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Story Time

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2020

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150 Stories

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How Turkeys Drown in the Rain, or Three Floods

Weekly Contest #336

Teresa puts a wilting rose in a sea green bottle and admires her handiwork shortly thereafter. She looks outside her window and sees you looking in at her. The water is up to your chest and you are gulping in air as though practicing for when it will consume you. Teresa doesn’t quite laugh to herself, but she makes a little noise indicating that she thinks where you are is the result of your choices and nothing else. We try to tell her that you have amnesia, but she doesn’t believe it. Don’t take it personally. She doesn’t believe in amnesia...

31 likes 17 comments 17
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Make Yourself Useful

Weekly Contest #335

I was asked to go home and take care of my sister. She had been ranting about a man following her all over the island, and I was supposed to come home and assure her that no such man existed. She was refusing to leave the house, and even though she worked for our uncle, he had confided in our father that if she didn’t return to her bartending job at his restaurant, he’d have to let her go. He couldn’t show any favoritism or his other employees might complain. All of this was explained to me over the phone a few days before Easter. The plan w...

19 likes 7 comments 7
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The Pyramids of Broadway

Weekly Contest #334

The man who came over left a box of doughnuts on the coffee table. He’s been over before and he always brings treats. Not treats for me. Treats for the Doctor. Even knowing that there are doughnuts in the box, I must examine. I nudge the box once, twice, until it falls onto the floor. I wonder if the Doctor and his man will exit the bedroom, but they do not. I hear a sharp intake of breath, and then a short laugh. They are occupied. I see a doughnut release a little jelly onto the hardwood floor. It looks like blood, but fresh blood. Blood t...

17 likes 4 comments 4
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Out on the Ice

Weekly Contest #333

CW: References to self-injury She wants me to go play pool with her. I have eggs burning on the stove, and she wants to go play pool. What am I supposed to do? Let the house burn down? I know I was out there on the ice for too long. Cookies on the ice. Brownies on the ice. Sitting waiting for something to bite. That’s one kind of meditation. Pool is another. She plays pool. And I’m not allowed to remind her of two years ago. I’m not allowed To bring up when we met. To bring up when we were introduced to each other To bring up our kids Our ki...

15 likes 3 comments 3
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The Steakhouse

Weekly Contest #332

Bonnie didn’t come into work on Thursday, because the storm destroyed her shoes. Bonnie keeps all her shoes in one part of her closet, and wouldn’t you know it, that’s the part that caved in when the rain was coming down like “Noah get the boat” and she told everybody she was under the weather, but really, she was just shoeless and you can’t show up with no shoes on even if everybody feels bad for you, because of your house. The steakhouse is a Joe Jeremiah’s and they have high standards for their employees. The JJ’s we worked at was right o...

18 likes 7 comments 7
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Esplanade

Weekly 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...

23 likes 10 comments 10
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A Thousand and One Plastic Bags

Weekly 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 ...

16 likes 4 comments 4
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The Danish Circle

Weekly 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...

24 likes 10 comments 10
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Tug

Weekly 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. ...

12 likes 4 comments 4
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Stand for the Rhino

Weekly 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...

19 likes 10 comments 10
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The Harvest

Weekly 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 ...

18 likes 7 comments 7
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Nebraska

Weekly 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...

30 likes 12 comments 12
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Wolcott Avenue

Weekly 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...

16 likes 9 comments 9
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Papercut

Weekly 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 ...

13 likes 5 comments 5
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Ball Launch

Weekly 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...

15 likes 6 comments 6
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