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Theodore Cohen

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Aug, 2026

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8 Stories

73 karma pts

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What Hell Looks Like

Weekly Contest #380

“Zoey? Zoey Whitman?” I recognized that voice . . . husky with a distinct French accent. It had to be Julien Laurent. I remember when we first met some 10 years earlier in the same airport, standing in line at the gate for our flight to Venice. Now, it was a Thursday in May 1979. I turned. There he was, looking as debonair as ever in a dark blue suit with structured shoulders, clean lapels, and trousers with a sharp crease falling smoothly over polished black shoes. “My gosh, what are you doing here?” I blurted, “here” being the main concour...

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Cynthia's Secret

As the song goes, she was a coal miner’s daughter.* Cynthia, or Cyn as her family and friends called her, was the seventh of eight children born to the Palmers of Little Fork, West Virginia. The youngest of two girls, she’d already had seen her older sister Kathleen escape a life of poverty, debt, and death by decamping to Northern Virginia when she was 17. There, she met and married Brian Fields, an accountant. They just had their first child. For Cynthia’s father and brothers, there was no escape. As a child, Cynthia watched as black lung ...

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Cynthia's Secret

Weekly Contest #374

As the song goes, she was a coal miner’s daughter.* Cynthia, or Cyn as her family and friends called her, was the seventh of eight children born to the Palmers of Little Fork, West Virginia. The youngest of two girls, she’d already had seen her older sister Kathleen escape a life of poverty, debt, and death by decamping to Northern Virginia when she was 17. There, she met and married Brian Fields, an accountant. They just had their first child. For Cynthia’s father and brothers, there was no escape. As a child, Cynthia watched as black lung ...

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Cursed

Weekly Contest #373

“I was on my way to Surette’s meat market in Lebeau before dey opened dis mornin’ when I ran into Abraham Duval,” said Sophronia Beliveau as she poured Jacqueline Rivière a cup of coffee. “Who’s he?” asked Jacqueline, a neighbor who had stopped by to chat. “He dat ole Creole who used ta cut my grass. He done told me he saw a ’gator crawl under Leonie Mercier’s house yesterday,” said Sophronia. “I’m worried.” It was late morning in Palmetto, Louisiana, ten miles west of the concrete bridge over the Atchafalaya River. The summer temperature al...

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The Madison Local

Weekly Contest #372

One in the morning and the temperature outside must still be in the 80s, he thought. Matt turned and twisted on the sweat-soaked sheet of his twin bed, which was tucked in the corner of his bedroom of the third-floor walkup he rented off-campus. It was sweltering in the apartment, which had no air conditioning. He remembered that on nights like this, as a boy, he often took an air mattress outside to the porch on the second floor of the duplex his family rented on the South Side of Milwaukee and slept under the stars. There simply was no oth...

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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

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

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 ...

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