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Zack Herman

Author on Reedsy Prompts since Dec, 2020

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38 Stories

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Granny Grace

Weekly Contest #342

Today, Mommy hung pictures in the long hallway at our new place. I’m fascinated by old pictures and the past, in general. Anything that happened before I was born interests me.The one picture that I’m fixated on is probably from the 1960’s. It is a colored picture and I can’t put it into words, but there was something different about color back then. Anyhow, the photo is of a woman standing in front of a field of tobacco. She’s tall and lean. She’s wearing a flower print dress and a pair of brown loafers. One thing that stands out to me is t...

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Billy Jay

“Hey, Buddy, you’re the only original Hoosier Harmony Boy left in the group, ain’t you?” Sonny asks me.Sonny is our bus driver. We’re headed down I-65, headed to Alex City, Alabama from our home base in Salem, Indiana. I’m hanging out with him up front. The rest of the group are relaxing, either in the lounge or their bunks. I’m in what they call the “buddy seat”, already in my sweats, T shirt and socks. “I sure am,” I answer his question. “When we started up in ’74, I was the tenor singer and bass guitar picker. Around ’92, I started having...

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Friday Night at Cozy Corner

Weekly Contest #340

I’m seated in my usual booth at the Cozy Corner Café. It’s Friday night, and it’s raining. Merle Haggard is playing on the jukebox. If he can make it through December, everything’s gonna be alright, he knows. Well, it’s October and I’m not as sure as Merle is about things being alright. I dip one of my fries in the ketchup on my plate and take a bite.“Gonna need anything else, Claude?” Beyth’s voice asks over my right shoulder. Tall, slender, blonde Beth, the only server on duty tonight. Sweet, lovely Beth. She makes me wish that I was many ...

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Luke Tillman

“Boy, you need to stay away from that Luke Tillman!”If I heard that once back when I was growing up, I must have heard it a thousand times. From Mommy and Daddy. From Mamaw and Papaw. From Brother Evans, the preacher at our little church. It seemed nobody over the age of 12 wanted me to be friends with Luke.None of that phased me one bit. Luke was everything that I was not. He had blonde hair that came down to his shoulders. Papaw cut my hair and he had learned to barber in the Army. There came a time when short hair became cool. I didn’t ...

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Marie

The first time that I ever saw Marie, I was nine years old. She was standing in the rain, under a streetlight on 4th Street. She had her broom propped against the streetlight post and she was wearing a bright yellow rain cap and a matching raincoat, so she wasn’t getting soaked at least. I, on the other hand, was running home from school and I was getting drenched. She smiled a sad, crooked smile at me and waved.“Hi!” I said in response to the wave. As far back as I can remember, I’ve had what I guess would be called a “sixth sense” about ...

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The Yellow Light

Weekly Contest #331

“Maudie, what can I do about mosquitoes?” Mama asked Granny Hickman.It was a Saturday afternoon during the summer after I had turned 10. We were all out on the front porch of the house where Mama and I were living on Flat Fork in Caudill County. My mother and grandmother were seated in rocking chairs, shoes kicked off. Mama was drinking a Tupperware tumbler of iced tea and Granny was puffing on a hand rolled Price Albert cigarette. I was sitting on the porch swing, reading the latest issue of Baseball Digest.“Got a skeeter problem, Tessa?” G...

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A visit With Saul

Weekly Contest #329

The other day, I asked Daddy about this memory that I have. He shook his head and said, “I never understood why you’re always diggin’ up the past, son!” Here’s what I know. As far back as I can remember, I had heard the adults in my family talk about my father’s second cousin, Saul. Saul had moved to the Cleveland area to work in a factory. His mother had begged him not to go up there. She said he belonged down here in Kentucky with his family, not up there with strangers. Saul moved anyway. He was doing well. He made plenty of money and wou...

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The End Shall Come

Weekly Contest #324

CW: Mass suicide, Gun violence, Physical abuse The Children of the Firstborn are gathered in the Cavern awaiting the Second Coming. There is a large digital clock mounted on a wall of the cave and it reads 10:30:49 and counting. A stage has been constructed near the clock and there is a podium on the stage. 14 year old Dougie Starnes sits on a rock near the clock. He is uncomfortable and, deep down, he really doesn’t want to be there. Like everybody else, he is dressed in a long, white robe and he is barefoot. Like most boys his age, he is v...

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Nellie, the Hat Man, & Me

Weekly Contest #314

My baby sister Sally’s crying wakes me up. Sally is five years old and I’m 10. There are only two bedrooms in our house, so we sleep in the same room. It’s a whimpering kind of cry. The kind of crying that a little girl does when she doesn’t get her way, not the crying she does when she’s hurt. Still, I hate to hear her cry, so I get out of bed and go over to where she’s lying. I reach out in the darkness until I feel her curly, blonde hair and stroke her head as if she was my dog, Scruffy. “Hey, there, sissy, what’s wrong?” I whisper. I am...

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How I Met Cindy

When you are the preacher’s kid, sometimes, you end up doing things that you really don’t want to do. It was the first day of Christmas vacation. I was 16 years old and had my first vehicle, a Ford pickup, painted burnt orange. I was a very self-centered young man and was determined to spend my vacation time hanging with my best friend, Judd, and my girlfriend, Monica. Dad, naturally, had other things in mind. “Look, son, we have all of the groceries from the food drive delivered except for one family. I have to work tomorrow and I’d appreci...

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Let's You and Him Fight

Weekly Contest #304

Hickmanville, Kentucky. We moved there from Illinois in 1972. I was ten years old. My grandfather had been having heart problems and his doctor had advised him to give up running the family business, Walker’s Grocery. The folks and me moved there and lived in a double wide that sat behind Pap and Mamaw’s house. By the time we had lived there for two years, I was pretty well settled. I made good grades and I was the starting shooting guard on the Caudill County Junior High Hornets basketball team. I had made friends. My best friend was Lefty...

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Angel Unawares?

Weekly Contest #302

“Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” -Hebrews 13:2 (King James Bible) When I was 16, my Friday nights were usually always the same. My buddy, Woody Rawlings, would stop by and pick me up in his beat up Ford pickup truck and we’d head for Logansville, the nearest “big town” and we would go and “cruise Willie”(Wilmington Avenue). Woody and me had been pals since 5th grade when he had moved to Kentucky from Detroit. Woody was a tall, skinny guy whose voiced had never changed when he hit ...

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The Legend of the Tire House

Weekly Contest #291

I got the newspaper from back home in the mail today. I subscribe to the Caudill County Gazette so I’ll have some connection to the place where I grew up. The picture on the second page caught my eye-a tall,skinny man with white, shaggy hair and a drooping moustache. He wore a pair of bib overalls and a plaid shirt. The clothing hung on him like he was a scarecrow. The man stood in front of a chicken wire fence. He didn’t smile for the camera, but stared stoically ahead. I wondered why he was in the paper. The headline explained it all… LO...

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A Soul In Danger

Weekly Contest #289

I was pulling out of Martin Hollow Road onto State Route 12 when I first saw the man. It was raining. H e was standing there by the STOP sign. He made no effort to get out of the rain. He just stood there and kind of stared at my old, rusty Dodge truck as I stopped. He was a wiry sort of guy. It looked like he was dressed in some sort of a work uniform that looked maybe a size too big for him. The fact that his shirt was untucked added to his sad sack appearance. He was wearing a straw hat, so at least, his head wasn’t getting wet. He was a...

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Auld Lang Syne Y2K

I suppose that I’ve always been kind of boring. It was December 31, 1999. My idea of partying like it was 1999 consisted of going to Wal-Mart for a frozen pizza, coming back to my two bedroom, on bath castle, baking the pizza, and watching some scary movies I had recently bought on VHS. Sounds like something a middle aged or elderly man would do, doesn’t it? I was 22 years old. It was cold that evening. The thermometer on the front porch said 37 degrees. I put on a sweatshirt and my old high school letterman’s jacket (I wrestled two years), ...

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