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Sophie De La Fuente

Author on Reedsy Prompts since May, 2026

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28 Followers
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8 Stories

202 karma pts

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What Fits in A Suitcase

Weekly Contest #380

By midnight, the laundromat smelled of hot cotton, artificial lavender and the lemon floor cleaner somebody had used without much conviction. Jasmijn had chosen a machine near the back, where the fluorescent tube above her flickered every few minutes and Washer 9 made a small knocking sound during the spin cycle. There were fourteen machines in total. She knew because she had counted them twice. There was nothing else to do. Her suitcase stood upright beside the plastic chair, one wheel missing. The wheel had come off in the station car park...

4 likes 1 comment 1
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The Throughput Efficiency Metrics

Weekly Contest #378

Monday morning did not begin with a death. It began with a measurement. Thomas placed a steel ruler against his silk necktie to check if the clip sat exactly 4.2 centimeters above his third button. A millimeter of error meant a loss of routine. Routine was the only thing stopping the basement from crawling up the stairs. On his desk lay the weekly quota from Head Office. The stamp at the top read: Project F15-D5. “Fifteen funerals a day?” Simon asked. He was the assistant. His voice was currently breaking between two different octaves. “No,”...

17 likes 10 comments 10
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Two and One

Weekly Contest #376

Author’s note: Two and One is a standalone story featuring Edith Marsh, who first appeared in “Room Fourteen” and “A Long Proof.” You don’t need to have read either story to follow this one. Two and One Edith Marsh stood on the front step of 9 Mariners Row with her gloved hand raised towards the doorframe and kept it there, an inch from the paint, for so long that the gull on the next roof gave up on her and went back to its chip paper. In twelve years she had touched the frame of every house she had been paid to empty. It was the first th...

15 likes 5 comments 5
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A Long Proof

Weekly Contest #373

Author's note: A Long Proof is a standalone story featuring Edith Marsh, the main character first introduced in my story "Room Fourteen." You don't need to have read the first story to follow this one. Edith Marsh touched the doorframe of Penhale's Bakery before she touched anything else, as she did in every building, and the wood answered with a warmth she had not expected. It was the last week of October, the rain coming sideways along Harrow Lane, and the shop had been shut for eighteen days. Yet the frame beneath her glove held the dry,...

24 likes 5 comments 5
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Me Neither

Weekly Contest #372

At 1:43 in the morning, Alison checked where her daughter was. She did this without putting on her glasses, which made the map bloom softly around the edges: France was a pale shape beneath her thumb, roads dissolving into one another, town names requiring more commitment than she was willing to give them. The blue dot was still in Lyon. Good. She put the phone facedown on the bedside table. Beside her, Neil made the small clicking sound at the back of his throat that had accompanied twenty-three years of marriage and, according to him, did...

23 likes 14 comments 14
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Room Fourteen

Weekly Contest #371

Edith Marsh had a rule about old buildings: touch the frame before you touch the room. Not because she believed anything lived in the wood, but because a doorway held a building's temperature longer than any other part of it, and a person who paid attention there could usually tell, before taking a single step further, whether a place had been loved or merely occupied. The Hotel Cortland kept its cold like a secret. She felt it through her glove on the brass of the lobby door, an old cold that had settled in over decades of guests leaving w...

23 likes 14 comments 14
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Carrying Capacity

Weekly Contest #369

The man opposite me had brought three photographs, though nobody had asked him to, and in all three his dog was asleep somewhere inconvenient — under a car, half in a flowerbed, wedged into a gap behind the sofa too narrow for anything with a spine. "He slept like that every night," he said, and touched the edge of the top photograph as if straightening it might make it more true. Arthur. A whippet, fourteen years old. Kidney failure, nine days ago. "Thirty-two percent," the technician said, and the man's eyes went to the display between our...

15 likes 6 comments 6
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Pink Glove

The glove arrived three days after the funeral. No note. No return address. Just a small cardboard box on the kitchen table beside the unopened condolence cards and the bowl of oranges beginning to collapse into themselves. Eva almost threw it away unopened. Her mother had hated pink. Not mildly disliked it. Hated it with a personal intensity, as if the color itself had insulted her once in public. “Pink is what people use when they want to disguise cruelty as softness,” she used to say. So the glove made no sense. It lay inside the box fold...

11 likes 0 comments 0
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