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Sarah Xenos

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2024

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27 Followers
9 Following

27 Stories

422 karma pts

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The Knock Beyond the Door

Weekly Contest #367

They ask if she is ready to close it, as if readiness has any place in the cold, humming dark. The air tastes of copper and burned dust, and the floor trembles beneath our boots with the ship's low, wounded groan. The vibration climbs through the soles of our feet and settles in our knees. She does not answer, because if she speaks, even once, the grief might break through. Beyond the door, something shifts—a slow scrape of metal against metal, soft but deliberate, close enough to crawl beneath the skin and raise the hairs along her arms. R...

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The Errors Were Waiting

Weekly Contest #366

I should have read the signs sooner. I should have trusted the unease that had been tightening inside me long before it had a name. It gathered beneath my ribs whenever the office lights hummed overhead, and the stale smell of burnt coffee drifted through the corridor. Her empty desk sat too neatly in the corner, its laminate surface scrubbed to a faint chemical shine, arranged with the precision of something already erased. Even before anyone spoke the decision aloud, the air around that desk had changed. It felt polished too clean, cool wi...

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The Light Absence Leaves

Weekly Contest #364

She looked around the empty room, and the truth of it struck her with a force she could not brace against. There was nothing left. No furniture, no sound, no small task to hide behind. She sat because her body had finally given up carrying what her heart could not. Then the grief came, harsh and unlovely, tearing through everything she had pressed down since her mum died. She wept the way she should have wept then, as if some buried part of her had been waiting for the house to be cleared before it could believe, fully and brutally, that he...

8 likes 1 comment 1
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Where the Sweetness Calls Her Home

Weekly Contest #362

The smell found her first: butter browning at the edges, sugar melting sharp and sweet, bread holding the pan's last warmth. It should have meant morning. Safety. Someone was humming in a kitchen that had been silent for years. Instead, it drifted through the dim hallway like a lullaby remembered wrong—too rich, too deliberate, too cruelly domestic—where she woke beneath a ceiling stained the colour of old tea, one hand trailing down wallpaper veined with damp. The paper yielded beneath her fingertips, clammy as skin, as if the house itself ...

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The Last Thing She Mistook for Hers

Weekly Contest #359

She nearly faltered when she entered the party. The room was steeped in amber light and the low, cultivated murmur of expensive conversation, all crystal laughter, champagne brightness, and the soft drift of rare perfume. Beneath the chandeliers, among the gleam of silver trays and the hush of silk against silk, faces turned with practised curiosity. And of all the people she might have expected to find in that gilded splendour, this was the one she had least imagined. There she stood—the woman who had spent years reducing her, almost delica...

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The Cost of Being Heard

Weekly Contest #358

No one had believed in me. That was their first mistake. She sat with the words before her, each line steeped in anger, humiliation, and pain held so long it no longer felt separate from the body that carried it. She was preparing for a moment she had once thought would never be hers. Now she was expected to write a speech for a dinner held in her honour, because her research had become too important to dismiss and too valuable to deny. She had to choose whether to inhabit the part she had perfected for years or use that sudden light to spea...

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The Ribbon

Weekly Contest #357

I watched her smile as they placed the prize in her hands once more, and in that instant felt something dark and silken stir awake within me, slow as smoke winding through a locked room. I stood beside her with tears caught like thorns beneath my ribs while the judges gazed blandly past the truth, as though beauty and injustice had long ago ceased to trouble even the dust upon their souls. She accepted another runner-up ribbon with grave composure, almost spectral in her calm, as though disappointment had become a pale and patient shroud wor...

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The Necklace in the Snow

Weekly Contest #356

On a bleak winter morning, it was her turn to walk the dog. The sky was still black, and the empty street stretched before her like a place the world had forgotten. Fresh snow covered the ground in a pale, unbroken sheet, muting every sound until even her footsteps seemed swallowed by the dark. The cold seeped through her coat and settled deep in her bones, making every breath sting. Her dog moved ahead in uneasy circles, stopping now and then to stare into the stillness, as though it sensed something she could not. Once, it let out a low wh...

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Lowered with him

Weekly Contest #355

Every eye in the church finds her in the front row. Their attention presses against her skin, hot and inescapable, and all she wants is to disappear into the polished wood of the pew. Too many people have come—more than she expected, and more than a man like him deserves. She never imagined so many would gather to mourn a man they could barely stand in life. Perhaps that is why his sister chose the church instead of the small community centre they first planned, as though a larger room, higher ceilings, and stained-glass light might somehow ...

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Under the Quiet Stars A night of solitude, small promises, and learning to rest

The night was so clear it felt as if the world had been rinsed clean. Above the dark treeline, stars crowded the velvet sky—pin-sharp points and steady lights. Mara looked up in quiet wonder, finally doing what she'd wanted for years: sleeping outside beneath them. This year, she'd decided, would be for the things she truly wanted.A thin moon hovered to one side like a careful brushstroke, pale enough to leave the constellations intact. The Milky Way ran overhead in a bright seam. After a long look around, she felt certain she was exactly wh...

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First Light: A Promise Renewed A Journey of Determination and New Beginnings

Weekly Contest #352

She blinked awake, the remnants of sleep clinging stubbornly to the edges of her consciousness. As she slipped from the warmth of her sheets, instinct guided her hand to the phone—5:00 a.m. The world outside her window was wrapped in a hush, a gentle stillness inviting her to start anew. Today marked the first sunrise of her new running ritual—a promise she'd made to herself in a rare, honest moment the night before. The words echoed with meaning, shadowed by memories of abandoned starts: a rainy evening ending in discouragement, a gym membe...

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Last Light on the Mango Tree Holding On and Letting Go of Home

Weekly Contest #346

Cradling her glass, she takes a slow sip of wine, savouring the crisp, lingering flavour as it dances on her tongue. The golden evening light seeps gently through the leaves of the sprawling mango tree beyond the porch, and she lets her gaze drift, soaking in each sunbeam. Dappled shadows flicker across the timber boards, and the air is sweet with the subtle scent of mango blossoms. Sunlight glints off the tree’s rough bark, casting shifting patterns that ripple across the boards. The distant drone of cicadas thrums, blending with the hush o...

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Tracks of Uncertainty A Journey Between Farewell and Fear

Weekly Contest #345

She draws in a trembling breath as she finally steps onto the train, the cool rush of air prickling her flushed cheeks and tasting faintly metallic on her tongue, like old coins. Tiny beads of sweat mingle with mascara at her brow, leaving a salty tang at the corner of her mouth as she tries to wipe them away. Her eyes flicker to her watch—9:57 am, the hands mocking her with each tick. Today will be a slog. The knowledge gnaws at her gut, twisting tighter with every heartbeat. She isn't ready, not for the day, and certainly not for the possi...

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Between Bush Tracks and Bonds: Mary’s Sunday Reckoning When Routine, Adventure and Love Collide Amidst the Wild Australian Bush

Weekly Contest #343

For two years, Mary's feet had worn a path along the same Sunday route, her boots memorising each bend and tree, the rhythm a comfort against the unpredictability of life. But lately, a gnawing restlessness pressed at her edges—a longing for something new, a whisper that perhaps the world had more to offer than familiar bush tracks. She'd lingered over the latest trail maps for hours, trading stories with locals at the servo over flat whites, the possibilities flaring in her mind. Today, she decided, would be different. She needed the world ...

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Sunlit Tea and Homecomings

Weekly Contest #339

After a long, draining day at the office, she slips off her shoes and puts the kettle on. The gentle hush of the kitchen settles around her. She listens to the soft hiss of water heating, punctuated by the occasional click and pop—small, familiar sounds that promise comfort after hours under the harsh glare of fluorescent lights. Each subtle noise seems to stretch the quiet, filling her with a fragile sense of anticipation. She moves with slow, deliberate care. Opening the cupboard, she pauses, letting her fingers drift over a colourful arra...

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