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Rebecca Lewis

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2023

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58 Followers
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150 Stories

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Proof of Flight

The Leap I was there the night he finally did it.Or maybe I should say the night he nearly didn’t. From the seats, you couldn’t tell. The crowd only saw the end — the bow, the grin, the trembling hands raised to the lights. But from where I stood, from the corner just off stage, every second stretched into a question I wasn’t sure I wanted answered.Raja had been chasing this one move for years. The “leap,” as he called it, as though the word could contain the danger or the obsession. To the rest of the world it was a stunt- a mid-air rot...

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The Race Beyond the Finish

Stephen woke before the alarm, as if alarms were for other people. His body ticked forward on its own clock, one that denied him the mercy of oversleeping. Four a.m. meant vertical, breathing, moving — no negotiations. The room smelled faintly of sweat and liniment, the sour perfume of maintenance. He sat on the edge of the bed, thumbs pressing into the knots of his thighs, testing the machinery. At thirty-six, he was more repair than flesh- knees webbed with tendonitis, a shin that hummed with old fractures, a shoulder that clicked in tempo...

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The Contest for the Last Algorithm

1. The Archive stood at the edge of the city like a cathedral gutted and rebuilt by machines. Its glass ribs stretched into the bruised evening sky, and its doors whispered as they opened to admit the two competitors.Barbara walked first, her shoulders set, her hands tight around the satchel that held her tools. She had grown up scavenging machine parts in the rustbelt, eating out of dented cans while others streamed into augmented classrooms. What she lacked in pedigree she made up for in persistence. Today was her chance to prove that....

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Minutes Made of Flesh

At the center of town stood the clocktower, always ten minutes slow. No one remembered who built it. The brass gears clicked, the pendulum swung, and the hands moved like tired soldiers dragging their boots through mud. Children grew up marking time by it. Shops opened late, school started late, lovers met ten minutes later than they meant to. The town lived on borrowed minutes.What no one knew was that behind the tower’s thick stone face, in a chamber sealed shut for centuries, lived a boy. Or something that still looked like one. He had be...

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Watching Without Walking

“Where were you last night?” “Don’t start.” “I waited three hours.” “You shouldn’t have.” “You said you’d be there.” “I changed my mind.” “You always change your mind when it matters.” “Because you never let things go.” “Because you keep running.” “I’m not running. I’m surviving.” “Surviving looks a lot like hiding.” “Easy for you to say. You’ve got nothing chasing you.” “I’ve got you chasing me with excuses.” “…That’s not fair.” “Neither is waiting at an empty station with a bag packed.” “I didn’t ask you to wait.” “You didn’t have to. I wa...

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Gravity Does

The first thing you should know is I never lie. Not about anything that matters. I skip details, rearrange them, press them into a shape that holds. If the world insists on chaos, isn’t it kinder to stack the pieces before passing them along?Take last Tuesday. I told the police it was a quiet evening — me on the balcony, nursing my one cigarette of the week, when I saw him fall. That’s true. I did see him fall. I just didn’t mention I’d been in his apartment first. Otherwise they’d assume I was involved. Which I wasn’t. Not in the way they’d...

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Capsules of Silence

Matt was the last man. Or so he believed.New Carthage — silent towers, sky in glass. The city had the neat geometry of abandonment- plazas like clean wounds, gutters full of folded leaves, neon signs gone to soft bruises. Food caches under stairwells. Rusted radios in grocery aisles, hissing with the memory of static. Nothing else.Each dawn he climbed. The roof was ritual. He liked the climb- a slow sprawl of staircases, the smell of old oil and snow that never melted. Scope to horizon. Notebook to page. Day 342. No movement. I am the only o...

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The First Cathedral

I remember fire. Not the fleeting flame of lightning, but the crawling, ravenous blaze men first called into being when they split my children for kindling. It gnawed at my flesh, scrawled black scars that still run deep beneath moss and soil. But fire does not frighten me. Fire is only a messenger, one of many tongues of time. Hatred is too small, too fleeting, for what I am.I am older than hatred. Older than man. Before their first word was uttered, before they painted the walls of caves with trembling hands, I stretched across the horizon...

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Ash Without Fire

The fire started where no fire should have. It was late September, a damp season, the kind where fallen leaves clung wetly to boots and fog stitched itself between the pines. No lightning storms had passed through. No campers had been seen on the trails. Yet a glow was spotted in the hollow behind Gray Elk Ridge, pulsing orange like a lantern cupped in the earth’s palm.When the volunteer fire crew hiked up, they found nothing burning but the clearing itself — grass smoldering, soil itself hissing with heat, tree trunks untouched. It was as i...

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The Forest Without Exits

Konel had walked this trail a dozen times. It was a narrow loop through ridge pines, his thinking place, familiar and predictable. The air here always carried that resinous sharpness, the kind that cleared his lungs and quieted his mind. He knew the bends, the exposed roots, even the hollow log where chipmunks darted in and out.But this time, the trail wasn’t there.At first, it was just a wrong bend, a tree he didn’t recognize. Then the markers vanished altogether. Every trunk looked identical, lined up like soldiers. The underbrush pressed ...

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After the Burning

The smoke rose in thin, crooked ribbons, black against the pale morning sky. The barn leaned sideways like it was tired of standing. Ash clung to the grass. The air stank of burnt hay and something sharper — oil, maybe.Michael sat on the overturned water trough, hands raw from beating at the flames with a useless wool blanket. His sister, Sarah, stood in front of him, still clutching the tractor keys, knuckles white. Neither spoke. The fire’s crackle was gone, replaced by the faint hiss of damp embers.Finally, Sarah said, “This is all my fau...

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A Weapon Made of Silence

Katie did not kill him. She pressed her back against the wall, every muscle strung tight as wire, while the man’s footsteps dragged past. His laugh - slurred, ugly - hung in the air like smoke. The shadow inside her hissed, claws raking along her ribs, aching for blood. It didn’t retreat. It never did.Weeks blurred into one another. At work, Katie typed until her fingers cramped, eyes locked on screens that paid too little to keep her brother alive. Nights were worse. She sat by his hospital bed, listening to the shallow rhythm of his breath...

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Fragments of Kindness

The villagers called it the Mireling. They said it had teeth like knives, eyes like burning coals, and a voice that could rot marrow. They nailed charms to their doors, left bowls of salt at crossroads, and whispered prayers whenever the swamp mist rolled too thick.But the Mireling never hurt them. It watched.It lived in the black water, slipping between reeds and shadows. Its body was not built for beauty — its skin gleamed slick and gray, its limbs too long, its jaw too crooked. When it tried to smile, the curve looked like a wound. And wh...

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The Coin

The bus always felt like a holding cell. Metal walls, stale air, faces dulled by exhaustion. Sara boarded every evening at the same stop, after the long fluorescent grind of her office job. She’d grip the pole, sway with the jerks of the road, and try not to breathe too deeply.Tonight, though, something was different.When the doors hissed open at Main and Fifth, a man climbed aboard who looked like he’d walked out of an old photograph. His suit was dated — not vintage stylish, just worn-out, wrong somehow. The jacket sagged at the shoulders,...

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Echoes in the Chamber

The council chamber throbbed with voices — angry, proud, self-important. Men in tailored suits flung papers across tables. Women in sharp blazers jabbed fingers in the air. Everyone wanted to be the one holding the steering wheel of the city.At the back of the room, half-shadowed against the wall, Ann polished her glasses with a soft square of cloth. She looked like someone’s aunt who had wandered in by mistake, cardigan sleeves rolled to the elbow, a thermos of weak tea at her side. No one noticed her unless they needed a signature on the m...

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