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Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2020
Submitted to Contest #331
It was too warm outside to leave the pies on the porch the way Lillian would have back when the kids lived at home. She put them in the spare room instead (the one that used to be Jodie’s before it was Kristin’s), and turned the ceiling fan on hoping that would take the temperature down far enough to keep the apple and blueberry cool until the following afternoon. It was just after midnight, and she was behind on her cooking. This never used to happen, but when Ken passed away, she found herself becoming less and less punctual. Retirement ha...
Submitted to Contest #330
No one was going to make him leave the cupboard. If he wanted to stay in there forever, that was his choice. This was not a family that believed in rushing someone when they were grieving, and this was a kind of grieving. He was going to be dressed up in a tuxedo as soon as he got to the new house. Once a very small boutonniere was pinned to his lapel, he would be asked to perform four or five marriages before retreating to a new bedroom that would be much tinier than the one he was leaving behind. His mother kept a thousand and one plastic ...
Submitted to Contest #329
The first time we played Danish after Sloop disappeared, Maggie O’Neill had a fever that nearly killed her. She put down a Queen and a seven and that meant it wasn’t going to be her night. I had a King and if I placed it upside down, I’d have taken a clean twenty dollar bill off Kate Ebbott. Something told me to wait, and Kate won the hand. Aisling sat out as she always did. Kate told Maggie to go home if she wasn’t feeling well, but at home, the police were outside Maggie’s home putting pieces together and she didn’t want to be there when t...
Submitted to Contest #328
He became a giant ship sometime around his thirty-eighth birthday. Floating in the harbor, a doctor arrived to examine him. The doctor was having an affair with his wife, but he was also the only medical professional in the city who specialized in maritime transformation. The affair was a short one anyway. It had begun a month earlier when he and his wife decided they didn’t want children. He began to feel an itch down near his right knee, and his wife began to commit infidelity. The doctor wasn’t her only paramour, but he was her favorite. ...
Submitted to Contest #327
None of us wanted to deal with the rhino in the tree. Half the burgers were already burnt and the pasta salad didn’t have nearly enough vinegar in it. I like pasta salad with mayonnaise, so I wasn’t going to touch it anyway, but I had sympathy for the vinegar members of my family. My aunt kept going in and out of the house she’d rented for the long weekend, and every time she did, my uncle would yell that she was “letting the cool air out.” I took a sip of my pomegranate lemonade. From across the deck, my mother locked eyes with me and silen...
Submitted to Contest #326
CW: Physical violence, gore, domestic abuse, body horror And oh, she begged for another rest, but weren’t the fields on knees of their own? Pleading with us to bring them succor. They had survived one of the hardest winters to ever settle into Woodcatch, and now spring had arrived, and they demanded their gift. And wasn’t she to blame for going out there in the first place when she was younger? No childhood age excuses mischief when it leads to the genesis of a starvation. She put on her party dress and shunned her cake. Out she went with a ...
Submitted to Contest #325
The man sitting next to you is not a gnome. He may appear to be a gnome, but he’s simply shorter than most people. There’s nothing wrong with that. You shouldn’t even be looking at him. Staring at him. You’re staring. How embarrassing. Who raised you? Just look down at the magazine you’re reading. It’s from 1812. There’s a test to find out if you’re possessed by Satan. Take the test. Find out. If you fail the test, the magazine recommends you turn yourself in to the village clergy so that you can be thrown into a well. The man next to you i...
Submitted to Contest #324
Into the sand goes the incubator. About two feet down, she places the derby. It has a cut-out in the shape of a star, but she doesn’t trace it. Her exploratory nature has to be tamed somehow, and today is as good as any to begin controlling it. She stares out at the ocean and wonders what the surface would taste like if it were possible to only taste the surface. Last night, she ate seventeen olives straight from the jar and then belched until her entire apartment smelled of brine. She woke up at 1pm on her kitchen floor covered in a blanket...
Submitted to Contest #323
It’s no laughing matter. What starts with a papercut ends with the corruption of the soul. Haven’t you seen Papercut III? Poor Teddy from the second movie ends up possessed. And here we are in the remake of Papercut VI and look who has a papercut. What’s so confusing? Papercut is the name of the movie, the name of the killer, and the name of what the killer does to you. You wouldn’t think you could die from a papercut, but in the fourth movie they revealed that he’s supernatural, so his papercuts are fatal. Don’t you know anything about the ...
Submitted to Contest #322
The vanilla extract she put on her broken arm did not heal the arm any faster. Three of the girls online said the extract would help, but maybe she wasn’t applying it right. Jaylee’s sister had used it on her pink eye. After one day, her eye not only looked fine, but her vision had improved. She stopped needing glasses. She took up sharpshooting. Why didn’t the extract work on her? Was it because she didn’t believe it would? “It’s all about faith,” Hunter explained to her while they were on break, “If you don’t believe, it won’t work. It’s j...
Submitted to Contest #321
I really wanted to go home. The trouble began and ended with a man named either Seth or Vinny. He was staying at my favorite hotel in town. It’s next to an Indian restaurant that I love, and the hotel itself is rather new in a town full of old hotels placed lovingly on the water. This one offers no promise of charm or elegance. Just modernity. New-ness. It lives and dies on youth. Architectural youth. Why am I talking about the hotel? It wasn’t really the hotel, but the hotel helped get me into trouble. And the trouble wasn’t really trouble....
Submitted to Contest #320
Her mother sent her out to find a broken television. Out in the woods behind their house, there were numerous broken pieces of electronics scattered between the trees. Some covered in moss, some not. Trisha had her scarf wrapped tightly around her neck. Her fake suede boots were pinching a little at her heels, but she’d break them in on her errand. She placed her cowboy hat slightly askew on her head. Its color helped bring out the warm tones in her cable knit sweater that were offset by her cold butter leggings that she’d ordered online jus...
Submitted to Contest #319
If I had a sister, I think she’d be a chimney. I don’t believe that a staircase’s sister should be another staircase. Why should that be the… Well, the case? Pardon me, I deplore repetition. My steps may look identical, but they’re each unique. I have names for all of them, but I change the names everyday just to keep things interesting. Houses can sit empty for years at a time. It’s vital to keep things interesting. One year I got so desperate I almost named the windows. Luckily, someone moved in the next week. That wasn’t the sisters. That...
Submitted to Contest #318
My father enjoys listening to soft rock while I give him his bath. He wears one of his old bathing suits while I do it, and handles the parts the suit covers only after I leave him be for a few minutes. When you’re caring for a relative, there can’t be any shame or pride, but my father has plenty of both. I give him the minutes that he wants, and then I come in to towel him off and turn down the radio. I won’t turn it off completely until he falls asleep. I bring it into his bedroom and place it by the window. A caller is asking the DJ to pl...
Submitted to Contest #317
I was eating strawberries in the tub when the doorbell rang. Throwing on my blue diamond robe, I dripped all the way to the front door where an old woman was waiting with a basket of apples. For a moment, I wondered if she was going to offer me a trade. My strawberries for her apples. She was wearing a large cloak, and her face was turned down. I realized that this must be the strega who had moved in next door. We hadn’t had a chance to meet, and there was a note on my fridge instructing me to bake croissants for her. The trouble was that cr...
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