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Scott Ellis

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2026

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7 Stories

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Overlord Forever, Apparently

Weekly Contest #357

The first time Miles Harper tried to tell Captain Triumph that he was secretly the Supreme Overlord of Evil, they were dangling upside down from a helicopter. "There's something important I need to tell you," Miles shouted over the wind. Captain Triumph grinned. "I knew it!" "You do?" "You finally want a cape." "What? No." "Trust me. You're ready." Before Miles could answer, Captain Triumph let go of the strut and dropped sixty feet to punch a giant robot in the face. The conversation never recovered. That was twenty-three years ago. In fair...

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Things I Texted My Husband: Between Gate C19 and Denver

Weekly Contest #356

Seat 14A. The aircraft has not yet moved.ME: We boarded. I’m in. Window seat like an idiot so I can watch the wing fall off in real time. 5:51 PMDON: wings don’t fall off 5:53 PMME: That’s exactly what someone would text the wife of a man whose wing fell off. 5:53 PMME: The flight attendant tried to gate-check my carry-on, the little one, and I said no thank you, it goes under the seat with me. It’s fragile. 5:54 PMDON: you ok? that’s a lot of feeling for a tote bag 5:55 PMME: I’m fine. I’m at a gas station of the soul, Donal...

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Tuesday

Weekly Contest #356

The cat was the color of dirty snow, which is why I almost stepped on it. It was the third of January and the kind of cold that gets into the seams of a person. I had gone out to the woodpile because the house was empty and the silence in it had a texture I could no longer stand, and I needed a reason to put my coat on. I had been splitting kindling for a stove I was the only one left to feed for eleven months. I had gotten good at it. The thing in the snow did not move when my boot came down beside it. I took it for a rag, or one of those c...

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One Boot in the Corridor

Weekly Contest #356

They taught me to be grateful before they taught me to walk.I have the records. My first word, logged by a convoy ethnographer who logged everything that year, was not mama or no but a sound the transcriber rendered as tan — which the survivor families decided, generously, was an infant attempt at thanks. There is a plaque. I have seen the plaque. A baby’s nonsense, set in resin in the Hall of the Spared aboard the Magdalen, beside four hundred and eleven other names, because four hundred and eleven of us came through.I was the youngest. Thr...

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Please Keep the Burbon Off the Piano

Weekly Contest #355

Pastor Bell’s funeral became a roast the moment someone brought bourbon into the fellowship hall.Technically, alcohol was forbidden on church property. But Pastor Bell had spent thirty-two years selectively enforcing rules depending on whether he found the sinner annoying, and since half the congregation suspected he’d once baptized a man with a hangover while mildly drunk himself, nobody objected too loudly when the bottle appeared beside the potato salad.The widow objected a little.“Just keep it off the piano,” Marianne Bell said.Everyone ...

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Quick Deaths

Weekly Contest #354

Kael armed the forbidden gas at 03:47 local time, fourteen minutes before the bakery ovens would have been lit.The standard harvest protocols glowed amber on the console beside it. Two glyphs. He needed only to touch one.The amber would take the planet conscious — atmosphere intact, populations intact, the fleet descending into cities still arguing about the morning news. It was what the protocols required. It was what scouts did.The silver glyph was older. Outlawed for fifty years. Marked on every console as a relic the fleet had decided to...

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The Forty-Fourth

Weekly Contest #352

Stars I am dying beneath a sky that does not care. The stars above Verantis are unfamiliar. Cold. Indifferent. They have seen countless deaths and will see countless more. Mine is nothing special. My father traced the constellations of Levine Prime for me when I was seven. I look up now and see nothing I recognize. I lie where my legs finally stopped working, two hundred feet past the compound wall, and stare up at them. Blood pools beneath me. Warm at first. Cooling now. The ancestral blade lies beside me, still clutched in fingers that no ...

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