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Sean Gaboya

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2026

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7 Followers
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16 Stories

257 karma pts

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The Porch Light

Weekly Contest #379

The morning after Halloween, I found a paper mask caught under my gate. One eye was torn. The elastic had snapped. I picked it up and stood there with it in my hand. Then I put it in the bin. The pumpkin was still on the step. Its mouth had begun to sag. Inside, the candle had burned down to a lump of wax. Sweet wrappers lay along the pavement. A strip of fake cobweb hung from the fence. I had liked the night before. All Hallows’ Eve. I had filled a bowl with sweets and switched on the porch light. Each time someone knocked, I opened the doo...

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The Last Portrait

Weekly Contest #378

Lily’s red notebook held three reminders: Ask his name. Bring water. Stay until someone comes. Her ten-year-old brother Noah asked camera operators their names. Half the Whitmores’ dining chairs had been sold, but their name still stood over a clinic, a concert hall, and a Peachtree Street tower. Their father, David, was the foundation’s president. Their mother, Catherine, was its executive director. Both wore gold lantern rings paid for by the members. Emma and Grace were Lily and Noah’s sisters. Emma memorized the accusations against them;...

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The Shepherd in the Widow’s House After: The Last Amen

Weekly Contest #377

The dead are not the only ones who refuse to let the widow go. Part One: The Last Visitor On the third evening after the stroke, Samuel sat propped beneath a warmed hospital blanket. The left side of his face still lagged a fraction behind the right. When he smiled, one corner arrived late. When he swallowed, his throat worked twice. But he was sitting up. He knew every name, every date, every joke his children used to test him. He argued with the youngest about whether the moon could follow a car. Then he lifted his recovering hand and trac...

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Torch and the Painted Cage

Weekly Contest #376

CW: Violence, blood and gore, substance abuse, and mental health issues They called him Torch because fire still obeyed him. His thumb turned the wheel. A spark jumped. A blue flame rose from the cheap lighter. For one bright second, he controlled something. Then the flame died. He was Keith again. Street dirt filled the cracks in his hands. Hunger chewed through his bones. That night the drugs had hold of him hard. Heat crawled under his skin though the air was cold. His jaw snapped at words before his mind could stop them. He shouted at t...

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The Day Everything Turned. By nightfall, the garden had finished one life and begun another.

Weekly Contest #375

CW: gore related to death of an animal Everything felt wrong that morning. The sun came up pale and weak, as if it had spent the night trying to decide whether to return. The air smelled of wet bark and iron. Leaves scraped across the yard without wind. Even the crows had moved farther off, calling from beyond the houses where I could not see them. It was the last day of October. I was raking the final leaves and putting the garden to bed. My grandson Eli followed me with a paper sack, gathering the small things he thought worth saving: a r...

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The Tears in the Vault

Weekly Contest #374

A work of historical fiction narrated by a historical Romanov tiara. Its Althorp connection, Diana’s childhood memory, the lost inheritance, and the journey to Manila are invented. I was born for light, but I entered this story in silence. Hands shaped me from diamonds and old pearls. Courts displayed me. Dynasties fell around me. Then I vanished into locked rooms, where history became rumor and memory became my only voice. I am a kokoshnik of diamonds and hanging pearls. Beneath Althorp, I watched a mother leave, a stepmother arrive, and a ...

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The Pilgrim of the Closed Door: A tale for the pilgrimage of the living

Weekly Contest #373

We met on the old road north of Rome in late October. The trains were full. So we walked. At supper, each traveler named the burden that had put him on the road. The Keeper of Keys believed every locked room protected someone. The Clerk of Quiet recorded every complaint and answered none. The Choir Widow sang whatever hymn the room required. The Candle Seller carried light but never entered darkness. Then they turned to me. They called me the Disobedient Son. I told them that was not my name. It was the office my village gave me after my fat...

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The Keeper of Opposite Hours

Weekly Contest #372

At 2:17 a.m., the friend in Atlanta opened their eyes without knowing why. No siren sounded. No troubling dream remained. Rain traced silver paths down the dark window. A thin bar of hallway light rested beneath the door—the kind someone leaves on when they want you to know you are not alone. Something had already begun moving toward them, quiet but certain. Cebu was twelve hours ahead of Atlanta; Atlanta was twelve hours behind Cebu. There, at 2:17 p.m., afternoon sun warmed the roofs while cool shadows gathered inside open doorways. One ci...

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Torch and the Big Gulp

Weekly Contest #371

This story contains depictions of addiction and bodily injury. I was a Big Gulp cup. That is all I was. Plastic, ice, and weak soda sweating in the heat. Some good soul bought me for him that afternoon. For Keith. But nobody out there called him Keith anymore. They called him Torch. They said the name came from the flame. From the pipe. From the way he kept burning himself down and still asking for more fire. That was Torch. A man who had been somebody once. A rich boy. A school boy. A top-of-the-class boy from one of them Atlanta private s...

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The Little Song on the Ridge

Weekly Contest #370

Something strange happened on the ridge this morning. I’ve been standing here a long time—a giant metal flamingo made of iron and bolts. My tall legs are planted in red clay that dries hard by noon and softens slick after rain. My bent neck holds one loud coat of pink paint, chalky where sun and weather have worn it thin. Rough in patches. Smooth where hands once touched me. I remember those hands, though I could not tell you whose they were. My bright yellow beak is outlined in black. My round black eyes shine when the light strikes them. I...

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Why I Wear Monarch Wings

Weekly Contest #369

The monarchs rest high in the trees. They drift in the leaves. They hide from the wind. I do not hide. My wings look like theirs. Orange. Black. Bright. But I am not a monarch. I am something older. I travel beside them. I listen to the memory inside their wings. I ride the cold mountain air. I catch raindrops after storms. I drink the light from them. That is how I keep the fire in my chest. Below me, the Blue Ridge Mountains roll like a dark blanket. The monarchs are flying south. They do not ask why. They do not ask where to go. Their bod...

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The Threshold Inspector, I was not, in truth, a hummingbird.

Weekly Contest #368

That was only the costume I wore when the lower world needed approaching gently. A body no larger than a thumb. Wings quick enough to blur the edges of certainty. A needle of a face, bright and precise, which humans mistake for a beak because humans name things according to shape instead of purpose. They call us birds because feathers are the part they can bear to understand. We do not perceive the way humans do. We do not begin with faces, voices, clothing, or the small arrangements of bone and skin by which humans recognize one another. We...

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The Point of No Return: A short story inspired by a hummingbird, a threshold, and an inspection I did not see coming.

Weekly Contest #367

I was sitting on the patio with that tired feeling you get when the day has already done more than you asked it to. Something had shifted. I could not have explained it cleanly, but I could feel it — like I had stepped over some line in my own life and only noticed after my foot was already on the other side. That was when the hummingbird arrived. Not in the gentle, poetic way people like to describe them — no soft gliding, no distant hovering, no Disney soundtrack. This one targeted me. He flew straight toward my face and stopped only inche...

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Ashes Between Us

Weekly Contest #365

Long before revolution scattered the Romanovs, before palaces emptied and old titles became echoes, the world was already watching Ducky and Alix move toward tragedy as if history had begun closing its doors behind them one by one. Courts watched. Cousins watched. Servants watched from thresholds, and later generations would watch from the cold distance of consequence. None of them had the power to stop what was forming; they could only notice, too late, how every silence narrowed the passage. The rivalry did not begin with a public insult o...

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A Story No One Will Believe: Ruben’s Witness

Weekly Contest #364

I am Ruben, and this is the story they said no one would believe. I learned early that grief is not always private. Sometimes it is a door left open, with the wrong man waiting outside for the family inside to become too shattered to turn the lock. In the low country of Indiana, where cornfields bowed under the wind and the church bell counted every birth, marriage, and burial as if it owned them, my family had a plot at the edge of the old cemetery. Iron bordered it, rust-soft and weathered, and beside the gate grew a vine no one had plante...

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