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Travis Smith

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Jul, 2024

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15 Followers
27 Following

8 Stories

128 karma pts

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The Ballad of the Mud-Man

Weekly Contest #343

In a clean, clean world a man fell into the mud. His name was irrelevant. His priorities were not the same as theirs, which made him always confused. He laid in the mud for several minutes. He wept. He hit the sloppy ground with his fists. He screamed at God for making him so broken. A column of mud heard the man whose name didn’t matter. The mud felt like he did, unwanted, out of place. Feeling true kinship for perhaps the first time ever, it surrounded the man. It did not set to drown him. It did not set to injure him. It was fusing to its...

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A Frustrating Splash of Destiny

Weekly Contest #342

Hi friend. So we’re both on our way home from the daily rinse-repeat, know what I mean? I just feel like telling someone about all of this. I hope that’s OK. We’ve both got a little time to kill on the ride, “cooling our bottoms” on the transit, anyway. May as well make some small talk. It’s been a day. I mean, I have it really good and I don’t want to complain. Others are basically drafted into lives that aren’t nearly as great as mine, but I suppose our perspectives are still our own. I like to think that I can have a really strange and co...

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The World's Greatest Husband

Weekly Contest #342

The World’s Greatest Husband knew he was because his wife gave him a statue declaring it so. It was a goofy, thrift-store tchotchke of an old man with a hairline that receded like his hair was a Sai sword and was dressed like Mr. Rogers and a tired but humble and content visage. He lightly cried when he received it. He had wanted nothing more in life than to love someone and be the best person he could be for them. Love was what gave life meaning and this was tangible proof that he was living life correctly and well. This notion was also sup...

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Faces of God, Winds of Jane

Weekly Contest #341

Where did it start? There was God. There was Jane. I was at my window. I was searching for something. There were reasons, for a while at least. Where did I travel? Dammit! Did I just dream it all. It was before. I stared out of my window, and she was there. God took a highlighter and drew it over her. She was auraed in blue. She was in a book and in pen God wrote “home.” I was tempted to jump out of the window. I needed to be near her immediately. People need reasons. It was a windy day, but only for her. Her hair moved. It danced while the...

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Another Wednesday Morning

Weekly Contest #340

-Wednesday morning. Another Wednesday morning. Aw hell… I’m afraid to write. I mean, seriously. I’m actually afraid to write. I’m such a fraud. Why am I like this? Why am I at all? Travis said, as if he was speaking to the dog. Olive was his strength, though ironically she too was traumatized, and he loved her so much because she was perhaps the only thing as fragile as him. -Stop that! What are you doing? Travis patted his lap and the shaggy gray dog with the big, sad, soulful eyes walked from the mattress of the bed straight to him, sittin...

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"In The Neighborhood"

Weekly Contest #340

There was a park where the old gang used to hang out. It was, in essence, two parks that joined two separate tracks of homes combined by a strip of concrete. With those two neighborhoods representing two very different tax brackets, it was said to be a symbol of community togetherness. Maybe I’m a cynic, but I’m certain it was not intentionally created for the purpose. I imagine it was more like “well, we can’t put a road there so let’s just keep the grass going.” Humanity and its need to falsify higher purpose. Anyway, we spent a fair amoun...

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The Inheritance

Weekly Contest #339

Jet watched the steam rise from his coffee cup through drooping eyelids. There was something fundamentally different about the smell of the same cup of bargain pods of Folger’s in his childhood home than anywhere else he had laid his head since switching to his thrift store Keurig. He could only imagine that it was a product of cohesion. The smell was more potent here because it became a part of the growing soul of what must have been ten-thousand pots of the stuff that had been brewed here over his lifetime. The smell was childhood to him, ...

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Plan-Verse Corp. Future Strategy Memo: Narrative Case Study

Weekly Contest #338

Plan-Verse Corp. Corporate Office Altasia blew the dust off of the brown leather-bound volume entitled “Plan-Verse Manual: One-Thousand Greatest Upkeep Disasters, Vol. 3. (300-399)” (Plan-Verse Corp.: We Manage Your Planets!) and threw it open, all the way to the index. She ran her finger down the page furiously and felt a bead of sweat find the unfortunate path into her eye. “Dammit!” She shouted with a tone that indicated an attempt to respect the whisper policy, but not the presence to actually keep quiet. “Shhhh!” cut into her ear from a...

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