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Rebecca Lewis

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2023

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61 Followers
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150 Stories

1551 karma pts

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When the Truth Stops Waiting

×This story includes themes of reproductive autonomy, pressured decision-making, family estrangement, and emotional trauma. Readers will encounter discussions of a past abortion and the long-term impact of a broken sibling relationship.× Megan kept the letter in the quietest place in her apartment. It lived in the second drawer of the bedside table, under a stack of receipts that she had promised to sort. The envelope was soft from handling. The ink on the front had started to fade. But she knew every loop and slant of her sister’s handwrit...

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You Missed Something

Juli had been back in the city for only two weeks, and already the past felt closer than it should. People warned that trauma made the brain noisy, hungry for meaning in randomness. She accepted the neuroscience of that, even respected it. But she trusted observation more than warnings. The apartment her cousin lent her was nothing romantic. The pipes rattled, the windows sighed, and the heater argued with the laws of thermodynamics. It gave her no illusions of permanence, which was oddly comforting. She rebuilt her days methodically, writin...

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Rook’s Streetlight

The streetlight hummed like it had something to say. Barbara noticed it every night on her walk home. She always took Birch Lane, even though her route didn’t require it. Something about the narrow street and its leaning maples felt familiar, like a place she had known once but forgotten. The streetlight stood at the bend, a tall metal spine with a chipped base and a glass bulb that glowed the same washed yellow no matter the weather. It never flickered, never dimmed, never stopped its low steady hum. Most people ignored it. Barbara listened...

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The Last Warmth

Heather saw the hospital elevator doors sliding shut and shoved her hand in just in time. The metal edges bumped her knuckles. Inside, her brother Adam sat in a wheelchair, pale but restless, turning the thin plastic bracelet on his wrist like it was a puzzle he meant to crack open. “You’re late,” he said. “You’re impossible,” she said, catching her breath as she took the handles and pushed him toward the garden terrace. The hallway smelled like antiseptic and chicken soup from the visitor kitchenette. They rode in silence past the nurses’ s...

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The Direction She Chose

Emily let the train settle into its pace. The early evening light stretched across the windows, thin and gold. She watched it flicker over the passengers around her. Most of them carried the calm of routine. They boarded trains like this every week, maybe every day. She wondered if any of them were leaving something behind that tugged at them the way Keith tugged at her thoughts. A sudden, irrational anger flared in her chest. How easily they went about their lives — scrolling, unwrapping sandwiches, talking about nothing. How untouched they...

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A Light Left On Between Them

“Goodbye.” Steve stayed rooted to the platform long after the train shrank into a streak of silver and vanished into the tunnel. The noise of the station came back in pieces. Someone laughed near the ticket kiosk. A suitcase rolled over a crack in the tile. A vendor called out about hot tea. None of it landed. He finally sat on a bench and let his hands fall between his knees. He had pictured this moment a hundred times, but every version ended with Amanda choosing him. Not this quiet exile she walked into, head high, heart guarded. A gust o...

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When the Air Changed

The Start It began quietly. No spark, no spotlight. Just two people crossing paths on an ordinary day that should’ve dissolved into the pile of forgettable ones. You asked a question like you were almost afraid to disturb the air. I answered with a warmth that startled me, a touch softer than I meant to be. Nothing dramatic happened. Still, something shifted — like a faint click beneath the floorboards. We didn’t feel it at first. We were both too wrapped in our own separate worlds to notice the new thread forming between them. But it was t...

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The Riverbank Beneath the Storm

It was a dark and stormy night, the kind that rattled shutters and made every tree look like it wanted to climb through your window. Savannah stood on her grandmother’s porch with a flashlight that kept flickering like it had second thoughts. She had come back to settle the old house after the funeral, but the storm made even the simplest task feel like trouble was waiting around the corner. Inside, the air was thick with dust and memory. The wooden floor groaned under her boots. A picture frame tilted on the wall as if it had been listening...

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Quite Work

Brandon kept the workshop lights on long after midnight again. The neighbors thought he was building furniture. His sister thought he was avoiding his grief. Only the walls knew the truth. Brandon was addicted to fixing things that were never really broken. It started with a chipped teacup. He glued it together and felt a small spark in his chest, warm and bright, the way a single match looks in a dark room. Then came the old radio from the attic, the cracked photo frame, the wobbly chair. Soon he was hunting for broken objects the way other...

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The Softness After

I drift above the floorboards the way smoke drifts from a candle that forgot it was supposed to burn out. Most nights are quiet in this old house. The walls groan, the windows shiver, and I listen to it all the way someone alive listens to rain. I do not remember the moment I died. Memory is slippery when you have no hands to hold it. I know I was someone who loved this place. I know the rose garden outside once smelled sweeter than anything in my life. I know the piano in the parlor remembers my fingers even if I no longer have any. The new...

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The Small Truths of Moving Forward

James stayed on the fire escape until the cold had settled so deeply into his sleeves that he could feel each thread stiffen. By then the couple below had vanished around the corner, swallowed by the grid of city streets. The moment was already drifting into memory, thin as breath on glass. He slipped back inside and shut the window, trapping the last bit of cold behind him like a stowaway. The apartment felt expectant. It was a strange feeling, almost like stepping into a room that had been holding its breath. He moved through it slowly. Th...

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The Shape of Quiet

The house on Wren Street kept its secrets in the quiet way old places do. Narrow and two-storied, its chipped paint curled like dried petals, and the porch rail leaned forward as if listening. Gauri lived there three months before the noises began. Not the soft settling of beams or the grumble of pipes, but a gentle tapping that traveled through the walls with the persistence of a polite visitor. She tried ignoring it. She played the radio late into the night, letting voices blur together until they formed a single, numbing haze. She layered...

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When the World Went Quiet

I remember the night the power went out. Not just in the house — everywhere. The whole grid collapsed, like someone had yanked the plug on the world. No warning, no storm. One moment everything buzzed with electricity, and the next it was all gone. Lights blinked out. Screens froze. The hum of modern life died in an instant. At first, we thought it was just our block. Then we stepped outside and saw that the entire neighborhood was dark. No porch lights. No distant glow from traffic. The sky looked huge, like it had grown overnight. My dad s...

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The Sky That Called Him Back

In the summer of 1987, in a dusty corner of a gas station off Route 46 in New Jersey, eight-year-old Dale King sat on a torn vinyl bench, swinging his legs and trying to disappear. His mother was arguing with the mechanic — something about a radiator leak and a price that didn’t match the sign out front. The air smelled like motor oil and burnt coffee. A flickering fluorescent light buzzed overhead like it was running out of reasons to stay alive. That’s when Dale saw it — a quarter, face-up, right at the base of a soda machine. It wasn’t gr...

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The Summer Before I Knew Myself

When I think of that summer, it always starts with the cicadas. Their sound wasn’t just noise; it lived inside the air, inside my teeth, inside the boards of the porch. It was a kind of weather. A shimmer that made everything feel a little far away, as if the whole neighborhood was already a memory even while we were still living it. I can still see the porch. The paint curling like dried petals, thin enough to flake off onto the backs of my thighs when I sat too long. The wood held the heat no matter the hour. It smelled of old summers sunk...

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