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Scott Ellis

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2026

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8 Stories

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The Repair

Weekly Contest #358

The violin had survived three countries, two oceans, and twenty years. It did not survive falling off a chair. Mateo stood very still and looked at the two pieces of it on the concrete floor of the maintenance room, and for a moment he could not make his mind do anything at all. A jagged crack had split the body nearly in half. One of the f-holes had torn. The bridge lay a few feet away, where it had skidded. Tomorrow was the competition. Tomorrow was the thing that wasn't supposed to be possible for someone like him — the reason he had spen...

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Balance

Weekly Contest #358

I should have hated Nick Mercer. Standing beside his grave, I tried. The rain tapped softly against the black umbrellas gathered around the cemetery. Pastor Mercer stood at the head of his son's casket and spoke about hope, and heaven, and the kind of peace that didn't make any sense when you were staring at a hole in the ground. I heard none of it. All I could think about was the boy in the casket. The boy who had broken my heart, and saved my life, and then taken it apart. My left hand tightened around the handle of my cane. My right hand ...

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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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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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