Menu

More apps built by Reedsy

Assemble a team of professionals

The writing app for authors

Writing courses, events and memberships

Get your book reviewed

Weekly writing prompts and contests

Menu
Prompts
Contests
Stories
Blog

Scott Taylor

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Apr, 2023

Stories
Comments
Library
83 Followers
50 Following

80 Stories

1845 karma pts

?

The Summer Jar

Weekly Contest #380

The Summer Jar Marguerite Alder found the jar on the third day of clearing out her grandmother’s house. It sat at the back of the pantry, behind tins of expired baking powder and a bag of rice gone hard as gravel. It was an ordinary canning jar with a zinc lid and a rubber seal, the sort her grandmother used for plum preserves. But this one glowed faintly, the way a window glows when someone has left a lamp on in the next room. Inside, something amber and slow-moving turned over on itself like honey stirred by an invisible spoon. Marguerite ...

1 like 0 comments 0
Read story

The Ofrenda

Weekly Contest #379

The marigolds came in on Mamá Reyna's hip, two enormous paper sacks of them, and the whole kitchen smelled like warm pepper and rain. "Out of the way, out of the way." She set them on the table and flexed her fingers. "Sixty-two dollars. The man at the stand said I could have them for fifty if I smiled at him. I did not smile at him." "You never smile at him," said Marisol, who was eleven and understood commerce. "He knows what he did." They built the ofrenda the way they built it every year, in the front room where the window faced the ...

7 likes 2 comments 2
Read story

Midnight Cathy

Weekly Contest #378

The farmhouse on County Road 9 had sat empty for six years before Luna Reyes and her mom moved in, and some nights it made it pretty clear it hadn’t missed the company. It groaned when the wind came off Lake Tilda. It ticked inside the walls when the furnace kicked on. And no matter how much lemon cleaner Mom used, it smelled like wet wool and old pennies, with something sweet underneath, like a butterscotch somebody had dropped behind the radiator in 1974 and never found. The attic was still full of the last family’s boxes. Mom kept saying ...

5 likes 2 comments 2
Read story

The Previous Owner

Weekly Contest #377

The tag said $6.99 and GENUINE VINTAGE and, in pen, in someone's cramped handwriting, "do not sell." Marguerite bought it anyway, because the Halloween party was in four hours and because the Goodwill on Delmar had nothing else in a women's twelve that wasn't a sexy Minion. It was a scarecrow costume. Not a cute one. Burlap tunic, patches sewn on by hand with thread the color of old teeth, straw actually stitched into the cuffs so it poked out at the wrists like something trying to escape. The mask was the real find: burlap again, with butt...

11 likes 4 comments 4
Read story

The Ice Machine at the Starlite

Weekly Contest #376

Marnie Kowalczyk worked nights at the Starlite Motor Inn, off I-94, outside Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Eleven to seven. Thirty-one rooms. One ice machine. No pool, though the building smelled like it had one once and missed it. She liked nights. Nights didn’t ask much. A trucker wanted a receipt. A couple wanted towels and didn’t want eye contact. The coffee in the lobby pot turned to tar by two, and she drank it anyway, because it was hot and it was there, and those were her standards for most things. She kept a Post-it on the side of the mon...

11 likes 6 comments 6
Read story

The Skeptic

Weekly Contest #375

Mara had one boot on the bottom rail of the fence before she read the sign properly. NO TRESPASSING. STRUCTURALLY UNSOUND. Someone painted it by hand on plywood and wired it to the rail, with the letters still shining. She tugged off a glove and touched the S. It came away tacky on her fingertip and smelled of turpentine, sharp under the low-tide stink of rockweed. Fresh paint. A week after the storm. Somebody's protecting their investment. She thumbed her phone to the recorder. "Greyhaven, keeper's cottage, claim ending four-four-one. Two-f...

7 likes 3 comments 3
Read story

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...

6 likes 1 comment 1
Read story

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 synt...

20 likes 7 comments 7
Read story

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 neve...

15 likes 10 comments 10
Read story

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 fe...

13 likes 9 comments 9
Read story

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...

12 likes 5 comments 5
Read story

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
Read story

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 ki...

10 likes 4 comments 4
Read story

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
Read story

The Blood Moon That Became Legend

Weekly Contest #317

Incident Number: 25-0812-0147 Date: August 23, 2025 Time Reported: 12:03 AM Reporting Officer: Sgt. Danielle Ruiz, Badge #211 Location: 117 Old Quarry Road (Harrow House), Milford, OR Weather: Clear skies, full (blood) moon Units Responding: 2 (Patrol Unit 14 - Ruiz & Officer K. Patel, Backup Unit 18 - Officer G. Miller) Incident Summary Jamie 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 th...

18 likes 15 comments 15
Read story