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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2024
Submitted to Contest #334
Once upon a time there was a young woman, all of eighteen years, who was trapped in a multi-million town house in Chelsea.Isn’t this how all fairy tales begin? The home may be grand or humble, and the girl may be a princess or a pauper, but it is imperative that the girl is good and the girl is beautiful - and that is the beginning and end of all things.She was not, of course, a princess. Her father was a theatre director and her mother a high court judge. They moved in air-kissing circles of egregious insincerity. She was their only child. ...
Submitted to Contest #333
Terence Bay, Nova ScotiaJune 1873 The Reverend William Ancient returned from a job of ministry to find James where he had left him, in the vicarage kitchen staring at a bare wall on which the only adornment was a crude cross. The bowl of chowder, untouched, sent his stomach growling. The aptly named Mrs Isabel Cook would be rightly disappointed if she knew just how little James ate. He was getting thinner while the Reverend was undoubtedly getting fatter by eating all that surplus.The glass though, the glass by the side of the smoked cod cho...
Submitted to Contest #332
The summer of '76 did it for me, back when everyone was still imperfectly alive. My father, an infrequent visitor, chose that year of all years to convert the loft into a living space. The image of him lying prone, slick with sweat while unravelling a bale of fibreglass for the lower rafters is sharper than other memories I have of him.It was also the year I went on a class trip to the Welsh borders. It was the last act of our primary school days before we had to grow up in September. Some of my friends fainted on a walk we took on the secon...
Submitted to Contest #331
CW: contains allusions to child abuse and death. Maris is a beautiful woman if you like them ice cold. Her blonde hair is styled in an immaculate chignon and she has such a little waist. Waspish, one might say. Tonight she is at a party hosted by a neighbour, tinkling and twinkling with her dry martini in one hand and a Sobranie cigarette in the other. But, despite her supremacy amongst the shackled wives, she is bored. There are no conquests to be made in this vanilla landscape. Who knew that plain women could be so Valkyrie-like in the pr...
Submitted to Contest #330
What a wonderland! What a heart’s desire! Beyond the wooden doors it was fearfully cold and yet it was not. It was bracing and wonderful and still and everything, just everything that is not hot, and fetid and grasping and hopeless.She whisked on her cloak, dyed red with summer berries, while Nicholas straddled the stove and cooked an enormous fish, simmering in tundra grasses and berries. There are chickens and livestock here, there are potatoes which grow in special cloches, and cows which produce milk and butter and cream. In this barren ...
Submitted to Contest #329
CW: Mental health, Substance abuse Jez Turner saw a woman stumbling along the moor’s edge, just as it breached the road. She was limping heavily on both feet, it seemed, and was poorly dressed for the weather conditions. It had turned full dark an hour before and there were no city lights in this part of the world. The stars, occluded by scudding clouds, were brilliant when they did appear, yet they offered no guidance. She had no torch, and the lights from his vehicle made her cringe as he passed.And he did pass, when once he would have sto...
Submitted to Contest #328
In 1888, when Jack the Ripper was sharpening his blades and the Queen was mourning her Scottish gilly and making old eyes at Abdul Karim, a young couple moved into the street. It was newly built, and yet even in its infancy the red bricks were coated in the soot of empire, and such little grass as there was in the strip about the porch was not green but queerly grey.The wife was heavily pregnant when they arrived and Mrs Garfield noted to a neighbour that she was not a natural brood mare. ‘She does not have the hips for it,’ she confided.Mrs...
Submitted to Contest #326
Aunty Maureen bought Maddie a diary for her fifteenth Christmas. It felt like a thoughtless gift for a digital creature unused to paper and pen.In Year 10 she had been forced to read extracts of Anne Frank’s Diary. How could Maddie, a foolish child, begin to understand the mind of a less foolish child? The teacher said that keeping a diary was good for you, and Maddie had replied that it did not appear to have done Anne Frank much good in the long run. That didn’t go down so well. Much of what Maddie said never did. Maybe that’s why Aunty Mo...
Submitted to Contest #325
Pet wheels the trolley. It’s what she does. It’s not everything she does, but the patients follow a Pavlovian instinct to open their mouths and swallow their pills when Pet comes rattling through.She is thirty but she looks fifty. When she is fifty, she will carry on looking fifty until she dies. Some people are just like that. Born to middle-age.Pet is devoted to religion, but there is no evidence that religion is devoted to her. There is no room in her head for allegory, and so she sucks up the contradictions through a single straw. She do...
Shortlisted for Contest #324 ⭐️
An old man, a young woman and a helmsman pulled up at the boat ramp, slick with East River slime. The short voyage had been a little rocky, this not really being a river but a saltwater estuary of conflicting tides.A crow’s mile from Manhattan, the ghost island was sedately fragmenting, brick-by-brick, frame-by-frame, beneath a kudzo canopy. They say it is now a bird sanctuary, a plumaged excuse for Parks and Recreation to sit on their backsides for rolling decades debating what to do with it. Few people were allowed there, but the old man w...
Submitted to Contest #323
‘Now I don’t mind having a chat, but you have to keep giving it that!’Chas and Dave, Rabbit (1980) The ProblemCaitlin’s broad arse was swaying in front of the stove. Geordie watched it in a state of detached mesmerism. The steady expansion of girth merely reminded him how much he loved her, like having a favourite cake and finding that it had doubled in size.He was in the middle of telling her about that night’s match; about how the new Austrian manager called everything 'sexy.' He told her about their placement in the tables and what the fo...
Submitted to Contest #322
I once knew a woman. A woman I thought I liked. I still know that woman, but I don’t like her anymore.Thinking you like someone is a game of exigencies, particularly when they live next door. You liked them because at a particular time in your life they seemed to cut the mustard. They seemed to appeal to whatever was clamorous in your nature, like knowing you were essentially a deadbeat but this one particular person might advance you to an upbeat.That’s not clear, is it? I could try this again, but I’m not Ernest Hemingway. I am not prepare...
Submitted to Contest #321
Bosie checked the appointment diary and noted that he was expecting a short consultation with a Mrs Pauline Harbour. He was rearranging his fuscia Holland Cooper tie when there came a peremptory rap on the door. Mrs Harbour, it would seem, had arrived at the wharf on time and was clearly keen to offload her cargo as quickly as possible.‘Dr Falcon?’ she enquired, as if he could be any other.‘That is me,’ he said, waving a manicured hand at the commodious faux leather chair set before him.‘Don’t you have a receptionist?’‘Indeed, but she’s off ...
Submitted to Contest #320
CW: Contains references to psychological abuse, cannibalism and implied domestic violence. Adalfuns had been taking the children into the forest with him of late. Never mind the lofty dangers of his occupation, or the aurochs and the wild boar. He told her the children would be safe with him. He knew exactly where they must stand when he felled a tree so they would not be crushed by the weight of them. He told her that animals were dumb and easily scared away by the thunder of a man’s lungs.He told her that it was good for Gransel to learn h...
Submitted to Contest #319
Caliban is not so readily evoked because of his low, feral nature, or to his pretensions as a would-be rapist. Characters such as these are common enough, a major motif without whom literature would barely exist. A part of the fabric, without which the tartan would have no plaid.No. Caliban is brought to mind so readily because he was ugly, and it is this singular deviation from physical form that so ensures his longevity.But was he a monster? Because if Caliban was a monster, then I, by definition, am the greatest monster of them all. If al...
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