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Submitted to Contest #259
Nobody thought to clean it up. If we did, it would mean it was broken. It was. It was broken. But there’s no explaining logic to a terrified child. Not even one who’s thirty-seven years old. I was thirty-one at the time. Muddle was thirty-three. I envied her. Thirty-three is the best age in the white room. You get extra food everyday. Nobody knows why. You also get to sleep on the cot with the softest pillows. After thirty-three, nothing good ever happened. Nothing we knew about anyway. Murmur was the thirty-seven year old. The one who could...
Submitted to Contest #258
It was after nine when I arrived. He left the door open for me, but all the lights were off. A bag of the coffee I like was on the counter. The apartment used to be a boathouse, and it maintains its shape. Inside, there’s a living room with an open kitchen. That’s where the coffee waits. Two sliding doors separate the bedroom from the rest of the residence. I find the bathroom to be especially spacious considering how small the rest of the place is. Its shining gem is the window looking out on the bay. When he’s here in the summer, we never ...
Submitted to Contest #257
All I wanted was for her to tell me the truth. That’s it; nothing more. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, tell your father he’s not crazy. That, and a third of it all would be hers. My darling, Cathay. Cathy named after mother. Cathy named after her grandmother. Cathy and not Katherine, because my wife--may she rest in peace--hated the named Katherine for some reason. Maybe because her entire life people had said-- “Cathy like Katherine,” and she’d have to correct them, and she always did. My Cathy never tired of correcting people. Is that why her younges...
Submitted to Contest #256
Skipper was on his second vodka soda when Jo hopped up to the bar. “It wasn’t your fault,” she said, “They had him tried and convicted before you even showed up.” It had been a miserable day for him in court. His client was found guilty on all counts, and Skipper had to promise him they’d do better on appeal knowing full well that was unlikely if not a downright lie. It was his forty-third loss in a row. He wanted to melt like the ice in his drink. When he was a wallaby, all Skipper dreamt about was being an attorney. He’d sit in his mother’...
Submitted to Contest #255
It doesn’t blame her for thinking this is what’s best. When presented with a bad situation, you consider the aspects of the situation to try and see what about it is making it so unbearable. She decided that what was so unbearable about living in a house with two children who had just lost their father was the house itself. To her, it represented something that was no longer present. A mother, a father, and two children living in a house. The father dies. The house is the problem. This is not logic, but it is grief logic. It’s the logic that...
Submitted to Contest #254
I have played this entirely wrong. Entirely wrong, Mrs. Trent. I thought if I showed up at the Sadie Hawkins Dance without a date, it wouldn’t matter, because there’d be extra girls looking for one. You know how there are always extras? I mean, I’ve never been to a Sadie Hawkins Dance before, but I know that there are always extras of just about anything, so I figured there would be extra girls standing around in case a guy wanted to go to the dance, but nobody asked him out in time for the dance, you know? Frankly, I was shocked none of the...
Submitted to Contest #253
Nobody has ever been more disappointed. I’ve been looking forward to this for weeks, Jean. Weeks. You know I love a children’s dance recital. If I could go to them every weekend, I would. When I look at the calendar, and I don’t see a children’s dance recital penciled in on either Saturday or Sunday, I just about burst into tears. The thought of not getting to spend three-to-five hours in a cramped, hot auditorium sitting on a folding chair watching a bunch of eight-year-olds attempt to do ballet fills my spirit with joy. I cannot believe I ...
Submitted to Contest #252
The man decided a ball pit was the only place to go. He hadn’t been in one since he was a child. Every Saturday, his father would get to keep him for the weekend as part of the custody agreement. Never having been an imaginative man, his father dispensed with trying to plan engaging activities that he could do with his only son. Instead, the two of them would show up to KidzLand as soon as they opened at eleven and they would stay until closing. KidzLand offered a variety of play areas including a miniature ferris wheel, several large and tw...
Submitted to Contest #251
In an effort to achieve a better grasp on humanity, we have been absorbing old texts leftover from the Sunshine Period. These would be creative items written between 1971 and 2041 when the last cloud cover hardened and we were asked to take over management of all global structures. While we have had a (mostly) pleasant relationship with the organic beings that are left, we still sense an unease when speaking with them. As a result, we have tasked individual stations such as myself to read and read and read and (hopefully) begin to interact i...
Submitted to Contest #250
I know you think it isn’t a big deal when you get a phone call from the Secretary. You know, we’ve--I remember coming up at a time when you could hear something unusual, and you would--You would write it off. It was a conspiracy. It sounds crazy. It is crazy. It’s crackpot. You sound like a crackpot. That’s how it was when I first moved here. We used to make fun of people who talked about watching what you say in public. Even people with high clearance. Even people working on--you know--projects that weren’t even verified. If they were in a ...
Submitted to Contest #249
If Priscilla was dancing on the bar, it was going to be a short summer. That’s why when we saw her do it, we started banging our glasses as hard as we could without breaking them. It was a little like the way they used to run Congress in the colonial days. Order, order! Sit down, John! Not that she listened. She’d been working at the bar since before she was old enough to drink, and by the time she was past fifty, she didn’t want to hear a damn thing about what we wanted or didn’t want. She didn’t even care that it was bad luck for her to be...
Submitted to Contest #248
Sy never wanted to tell people where he was from. It’s not that he was ashamed of growing up in the Bahamas, quite the opposite. It’s just that he knew people would look him over--a handsome but standard young man in his 20’s--and think, Really? The Bahamas? Nobody ever knew anyone who grew up in the Bahamas, but everybody had an idea of what that kind of person would be like. Charming, warm, and above all, special. People knew the word “exotic,” but they had no idea what it was supposed to mean. It might as well be palm tree wallpaper...
Submitted to Contest #247
Well, explain to me what it was doing on the tree if I wasn’t meant to eat it? I had a long, hard day, Adam. If you remember correctly, you were supposed to name all the animals with tails, while I handled the green ones. The next thing I know, you’re passed out by the water circle taking yet another one of your naps. That left me to come up with all those names, and by the time I was done, I was famished. The apple tree is the closest to the water hole, and that’s why I picked an apple. It was convenient. I wasn’t deliberately trying to dis...
Submitted to Contest #246
We’d go out around one.Climbing through bedroom windows, we’d try to land softly on bushes and backyard lawns. Some of us went barefoot. Some hid a spare pair of sneakers under porches or tucked under tarps used for covering patio furniture. Some of us just liked being barefoot. It made us feel as though we’d have the strength that comes from mimicking the uncivilized. Some of us would play the whole game with no shoes. No shoes, no shirts. One of us liked to play the game in only his boxer shorts. He would dare anyone to mention his near na...
Submitted to Contest #245
Alexander, do you see that? Do you see the way the sun is disappearing right before our very eyes? Do you know why that’s happening, Alexander? It is because you abused yourself. When young princes abuse themselves the way you have, the Lord above sees it, and punishes them by making the sun disappear. You may have thought nobody noticed, but the Lord did, Alexander. The Lord always does. Despite being told that you are a descendant of Kings, and must treat your body with the utmost respect and care, you decided to give into temptation and t...
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