Theodore Cohen - Writer on Reedsy Prompts

3 Stories

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The Night Manager

Weekly Contest #371

It was dusk when Will Thompson spotted the sign that advertised lodging off US Highway 285 north of Pecos, Texas. The last several hours were still a blank as he struggled with the damaged power steering of his classic red, ’83 Cadillac Eldorado with the huge 6.0-liter V-8 engine. What he does remember is getting off I-20 at Pecos and heading north in search of gas and something to eat. Somewhere along the way he literally ran into the largest livestock hauler he’d ever seen. Actually, was the other way around. The tractor not only obliterat...

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One Lucky Man

Theodore Cohen

Weekly Contest #370

This is a true story. It has never been told. Set between Monday, May 10, 1965, and Wednesday, June 2, 1965, it chronicles the events leading up to what would have been the first field tests of a revolutionary new system for measuring the pull of gravity from a helicopter. The project was directed by the Chief of the Gravity Division of the then-Army Map Service (AMS) in Bethesda, Maryland. The events surrounding preparations for the tests, which were to take place in and around Lafayette, Louisiana, are as fresh in my mind today as if they ...

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A Dream Denied, A Vision Unfulfilled

Theodore Cohen

Weekly Contest #369

Mick said dad probably was dead by the time he hit the floor. The doctors said it was a heart attack. Mom remembered he had gone to the bathroom to put on his shoes when she heard him fall. There was nothing she nor Mick, a neighbor who she had summoned, could do. It made no sense. The man was only 67. Unlike his father, who in the early 1900s owned a tobacco shop on Milwaukee’s West Side and smoked half the inventory every week—he died of a massive heart attack in his mid-80s—dad neither smoked nor drank. He even bragged that at his last ph...

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Author bio

Theodore Jerome "Ted" Cohen is an award-winning author who has published more than ten novels—all but one of them mystery/thrillers—two books of short stories, twenty flash-fiction anthologies, and six anthologies of short stories and flash fiction. He also writes illustrated storybooks for children (K-3) in the series Stories for the Early Years as well as Young Adult (YA) novels under the pen name “Alyssa Devine.” During the course of his 45-year career he worked as an engineer, scientist, CBS Radio Station News Service (RSNS) commentator, private investigator, US Army officer (CPT, Corps of Engineers), and Antarctic explorer. What he’s been able to do with his background is mix fiction with reality in ways that even his family and friends have been unable to unravel!