A park. One of those places nobody goes except those who've got nowhere left to go.In my gut, something hollow knocking against emptiness. The belch rose slowly. When it reached my mouth I got the taste.Not bourbon. Bourbon ...
Weekly Contest #343
The road unspooled. Three in the morning. The summons folded in my inside pocket, against my ribs. Karen. The judge. Tuesday. It meant: you lost.The curve came out of the dark like a fist.My foot searched for the brake. Nothing. I pumped. The pedal sank and didn't come back. The car kept going straight. The road turned without me.The ditch took me.The wheel in my sternum. The belt in my shoulder. Teeth clacking. The taste of blood in my mouth, hot, immediate, mine. Then nothing but the dark and the engine dying.I stayed with my hands on my k...
The first time they gave me lithium I was sixteen.Laurelwood.It was a year after my mother died. The room smelled of bleach and lino too new. That cleanness that burns your nostrils and leaves your tongue dry. The sheets scraped. The light came from everywhere, flat, without angle, nowhere to hide. A washed-out white. The kind of white where shadow has no right to exist.The nurse's name was Brenda. Or Glenda. A name that doesn't stick. She had dry hands. Cracked. And a wedding ring too tight. The band bit into the finger and the skin spilled...
Weekly Contest #342
The first time I saw Ruth, she was screaming.Barefoot in the gravel. Three in the morning. The Shady Pines parking lot, and this woman standing there like someone had thrown her from a moving car. She was screaming from her belly. Not her throat.I thought I knew her for a second. I didn't.The mobile home was burning.Not a clean fire. A greasy fire, orange, eating the vinyl and the carpet and the cheap glue. The smoke went down instead of up. It stuck to everything. To skin. To tongue. I spat. Chemical taste.The patrol car was parked on the o...
CW: Sexual violence, Physical violence, gore or abuse Me and Travis, we decided to make a porn. That's not the hard part to tell. Travis had a gift for things that last thirty seconds. The rent, he said it would work out. The electricity, we'd pay tomorrow. He said that and I looked at him and I believed him. I believed him for a moment. Before that he worked at Leroy Merlin. Blue polo, plastic badge. Three weeks. His section manager asked him to tuck in his shirt. Or wipe something down. — I fucking quit, he said. He'd go out. He'd come hom...
CW: Physical violence, sexually suggestive content Four in the morning and I was there in the dark. Sleep had left a while back already and it wasn't coming back, that much I knew. There was this smell in the room. The formaldehyde and the soap and the skin and then underneath all of it, like it was hiding, something sweet. Vanilla. Her shampoo. The one she bought at Walmart in the yellow bottle and always left uncapped on the rim of the bathtub.Faye.She was downstairs. In the oak casket I'd picked out myself, cream lining, bronze handles. I...
My mother held the Book. She held it against her belly the way she never held any of us. Both hands on it. Her thumb crushed against the edge so the pages wouldn't move. They'd made room for her on the front seat. They'd wedged rags so it wouldn't knock around in the turns. The Book traveled well. It traveled better than us.Father's pickup was loaded. Crates, tools rolled in rags, bags of laundry tied shut. A sheet over everything. The vehicle sank on its axles. It drove slow. We were in the back. Piled in. Knees in ribs. Elbows in soft bell...
My mother was bleeding from her eyes.Two straight lines. They ran down without seeking the nose or the mouth. Slow. The blood took its time.She lay on her plank, the one at the back, the one that creaked. Someone had put a blanket over her belly. I don't know who.The barrack stank. Forty women. Twenty planks. Two to a plank. At night they coughed, chattered their teeth, moaned low so as not to bring the guards back.No one looked at her.We had learned. A gaze catches. What catches becomes a debt. And debt, here, was paid in grams of corn.The ...
Weekly Contest #341
Father, I hope you're holding up. That the cold ain't eaten your spine too bad. It's cold here too but it ain't the same kind. Not the kind you fix by stuffing rags under the door or nailing plastic over the windows. Something else came in after the fire and it stayed. It sat down in the house like it lived here. Like it always lived here. Donna says it makes sense. But nothing in any of this ever made sense and I stopped trying to make it. You keep doing what you did before. You get up in the morning. You heat water on the burner. You fold...
Latex has a taste. If you don't know it, it's because you've never put it in your mouth.I did. Eight times an hour. Ten. Fifteen. The rubber tip between your lips, you blow, you swell it, you twist. By the third balloon your lower lip splits. By the fifth it bleeds. You swallow without thinking. Rubber and blood. The taste of a coin heated against the gum. You keep going.The kid across from you is waiting for his dog.You twist. You knot. The balloon squeals under your fingers. A high, strangled sound. Your fingertips go white. The shape appe...
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