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Rebecca Lewis

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2023

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150 Stories

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The Boy Who Apologized to a Dragon

I remember the first ship that mistook me for an island. It came at dawn, dragging its wooden ribs through gray water, sails hanging limp in the fog. The men aboard were starving. I could smell it on them. Sour sweat, empty stomachs, hope turning sharp around the edges. One of them spotted my back breaking the surface and shouted land. The others cried with relief. I stayed still. That is the hardest thing for a dragon to do. They lowered boats. Tiny things. Splinters with oars. The men rowed toward me laughing, already dreaming of fresh wat...

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The Returned of Bell Cross

Weekly Contest #353

The first time the river gave back a body, the town blamed the rain. Spring storms had been hammering the valley for weeks, turning roads to soup and pulling fence posts from the ground. The river swelled fat and brown, carrying branches, dead livestock, and once, the roof of a chicken coop. So when Pete Badawy surfaced along the bend near the mill, tangled in roots with his eyes full of mud, people said the current must have dragged him from the cemetery upstream. That explanation lasted three days. Then the grave was opened. Still occupied...

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Cataloged Under Nothing

The first time Henry noticed it, he blamed exhaustion. He’d been cataloging artifacts in the basement archive of the university museum for weeks, breathing in dust and handling objects no one had touched in decades. Most of it was routine. Clay shards, dull coins, fragments labeled with guesses more than facts. Then there was the mask. It was carved from dark wood, smooth in some places, splintered in others, as if it had been both carefully shaped and violently broken at the same time. The tag tied to it read simply- Origin unknown. That wa...

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Leaving Doesn’t Mean Abandoning

The sky was still undecided. At the edge of the lake, the world hovered between night and morning, the water holding the last scraps of darkness while the horizon quietly caught fire. Tara stood on the old wooden dock with her shoes in one hand and her father’s watch in the other, the metal cool against her palm. She had not wound it in three years. Behind her, the town still slept. No cars. No voices. Just the occasional rustle of reeds and the soft complaint of the dock beneath her bare feet. She used to come here as a child, dragged out o...

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The Blue Lantern on Maple Street

Every evening at exactly seven, a blue lantern appeared at the end of Maple Street. No one knew who lit it. It hung from the crooked branch of the old willow tree beside the abandoned house, glowing softly like a piece of the evening sky had drifted down and decided to stay. People noticed it, of course. They slowed their walks, pointed from car windows, whispered about it at the bakery. But no one went close. Except Barbara. Barbara was twelve, curious, and had the kind of mind that could not leave a mystery alone. She passed the willow tre...

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Hands Tell the Truth

I remember the first thing I ever heard. Not my own voice. His. “Again,” he said, somewhere above me, tired and stubborn and still full of hope. “One more time.” There was the scrape of a chair across stone, the clink of metal tools, the hiss of rain against the workshop windows. I did not yet have eyes, but I knew the rhythm of his footsteps. Slow when he was thinking. Sharp when he was angry. Silent, somehow, when he was afraid. For three winters, he built me. I know this because he told me, though he thought he was speaking only to the wa...

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Brass Key, Bad Timing

Laura had rehearsed the conversation all week. She stood outside the little bakery on Pine Street, watching the fog press against the windows. Inside, Greg was already there, hunched over a coffee he probably wasn’t drinking. He still tapped the side of the cup when he was nervous. She pushed the door open. The bell above it gave its usual cheerful ring, completely out of place. Greg looked up and smiled too quickly. “Hey. You made it.” “Of course,” Laura said, sliding into the seat across from him. “You said it was important.” He nodded, th...

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The Shape of a Wish

On the first Monday of every month, Holly cleaned out her desk. She sharpened pencils she never used, untangled charging cords that belonged to no known device, and threw away sticky notes with cryptic messages like “Call Ladonte???” and “DON’T FORGET THE THING.” At the very back of the bottom drawer, beneath an expired passport and a fossilized granola bar, she found a notebook. It was small, bound in dark blue cloth, with no title on the cover. The pages were thick and cream-colored, and on the first page, in her own handwriting, were the ...

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Line by Line

Zac used to wake up with sentences already forming. They would arrive half-finished, like someone else had started them in the night and left the rest for him to solve. He kept notebooks everywhere — by the bed, in the kitchen drawer, in his coat pocket, bent and soft from being handled too often. Words were never the problem. Until they were. It didn’t happen all at once. At first, it felt like fatigue. He would sit at his desk, fingers hovering, and nothing would come. Not even a bad sentence. Just a flat, silent space where something shou...

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Only What Matters

The first time Lola noticed it, she thought it was a trick of the light. She was standing in her kitchen, rinsing a cup she didn’t remember using, when something small and pale slid off the counter and landed near her wrist. It didn’t make a sound. It just… arrived. She dried her hands and looked down. It was a thin, translucent strip, curled like a shaving of wax. When she touched it, it was warm. Not hot, not cold. Familiar-warm, like something that had always belonged in her hands. The moment her fingers closed around it, she saw it. Not ...

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Left on Read

I should’ve known. That was the thought that finally landed, heavy and late, like a storm that waits until you’ve already left your umbrella behind. The message had come in around midnight. No name, just a number I didn’t recognize. “Hey. It’s been a while.” I stared at it longer than I should have. Long enough for old memories to start creeping in. The late drives. The quiet laughs. The way things ended without really ending at all. I told myself not to respond. I even set my phone down, turned off the light, and closed my eyes. Then it buz...

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I Tried to Wake Up Early and Created a New Identity

I once decided to become a morning person. Not slowly, not responsibly — just all at once. Five alarms. A motivational water bottle with times printed on the side. Three friends notified so I’d feel socially pressured into success. Day one started at 5:00 a.m., or at least that’s what my alarm claimed. My body disagreed. My soul filed a formal complaint. The first alarm went off. I woke up confused but optimistic, like a woman who thinks she might jog. The second felt more aggressive. By the third, I had entered negotiations. “Okay,” I whisp...

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You Stayed

Today is April 31. Everyone else called it a mistake. Clocks rolled from April 30 straight to May 1, phones updated overnight, calendars corrected themselves without asking. But when I woke up, the date on my kitchen wall still read April 31, written in thick black marker from a month ago. I hadn’t written it. At first, I assumed I’d forgotten. That happens more often than I like to admit. But the handwriting wasn’t mine. Too neat. Too careful, like someone trying not to be noticed. I left it alone and went about my morning. Coffee. Toast. T...

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They Collect Here

I used to think maps were honest. Lines meant roads. Dots meant towns. A little blue squiggle meant water you could drink if you were careful. It all looked so certain, laid flat under your hand. You could trace a path with your finger and believe the world would follow it. Out here, nothing follows. The road I’m on now isn’t on my map. It’s a thin strip of cracked asphalt cutting through a valley that smells faintly of metal, like old coins. The sky has that pale, washed-out look it gets before a storm, except there hasn’t been rain here in...

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Measured Life

TW- themes of death, end-of-life care, and grief. thump… thump… thump… They told Barbara the machine would keep him alive, but they never said what that meant for everything else. The room smelled faintly of antiseptic and warm plastic. Monitors hummed. A soft green line pulsed across the screen in steady rhythm, translating something ancient and human into light and sound. She sat beside the bed, elbows on her knees, watching that line rise and fall as if it were breathing for him. Her father had always been louder than this. He used to la...

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