Pádraig Barry (PJ)
Retired guy. Nurses and surgeons are my heroes. An English/History Major Should Have Been Trapped in an Accountant’s Body, LH Guy explains a lot, Married to a Saint, What a Great Life We Are Having Together 🚫porn
- I told him to ignore the gossip, but he carried it home anyway, like mud on his boots. The things they said and the things he feared were true settled into him, grain by grain, until he mistook their weight for his own. #bravewrite
- I hopped on the rail car in St. Louis and found him there. We talked of life. I thought the world cruel. He took a hefty pull from the bottle and said a man should not expect the world to treat him kindly. #2WordPrompt
- Louise blamed her chronic optimism on too many romance novels, none of which prepared her for the meeting from hell. By the time the chair launched into his third digression, she was already calculating how many chapters of Emily Henry’s latest it would take to recover. #vssmagic
- He wore the wound like a boutonnière, elegant and tragic, as if heartbreak were a fashion statement. Those scars were nothing compared with the ones he carried inside. #vss365
- The room was dim, but the lambent look he gave her lit something low and dangerous inside her. His gaze had a soft, glowing heat that traced her skin long before his hands did. He was patient. He knew the best boil was a slow boil. #vss365
- The hat shimmered with moonlight and murmured secrets only the wind could understand. Beneath the hat’s brim, her eyes glowed like embers, and the forest leaned in to listen. I knew I was being enchanted, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be hers forevermore. #vssmagic
- I told myself I’d just get back my sweater and leave, but then she opened the door in just a tee shirt, smiling like she knew exactly how flimsy my plan was. #bedroomeyes
- The temporal manual for seventeenth century France said to prepare for cultural dissonance, but Agnes wasn’t ready for the thick dialect and the even thicker disdain from the local nuns. They thought a single woman was unbecoming and she should either marry or join their order. #2WordPrompt
- Our supervisor said the situation demanded calm professionalism, but Barry, ever the optimist, insisted on bringing a touch of levity to the project. It was a wise decision. It kept us from throttling each other as the deadline approached. #bravewrite
- She stealthily got out of bed. I thought she meant to leave, but she only needed to use the bathroom and now she was returning to my bed. The blinds were half open, her silhouette golden and careless, and I thought, here comes the sun, and maybe trouble too. #bedroomeyes
- The ghost of my father sat in the old chair by the range, not speaking, just watching the kettle boil as if it mattered. This was so odd to me. He never liked tea. He preferred lager, and a lot of it, which proved to be his undoing. Maybe death had reformed him while my mother could not. #vss365
- Agnes was the lead presenter at the mega-conference on Victorian laundry practices. However the conference had somehow been double-booked with the symposium on plague vectors, which explained the disinfectant fog in the conference center and why she was giving her presentation in a bonnet #vssmagic
- By the time Janis reached her friends’ Woodstock encampment, her hunger had become more than a distraction. She was sweating profusely. Her addiction had happened faster than she ever imagined and she needed to find a fix quick before the more painful withdrawal symptoms set in. #2WordPrompt
- A tulip had no business blooming this early, yet there it was, lifting its red head as though answering a summons he hadn’t meant to send. Ever since he was installed as a Druid in what he thought was a pretend ceremony, strange things kept happening around Pádraig. #bravewrite
- Sarah did not mention the change aloud, only let her glance drift toward the horizon where the sunset burned in a fiery seam. She realized how every moment had been quietly taking watch. She felt its soft reprise threading through her, asking who she might become if she dared to answer it. #inkmine
- She touched the bramble and felt its prick, a bead of blood blossoming on her finger. A feel of warmth spread up her arm. She drew her hand back, but the sense of awakening stayed with her, settling beneath her ribs, alert and waiting. She was no Sleeping Beauty; quite the opposite now. #vssmagic
- He moved to the plateau years ago. There was pain in the way he stood now, as though the wind had been at him too long. That and being that far from the ocean can steal a soul from a man. #vss365
- The clouds began to darken just as the last bus pulled away, leaving Dan isolated at the edge of town with nothing but the wind and the whispering trees. He had heard rumours of vampires in Upstate Nee York and now he could almost believe they were true. #2WordPrompt
- A vacant smile clung to the mannequin’s face, though she could swear its eyes had shifted toward her. Frank began to think his exploration of a long abandoned Caldor store was a bad idea. #bravewrite
- Jason was an aspiring bluegrass singer-songwriter. When the encore ended, Molly in a band brushed past him, whispering that she hoped he’d stay. He stayed and eventually a security guard brought him to her dressing room. All night the two sipped bourbon and talked about collaboration. #bedroomeyes
- Jack’s run at the blackjack table had been amazing. The Chinese lucky coins tied with a red string were doing their job. His winnings: two large stacks of $10,000 chips were in front of him. The dealer was suspicious. He was too lucky. Already an enforcer had been quietly summoned. #vssmagic
- He touched her wrist, briefly, and it felt like someone had seen her soul and decided not to walk away. The touch wasn’t dramatic, but it held. And in that small, unremarkable moment, something inside her shifted, like a door she hadn’t realized was locked had quietly come open. #vss365
- The peasant girl had long resisted trying to protect the kingdom. Now, finally, she stepped toward the mirror. The air tightened, expectant, as if the world were holding its breath to see whether she would flinch or finally claim her future as a princess waiting on the other side. #2 WordPrompt
- Phil had been running all day. The villagers were persistent chasing him with pitchforks and torches. As evening descended they were still on his tail but he was able to keep his distance between them. All this outrage because he saw his shadow. #bravewrite
- On an audit at the orphanage, Lydia noticed the cornflower blue of the child’s jumper first, a colour so soft it seemed to ask for gentleness. In it she looked like someone who might yet be spared a hard life. Before the day was done Lydia had filed papers to begin the adoption process. #vssmagic
- A shadow flickered across Agnes’ face, and then her expression wasn’t hers at all-older, colder, and entirely unaware of who she was. She never should have opened the bottle in Merlin’s cave. It was against protocol. Worse it contained the spirit of Morgana and now her body was Morgana’s. #vss365
- The professor told me to stay calm, but since the alarm was playing “Ode to Joy” in increasingly frantic tempo, I took that as a cue to best feet. I never cared for Beethoven anyway. #2WordPrompt

- Quiet unassuming Dana received a makeup kit on her eighteenth birthday. It had unintended consequences. It awakened her sense of self presentation but it also created a strong sense of self love. Within a year she looked a decade older and was a narcissist. #bravewrite
- It took considerable courage for Agnes to open the spellbook, mostly because the last intern who tried had been turned into a very opinionated raven. However, she needed to make herself a confident pampered actress in the 1950s. The spell worked too well. She was a material girl now. #vssmagic
- Agnes tried to soothe the visiting committee with tea and biscuits, but nothing soothes politicians determined to be outraged on principle. The itinerary had been redacted. Each blacked-out line on the itinerary seemed to inflame their sense of being stonewalled, and possibly insulted. #vss365
- It was hardly worth missing the entire Michaelmas season of lectures just to chase a rumor about a misfiled diary, but the Dean insisted, and Agnes had never won an argument with him and she knew she could not win this one. #2WordPrompt
- It was in the soft, bewildered hours before dawn that the mourning rose up in him again, as patient and persistent as the tide against the old pier. Yet when the sun rose his sorrow would recede for light always brought hope to him. #bravewrite

- The Dean of Temporal Studies insisted the thrum in the retrieval unit was harmless, though he said it with the same tone he uses for “minor temporal anomaly” and “we’ve lost another undergraduate.” #vss365

- Agnes did try to warn the department about the paradox, but since no one reads memos longer than two sentences, they’re all acting surprised that Patrick returned from a trip to the Civil War as a circus mime. #2WordPrompt
- When the new rules on file retention had been circulated through the Department, Weber muttered that it was a form of bureaucratic euthanasia, slowly killing off creativity and productivity one new rule at a time. #bravewrite
