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Tahlia Malpas

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Oct, 2025

Stories (12)

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12 Stories

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The Match Who Remembered the Sun

“It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark.”I know that sentence the way a tree knows its rings. It lives inside me, carved into my grain, into the sulphur at my head, into the little splintering bones of my body.I am a match.Not the sort of thing people write about, unless it is to say I flared, I failed, I went out. You hold us between finger and thumb, you ask for a miracle, and then you blame us when winter eats it.But I have a story too, and I will tell it, because once upon a time is not only for princesses.Once...

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The Mirror That Wouldn't Lie

Once upon a time, I hung on a wall and told the truth until it tasted like blood.They sing about poison apples and a girl with skin like snow. They sing about a Queen who hated youth and a prince who arrived like a convenient key. They do not sing about the mirror that was never allowed to blink.I am called Magic, as though that settles the matter. I am called Mirror, as though I am only surface and not witness. I am called a tool, as though tools don’t remember the hands that use them.If you want my side, begin where I began.I was made from...

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Bread for the Hungry Name

rigger Warning: Mentions of food insecurity and past family abandonment (non-graphic).Nia had learned to live with hunger the way some people lived with tinnitus: a constant, thin ringing inside the body. Sometimes it was a real ache under her ribs, a hollow that made her hands shake when she tried to count coins. Sometimes it was a different kind of emptiness, one that sat behind her sternum like a locked room.Tonight it was both.She stood under the awning of a closed laundromat on Boundary Street, watching Brisbane rain turn the pavement i...

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The Scone That Stole Midnight

By the time Hazel Quinn arrived at The Steeping Hour, the front windows were sweating with rain and neon. Brisbane did that in summer: the sky would open like a tipped bucket, and the city would pretend it wasn’t impressed.Hazel hung her damp cardigan on the back hook and immediately froze.The pastry case was… wrong.Not empty. Not smashed. Not obviously sabotaged.Just subtly cursed in a way that made Hazel’s skin prickle.Normally, the bottom shelf held the shop’s pride: honey-cardamom scones with a glossy sugar crust that snapped when you bi...

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The Empty Plate of Moon-Salt Pie

The plate was empty.Not “someone had seconds” empty. Not “a tragic little crumb left behind” empty.It was winter-moon blank, polished so clean the candlelight slid over it and found nowhere to cling. No crust shards. No glaze streaks. Just a pale circle of ceramic at the centre of the Queen’s banquet table, staring back like an accusation.Tamsin of the Oven Guild stared until her eyes dried.Beside her, Chef-Archmage Brulla leaned close, broad shoulders blocking the chatter of silk-dressed nobles. “Do you smell it, little flame?”Tamsin breath...

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Ube Halaya Confessions

Mina Santos learned early that some truths needed stirring.Not because they were fragile, exactly. Because if you left them alone too long, they stuck to the bottom and burned, and then everyone could taste the bitterness, even if nobody said it out loud.On Saturday night, Lola Maring set the biggest pot on the stove with a thud that felt like punctuation. Mina took her place beside it with a wooden spoon and a resigned sigh.“Medium-low,” Lola commanded. “And do not stop.”“It’s ube halaya,” Mina said. “I know.”“You know how to talk,” Lola re...

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Skillet Moon at Onyx & Honey

Keisha’s phone buzzed at 6:02 p.m., the precise minute she always pretended wasn’t a deadline.JONAH: I found it. The restaurant with the unhinged menu. You owe me emotional damages and fries.Keisha blinked at her screen, thumbs hovering over the keyboard like they were deciding whether to enter a boxing ring.KEISHA: “Unhinged” is subjective. “Unhinged” is also my brand. Address?JONAH: Onyx & Honey. New place on Ashford. Bring your tastebuds and your therapist.Keisha sat up on her couch, nudging aside the notebook she’d been using to draf...

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The Circle Of Ash

The air tonight tastes of storm and iron. The clouds hang low over the mountains, swollen with unshed rain, while the paths of Iron-Throat Pass tell tales of miners who first traversed these rugged terrains, naming the pass after the resilient echoes of iron ore in the tunnels' throats. Long ago, the scent of sage fires warded off a plague that once threatened our ancestors here. I can hear Thane moving inside, pacing, muttering to himself as he grinds the herbs into dust. He thinks I am asleep, but my body is restless, humming with the quie...

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The Saturday Spell

Every Saturday morning, just before the clock struck nine, Bramblewick could be heard muttering to himself in the cozy confines of his cluttered kitchen: "Let us see if I can survive another brew without catastrophe." This self-deprecating mantra was as much a part of the ritual as the brewing itself, an ancient art, in Bramblewick's opinion, that kept his spells from exploding quite as frequently as they had in the past. He often recalled the infamous brew that once leveled half the lane with a rueful chuckle and a formidable resolve to avo...

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The Candle in the Window

Trigger Warning: This story contains themes of grief, death, obsessive behaviour, and supernatural horror. Reader discretion is advised. The desert goes quiet when the sun drops. The cicadas hush, the heat slips into the dirt, and the world folds into that deep, trembling stillness that only the outback knows. I wait for that silence before I light the candle.It sits on the windowsill facing the flat, red horizon. Beeswax, pale and smooth, the wick trimmed to half an inch. I strike the match, listen to it hiss, and breathe in the first curl ...

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The Lantern Keeper's Bride

Submitted to Contest #323

The world ended in soft light, not flame.Each evening, as the sun dropped behind the peaks, Lysandra climbed the path to the cliffside lanterns and lit them. The glass orbs shimmered with starlight, drawing on drifting sea magic. The lanterns, it was said, steadied the veil between worlds—without them, night would engulf the coast and drowned spirits would rise.She was the last Lantern Keeper of Arathen’s Reach, and she was alone.Until he came.Cael arrived one stormy night, half-drowned and furious at the sea for letting him live. Lysandra f...

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The Last Heat

Submitted to Contest #322

The afternoon sun bore down on the dusty athletics track, making the air shimmer like a mirage. It was the last Saturday of summer in Werribee, and the annual community games were in full swing. The smell of sausage sizzles wafted over from the Lions Club tent. Kids darted about with icy poles dripping down their wrists. The loudspeaker crackled with the voice of old Mr Tomkins, who had volunteered as announcer every year since anyone could remember.“Next up, the men’s one-hundred-metre final. Line up, boys. Give the crowd a show.”The crowd’...

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