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Rebecca Lewis

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2023

Stories (396)

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25 Followers

24 Following

396 Stories

679 karma pts

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Ghost Soup (The Pot Will Remember)

How to Make Ghost Soup A recipe for one lonely night — or every night thereafter. Prep Time- 3 hours of regret, 1 hour of hesitation Cook Time- One eternal simmer Serves- You, and the things you cannot forget (and those that do not forget you) Ingredients 1 bruised but intact memory, sharp-edged (handle with care) 3 whispers caught in the corners of an empty room (fresh whispers preferred; stale ones tend to linger) 2 teaspoons dried regret (fresh is too volatile) 1 large handful old photographs, torn or ...

4 likes

After the Whispers

March 2, 2025 I signed the lease today. Six months. Crescent Hill, just outside of town. The house is old — real wood floors, big windows, cracked walls. Too cheap for what it is, but the landlord, Mr. Yu, was eager to get someone in. Said the place has been empty a while. I need the space. And the quiet. March 3, 2025 First night. Wind shakes the windows. House creaks like it’s breathing. I keep telling myself- old houses sound alive. That’s all. Unpacked a few boxes. Bedroom’s upstairs, office downstairs. I’ll write here. No e...

4 likes

Turn Here

The Left Turn At the intersection, I could go right and head home — but turning left would take me somewhere I hadn’t been in almost fifteen years. My blinker clicked softly in the quiet cabin of the car, ticking toward the predictable safety of my apartment, my dog, and a leftover meatloaf dinner. The rain had slowed to a mist. Streetlights cast long shadows across the wet pavement, everything glowing slightly unreal, like the world couldn’t decide if it was dreaming or not. I sat there too long. A car behind me honked once, politely...

2 likes

The Last Ten Minutes

The Edge of the Fireline We’d been driving through smoke for miles — but now it wasn’t just smoke. It was embers on the wind. Glowing flecks flared past the windshield like insects lit from within. The sun was a red blister in the sky, barely visible through the haze. Inside the truck, it was quiet except for the voice on the radio. “…—repeat, the fire has jumped containment at Sector Nine. All units, fall back to Ridgecrest. Do not attempt rescue operations beyond Fireline Delta. I say again—” Tigere killed the volume with a jab of h...

3 likes

Red Dust

THE BIGGEST LIE I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life. “My brother was a good man.” Silence wrapped around the room like fog. A few nods. A sniffle from the second row. But mostly, people just stared back, waiting to believe something they could carry home like a souvenir. I kept going. “He always put others before himself. He was kind. He was loyal. He loved this town, and he never ran from anything.” All of that was a lie. My brother, Bill, had been a lot of things. Charming when it suited him. Manipula...

3 likes

Just the Way She Liked It

You Know What? I Quit. The day Emily Griffin quit her job, it wasn’t with a dramatic exit or a chair thrown through a window. No yelling, no tears. Just four quiet words.“You know what? I quit.”She said it to no one in particular. Her manager, Matt, was in a meeting — some quarterly strategy summit with a bunch of guys who used words like “synergy” and “value prop” without vomiting in their mouths. Emily was standing in front of the break room coffee machine, watching it sputter out a stream of burned liquid caffeine, and it just hit her....

3 likes

The Woman in the Car

The retreat promised clarity, discipline, and breakthroughs. On the brochure, it showed a lodge framed by pine trees, perched above a lake like a sentence waiting to be written. The twelve attendees, selected by blind submission, were told to leave distractions at home. No phones. No Wi-Fi. Just notebooks, laptops, and the urge to write something real.Jayla arrived with two suitcases and a six-month case of writer's block. Her debut novel had made modest waves, enough to land her on panels and under pressure. She hadn’t written anything good...

3 likes

The Hidden Cell

Kelly Bruce checked the clock. 3:58 p.m.The grant application was due at 5:00 p.m. sharp, and if she missed it, her research lab would shut down in less than three months. That meant no more experiments, no more salaries for her grad students, and seven years of cancer therapy research swirling down the drain.She cracked her knuckles. Focus.The abstract was done. The budget section had been finalized last night. But the "broader impact" section — the part where she had to explain why her work mattered beyond the walls of academia — was still...

3 likes

The Hours Between

During the day, Trevor Hiltbrand was nothing special. A mild-mannered copywriter at a mid-sized marketing firm, he spent hours staring at his monitor, the cursor blinking like a metronome marking time on his wasted potential. He drank lukewarm coffee, nodded along in meetings, and typed out lifeless taglines for products he didn’t care about.But when night fell, everything changed.It wasn’t insomnia. Trevor slept just fine — just not at night. He had learned long ago to give up on a 9-to-5 schedule for anything meaningful. At 11 p.m., someth...

3 likes

The Truth Afterward

The email came at 2:14 a.m., a time when no good email ever arrives.Subject: URGENT - “The Devil You Know” EditsFrom: erika.pope@veritaspress.comTo: felixlloyd.writer@gmail.comFelix Lloyd opened it, already wincing.Felix,We need to talk. You know I don’t get squeamish, but Chapter 14? That’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. You crossed a line.Call me first thing.— Erika He read it twice, then again. His stomach turned in that cold, hollow way it did when rent was due and the bank account hovered just above zero.He knew exactly what she meant.Cha...

3 likes

The Hunger That Waits

Ashes.They floated, weightless and slow, dancing through the pale morning light. What was once a home was now a charcoal outline, smoldering and skeletal. The oak beam that used to frame the living room buckled with a groan and collapsed into embers.Taylor Robinson stood at the edge of the ruin, boots planted in the damp earth, a duffel bag at his feet. Smoke clung to his coat, woven into the threads like a curse. He didn’t move. Not yet. Not until he was sure it was done.A crow cawed somewhere overhead. He didn’t look up.The fire had starte...

3 likes

Red Stain

Rain hammered the roof of the stolen car. Wipers fought a losing battle against the downpour. Pat kept one eye on the road, the other on the duffel bag in the backseat."We're almost there," he said, voice low.Erin didn’t answer. She stared out the passenger window, her arms folded tight. Her damp hair clung to her cheeks. She hadn't spoken since they left the bank.Pat glanced at her. "You okay?"She nodded, then shook her head. "No. I'm not."They drove on in silence. The back roads twisted through the forest like veins, dark and pulsing. Pat ...

2 likes

The Clean Slate

The night Sal signed the waiver, the air inside the clinic was cold and sterile, humming faintly with fluorescent lights. There was no ceremony, no dramatic flourish. Just a clipboard, a signature, and a nod from the tech in the gray scrubs. It felt too easy, given what he was about to do.He sat in the waiting room for twenty minutes after that, the waiver still clutched in his hand like a confession. No one else was there. Just him and a looping video on the wall about the future of memory engineering. "Imagine a life unburdened," the narra...

2 likes

The Fire Beneath the Hero

THE HERO’S SHADOW I wasn’t always the villain.There was a time when Pat Crowley and I trained together, brothers in arms at the Academy, both born into a city that never gave anything without a fight. We were the same, at first. Eager. Hungry. Full of fire. He just happened to point his fire upward, toward justice, while mine went inward, burning me hollow from the inside.We graduated top of our class — Pat first, me second, by half a point. That half-point ruined everything.He got the Sector 5 commendation. The Commander’s sigil. A hands...

2 likes

The Override

Andrew Kavovit had one rule- never override a security protocol. Not even for the President. It was the kind of principle that kept him alive through seventeen years as a systems engineer at Harlow SecureTech — the world’s most advanced private security firm.But tonight, as rain needled the glass dome above his desk and the lights of the city glowed like warning signs, he hovered his fingers over the console, one tap away from obliterating that rule.It was 2:46 a.m., and he had exactly seven minutes before the system’s watchdog A.I. would re...

2 likes

Author bio

I love. I don’t do things halfway, and I don’t know how to be detached when something matters to me. When I commit, I’m all in — even when it costs me, even when I know it might hurt. I notice everything- shifts in tone, small details, when something feels off. Once I see it, I can’t unsee it. I need things to mean something. I don’t skim through life or people. I sit with feelings, replay moments, question narratives, and refuse to accept easy answers just to be comfortable. I don’t trust tidy moral stories or authority for its own sake. I’m drawn to darker, moodier art because it feels honest — it doesn’t pretend everything is okay when it isn’t. I’m grieving, and that’s real, but it isn’t all of who I am. I’m loyal to my core, aware, creative, and honest. I don’t want platitudes or surface-level fixes. I want the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. I loved hard. I lost hard. And I’m still here. Bruised, human, and stronger than I give myself credit for.