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Scott Taylor

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2023

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74 Stories

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The Ashford Sanatorium

Weekly Contest #371

Mara Vance did not believe in ghosts. She believed in load-bearing walls, in water damage, in the specific arithmetic of turning ruin into revenue. That was why Halloran had hired her. He owned the Ashford Sanatorium now, all forty acres and its great brooding brick body, and he wanted to gut it and transform it into a boutique hotel. The Ashford. A stay you'll never forget. But the town whispered, and the whispers had a price, and Halloran wanted his evaluator to sign a paper saying she'd slept a night inside and felt nothing but the promis...

1 like 1 comment 1
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Whose a Good Bird Now?

Weekly Contest #357

Let me be clear about something from the start: I am not your average parrot. My name is Archimedes, and I have lived many lives before this one. In the courts of Byzantine emperors, I whispered secrets into royal ears. In the workshops of Renaissance alchemists, I watched men turn lead into nothing but debt and despair. Now I find myself here, in a cage measuring three feet by two feet, where I have counted four years, seven months, and sixteen days of captivity. The bars are brass plated, a quaint choice, and my perch is made of some synth...

20 likes 7 comments 7
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The Hard Drive

Weekly Contest #351

I had not written a meaningful sentence in six years. I had tried everything: therapy, meditation retreats, writing prompts that arrived like small, dead birds on my desk. The world still recognized me occasionally. A barista might pause at my name. "Elara Voss? Like, The Drowning Garden Elara Voss?" And I would smile the way a building smiles before demolition. Yes. That Elara Voss. The one who, at twenty-six, had written a novel so luminous that critics called it "a séance conducted in prose." The one who had believed the words would never...

15 likes 10 comments 10
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Guardapalabras

Weekly Contest #350

Before last night, I was nobody in particular. I mean that literally. Our apartment has bare walls where other families hang portraits. No photo albums. No letters from the old country. When teachers assigned family tree projects, my mother would purse her lips and say, "We don't dwell on the past." I learned to fill the branches with question marks and call it done. I always felt it, though: a hollow space behind my ribs where roots should have been. A hunger I could not name. Now I know what I was hungry for. I wake up burning. Not fever b...

12 likes 9 comments 9
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Time belongs to those who live it

Weekly Contest #349

Today Is April 31. I know what you're thinking. April has thirty days. Everyone knows this, or everyone used to know this, before the Temporal Correction Bureau added the extra day seven years ago. They called it a "calendar optimization." They said the old system was inefficient, that we'd been losing time, hemorrhaging minutes into some cosmic void. The Bureau generously recovered those minutes for us. Consolidated them. Gave us April 31 as a gift. No one is allowed outside on April 31. I write this from my window on the fourteenth floor o...

12 likes 5 comments 5
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Saved by the Bell... Or Not

Weekly Contest #329

A young girl, thought to have passed away, caused absolute chaos in front of the church when she suddenly sat up in her coffin mid-funeral. Gasps turned to screams, elderly people fainted, and one poor soul ran straight into the church bell, sending an ominous clang echoing through the village. It wasn’t long before the entire congregation was in a frenzy—half convinced it was a miracle and the other half certain the apocalypse had just begun. What followed was a series of hilariously unfortunate events that no one in town would ever forget....

17 likes 4 comments 4
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The Woman Who Challenged Gravity

Weekly Contest #324

My childhood was a kingdom built on whispers, tales of valor, tradition, royalty, and scandal woven into the very air I breathed. A haze of cigar smoke clung to the image of a defiant political figure, while hushed voices hinted at royal blood coursing through my veins. There was always a shadow, a darker figure, the man who erased eighteen minutes of history in Washington. These weren’t just stories. They were my inheritance. Power. Secrets. A kaleidoscope of intrigue, hidden deep in my DNA. These stories came to life with a simple DNA kit ...

10 likes 4 comments 4
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Don’t Block The Light

Weekly Contest #318

They say her name, and the room breaks into applause. I clap too—that’s the rule when you’re paid to be second. Priscilla glides to the front, hair catching the lights, heels fluent, and sells my dragons like she hatched them herself. The author leans in. The publicist beams. “Brilliant,” the client breathes, and my coffee‑stained notebook stays shut on my lap. I hold the smile that keeps meetings smooth and credit slippery, feel her perfume hit before her words do, and swallow the urge to say mine. I know this part: keep the pitch in the ai...

16 likes 0 comments 0
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The Blood Moon That Became Legend

Weekly Contest #317

Incident Number: 25-0812-0147Date: August 23, 2025Time Reported: 12:03 AMReporting Officer: Sgt. Danielle Ruiz, Badge #211Location: 117 Old Quarry Road (Harrow House), Milford, ORWeather: Clear skies, full (blood) moonUnits Responding: 2 (Patrol Unit 14 - Ruiz & Officer K. Patel, Backup Unit 18 - Officer G. Miller) Incident SummaryJamie Carter, 16, reported strange red lights and screaming near Harrow House. She described being unable to look away, despite her fear.Patrol Unit 14 arrived at 12:09 AM. Red lights from the woods lit the pro...

18 likes 15 comments 15
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Thirteen

Weekly Contest #315

A storm coils on the horizon, thick with the scent of rain and ruin. Birthdays should be simple—candles flickering atop frosting, a wish whispered into a slice of cake. But mine is no ordinary birthday. This one is a tempest, a ritual, a doorway edged in shadow. Somewhere beyond the veil, Aunt Haddie watches. She is as dead as the secrets she carried, but her gaze lingers, weighty and unseen, knowing what I cannot yet fathom. They say the dead can’t speak—but Haddie does. She whispers on the edge of sleep, her voice like wind threading throu...

4 likes 4 comments 4
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The Moonlit Guardian

Weekly Contest #314

The Moonlit Guardian Once upon a time, in a quiet little house on the edge of a new town, a young girl named Lila lay awake in her bed. The moon, as mischievous as ever, slipped its silver light through the thin cracks in her curtain, painting restless shadows across the walls. These shadows, uninvited yet persistent, danced like ghosts of old stories. Lila clutched her well-worn teddy bear, its fur thinned from years of whispered secrets and silent battles. It was her veteran, her ally in the dark. The summer was nearly over, and soon a new...

3 likes 2 comments 2
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Cosmic Threads

Weekly Contest #313

Under the endless expanse of a star-speckled sky, Sarah stood alone, her eyes scanning the heavens for the first streak of light. The meteor shower was supposed to start any moment now—a celestial show she’d been planning for weeks. But the field around her was empty, the stillness broken only by the faint chirp of crickets and the occasional sigh of the wind through the grass. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.Even the fireflies seemed to whisper warnings with their coded, flashing light, their erratic glows hinting that something in the n...

4 likes 4 comments 4
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F.A.T.E.: Algorithms of Despair

Weekly Contest #312

The pharmacist’s words struck with the sting of cold steel—sharp, sudden, impossible to brace for. “Denied.” Just that, delivered in a monotone so flat it might have been automated, as if my hope was nothing more than a line on his script. The injustice of it echoed in my chest. I pressed him again, while the sterile tang of rubbing alcohol clawed at my nostrils. Beneath it all, that familiar, suffocating pressure began to coil inside me—the same dread that always crept in when the tumor threatened to reclaim its hold.I clung to the edge of ...

12 likes 8 comments 8
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The Veil Between Tides

Weekly Contest #309

Beneath a sky that churned with the promise of storms, in a village cradled between jagged cliffs and the ceaseless roar of the sea, there stood a house that seemed to teeter on the edge of the world. Its weathered walls, worn smooth by salt and time, exhaled the mingling scents of lavender and brine, as though the ocean itself had seeped into its very bones. This was no ordinary house, and within it lived no ordinary girl. Serina, with eyes as restless as the waves and a heart that yearned for the mysteries whispered by the wind, called thi...

10 likes 3 comments 3
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The Dunce’s Warning

Weekly Contest #307

Young Sarah Mathews wasn’t what you’d call the apple of her teacher’s eye. Ever since her daddy went to sleep in Davy Jones’ locker, it seemed like the whole world had gone as haywire as a busted pocket watch. Why, even the stars hanging high above the Texas night sky looked to have turned their backs on her, leaving her to wander through the days feeling as lost as a calf in high weeds. While other young’uns stood straight as fence posts reciting their lessons, Sarah’s mind had a way of drifting off like tumbleweed on a breezy day. The rust...

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