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Rebecca Lewis

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2023

Stories
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60 Followers
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150 Stories

1418 karma pts

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At 2:13

2:13 a.m. The number hums on the clock — blue, steady, absolute. Belinda doesn’t need the alarm anymore; her body keeps the time for her. She lies still, listening — the soft tick of the fridge, the wind pressing against the window, the faint hum under her ribs. The world feels paused, waiting for her to begin.She reaches for the notebook without turning on the light. The paper is worn thin at the corners, pages furred from her fingers. The pen sits exactly where it should — capped, angled toward her hand. Left thumb to spine, right hand poi...

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The Quiet That Stayed

Every Sunday night at 11:11, Tania lit a single candle. No prayers, no hymns — only the rasp of the match, the breath that followed, and the small surrender of fire to wick. She set the candle on the windowsill beside a chipped mug of water, folded her legs beneath her, and waited for the silence to settle.It began as remembrance. Her brother had died at 11:11 on a Sunday night, and the act of lighting the candle gave that hour shape, kept it from collapsing into ordinary time. But repetition has gravity; it pulled her into devotion. The rit...

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The Ninth Circle

The salt never stays white in Saint Ilya. By morning it yellows like old teeth, drinking the valley’s breath. Rachel pours another line across the church steps. Her hands tremble less from fear than from the echo of every time she’s done this before. The crystals cling to her fingers — remembering her, then forgetting.Behind her, the congregation hums the old tune — the one no one writes down because everyone swears they remember it. Each year it changes, as though the valley corrects them. Tonight it drifts between hymn and dirge, the sound...

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Children of the Two Suns

The First Dawn Before there were names, before there were even people, there was the Cold Sky. The sun did not rise then — it wandered. Sometimes it passed over the world and burned it, and sometimes it forgot the world entirely.The earth grew tired of waiting and sent forth the Stone Mothers- twelve pillars of living rock who stood upon the ridge and sang. Their song was wordless, long, and patient. It told the sun stories of the rivers and mountains, coaxing it to return each morning.The sun, flattered by their song, made a covenant- “...

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Smoke Among the Branches Part One

The Map of Fire Lantern light wavered as Amy crouched by the oak table — Adam’s ‘family meeting’ table. Knife scars, stains, and scratched names marked the wood, records of a life she’d trusted without question.Adam leaned forward across it, eyes shining with that feverish excitement he called vision. “We’ll take the shipments tonight. The town will thank us when we’re done. They don’t see it yet, but we’re saving them from themselves.”The words echoed oddly in the dim room, like a sermon half-swallowed by shadows. Amy wanted to believe ...

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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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