Our Collection – Page 2 – The Short Story Project

USA

Running, through the vines and tree roots, encircling my legs, pulling me back to the Napalm Apocalypse. I hear the blades of the Huey just in the clearing ready to pick me up, I can’t move,...

Invisible

Jeannean Walker

1 min

USA

I peered out the passenger seat window of my mother’s car. She shifted from second to third gear. “You want to be committed; I’ll commit you!” she spewed while the car lurched forward. My sister laid...

My Sister

Hilary Sigismondi

1 min

USA

I watched his face, nutmeg brown from the sun and criss-crossed like alpaca tracks, grow paler by the day, a yellow hue to his beautiful eyes that the doctor said was because his liver was quitting...

The Lonely Magpie

Alan S. Falkingham

1 min

USA

Tommy’s cousin Gabe. Tommy’s distant cousin Gabe from Stillwater, Minnesota. Tommy’s cousin Gabe, related to my husband through divorce and remarriage, in lieu of actual blood, who arrives on my front porch at dinnertime with a...

Gabe

Holiday Reinhorn

7 min

USA

“It is not enough to be the possessor of genius—the time and the man must conjoin. An Alexander the Great, born into an age of profound peace, might scarce have troubled the world—a Newton, grown up...

The Curfew Tolls

Stephen Vincent Benét

25 min

USA

I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way West, after changing cars at Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat...

Cannibalism In The Cars

Mark Twain

13 min

USA

The woods were already filled with shadows one June evening, just before eight o’clock, though a bright sunset still glimmered faintly among the trunks of the trees. A little girl was driving home her cow, a...

A White Heron

Sarah Orne Jewett

16 min

USA

The first time Anna heard her son’s heartbeat, it was through the doctor’s stethoscope; a hummingbird beat, a frantic thumping; a small frenetic voice. She was a linguist, the first of her circle of friends to...

Ain’t No Word But Lonely

Rachel A. Levine

9 min

USA

Maggie is an expectant mother in a state that grants personhood at conception and protects the child’s rights over those of their mother. The world changed when I wasn’t looking. That’s what it felt like,...

Tertullian’s Law

Tia Levings

10 min

The Mother of all Defiance – Fourth Place

USA

Mom gave me a block of cheddar cheese and a sleeve of Fig Newtons when I left home for California in August of 1983. Apparently back then, when crossing the country alone in an unreliable foreign...

The Mother of all Defiance – Fourth Place

Mimi Broihier

9 min

USA

323 Juneberry Way, Deptford, NJ 08096 (856) 848-0501 Lmanfredo@comcast.net In certain places there exists a permeating pointlessness to life with an aura of despair so acute that its inhabitants come to be unafraid, or, at...

Soul Anatomy

Lou Manfredo

29 min

USA

Waythorn, on the drawing-room hearth, waited for his wife to come down to dinner It was their first night under his own roof, and he was surprised at his thrill of boyish agitation. He was not...

The Other Two

Edith Wharton

29 min

USA

Nature is a haunted house — but Art — is a house that tries to be haunted. -Letter excerpt, Emily Dickinson, 1876. Chilled Autumn air settled over me, the dryness of it tickling my lungs....

The Castle in the Woods

Isabella Connor

9 min

Nothing Ruins a Good Story Like an Eyewitness

USA

You got it wrong, son. You exaggerated the wrong things and failed to exaggerate the right things. I know you’re supposed to know your business, but you wrote your story from a long way off and...

Nothing Ruins a Good Story Like an Eyewitness

Matt Cashion

12 min

USA

Two people came through the double glass doors of a twelve-story brick building and walked along the chain link fence to the parking lot. The tall, gray-haired man guided the short, white-haired woman by her elbow,...

Leaving the Meadows

Megan Staffel

18 min

USA

“Win, win, win, win, win, win, win!!” was the incessant cry of our stepmother Sophie. It was the command that drove our household. She was a slight woman with a turned-up nose and a perky hairdo...

The Real Mother’s Song

Geoff Schmidt

9 min

USA

That winter, like every winter before it, my father woke early each day and turned up the thermostat so the house would be warm by the time my mother and I got out of bed. Sometimes...

Glossolalia

David Jauss

34 min

USA

One move leads to another move, and nowhere feels as good as you want it to feel; your childhood feels wrong, and this place feels wrong, and the next place feels wrong, and so you move...

The Problem with Moving

Jessica Hollander

2 min

USA

The first time Heloise saw Mitch, he was standing beside the vending machines in the hospital cafeteria, angular and fresh in his puckery clean white scrubs. She had come in for a Coke and chips, not...

Uno

Eileen Pollack

29 min

USA

My lover’s fingers are long. When he stretches them out, they bow in the middle. When they bend, he can span five frets. He sits on the wide window sill, the guitar resting on his bare...

Astronomical Objects

Liz Prato

5 min

USA

Way over there, the boy could see them, in the deep end, his mother and the man his mother said he’d better stop calling Dan Dog. They were all the way over there, doing what his...

Make Me Do Things

Victoria Redel

5 min

USA

One of the robots offered to carry Pico for the last hundred meters, on its back or cradled in its padded arms; but she shook her head emphatically, telling it, “Thank you, no. I can make...

Guest of Honor

Robert Reed

47 min

USA

Ben was my summer boyfriend, my “older man,” Mom called him. He was twelve, and I was eleven, a skinny eleven, though I believed my breasts appeared acceptable to those who mattered. He lived usually with...

How to Be a Prisoner

Jessica Hollander

3 min

USA

It all started when Cletus Jefferson asked himself “Why aren’t all blind people geniuses?” Cletus was only 13 at the time, but it was a good question, and he would work on it for 14 more...

None So Blind

Joe Haldeman

16 min

USA

“This isn’t the one,” she said, laying her hand on my arm. As if she was really sorry. “Stick a fork in me. I’m done,” I said. “No. You’re just upset. You thought this was the...

You Are the Bad Smell

Kathy Anderson

11 min

USA

For three years, lifetimes ago, I was an office manager at a credit agency. During those years, with one exception, I never fired anyone. Probably this was because everyone quit first. The pay was miserable, there...

Let Go

Lee Upton

14 min

USA

Yoshi Takamata moved from Kyoto to Connecticut at the age of fifteen, and his three years of American high school, followed by four years at local college and two decades in New York City, had done...

The Flower of One’s Heart

Panio Gianopoulos

25 min

USA

During the early years of the Ming Dynasty, one young woman in particular was praised for her beauty. Of course there were other beauties, but wherever Liling went, admirers clapped, as if she were on stage...

Liling

Kelly Cherry

5 min

USA

Years ago, Aunt Renata squeezed a picture into my hand when my mother wasn’t looking. Aunt Renata wasn’t really my aunt, but rather someone to whom my mother had clung like a sister, like blood. In...

Waltz on East 6th Street

Tehila Lieberman

11 min

Look at the Sky and Tell Me What You See

USA

I’m going to a funeral, and for the occasion, I’ve chosen a knee-length black Donna Karan dress (Flashy Trash, $15), black lace bra and panties, garter belt, sheer black stockings and brown snow boots with my...

Look at the Sky and Tell Me What You See

Aimee LaBrie

9 min

USA

He’s confused. Too shy. His sister died of leukemia when he was thirteen. He’s not over his wife yet. He’s intimidated by your sarcastic sense of humor. You’re smarter than he is and he can’t handle...

Words to Live By

Aimee LaBrie

2 min

USA

When I came down, Granpa’s door was barely open. A blade of candlelight from inside crossed the floor and the living room couch. Mom whispered orders. Someone prayed. When I peeked in, Mom’s hand touched the...

The Lie

Peter Brown

17 min

USA

“Miri?” Hannah had intended to knock lightly on the bedroom door, but it hadn’t been closed properly so it opened slowly at her touch. Miriam never closed her door all the way. “Miriam?” She stood in...

Inseparable

Anaia Daigle

9 min

USA

This all happened a long time ago, in the early decades of the Second Republic, when I was a boy growing up in Upper Pannonia. Life was very simple then, at least for us. We lived...

Tales From the Venia Woods

Robert Silverberg

31 min

USA

As soon as they called the First Class passengers I stepped to the head of the line, hurried down to my seat and braced myself for the crowd that came slumping past minutes later with their...

Looking for Service

Nathan Oates

28 min

USA

At one time, the landlord Jeffers had been a busy person, but not anymore. Now he had time to think, and he had recently decided that he was going to die. His stomach was no longer...

The Funeral Bill

Jason DeYoung

26 min

USA

When she was seventeen, Loretta discovered that she was pregnant with Blue Simpson’s child, a shame really. Not because Tildon turned out to be a bad son. (In fact, he would do quite well, thirty-two years...

Filament

K.L. Cook

17 min

USA

And, Madame Blanchard, believe that I am happy to be here with you and your family because it is so serene, everything, and before this I worked for a long time in a fancy house—maybe you don’t know...

Magic

Katherine Anne Porter

4 min

USA

I was on my way to the bus stop when I saw the headless man. At first I thought it was a trick of the eye: I was wearing big dark glasses, possibly the head had...

Headless

Karen Brennan

9 min

USA

His picture would appear in the paper, scrutinized for any sign of dementia. People would read between the lines for hints of indiscretion or scandal in his background as to what had motivated him. They’d find...

Indie

Steven Schwartz

22 min

USA

There was a wall of Ruth and Sam’s house that bordered the neighbor’s bed of ivy. These neighbors allowed the ivy to spread unchecked. It crawled up the wooden fence and weighed it down so that...

The Migrating Wall

Karen Brennan

6 min

USA

Ginny stood on the counter of the diner decorated in tinfoil. She’s my wife, if you want to call her that, which I do. She’d made bracelets and earrings and a fake-fancy necklace by folding and...

Riding to the Shore

Liz Prato

17 min

USA

The day after his wife left him, taking their three-year-old son with her, Larry Watkins took out his circular saw, attached the metal-cutting blade, and carefully sawed his 1974 Cadillac Fleetwood in half. It was not...

Torque

David Jauss

20 min

USA

It is past midnight and Janet is up in the oak tree. She is the bird with black feathers. When she twitches her head the tips of her black feathered braids just brush the tips of...

Man in Gorilla Suit by Moonlight

Tehila Lieberman

10 min

USA

I. You spotted the trapeze rig in the spring, where it seemed to have sprouted, like a flower, from its otherwise concrete surroundings. It was pitched on a medium-sized plot of grass in what counts as...

Planch, Whip, Salto

Becky Adnot-Haynes

6 min

USA

I made a request of no crying, for I had the grand task of handling the cat. No crying, I said. Do whatever it takes to wait until I’ve gone. He agreed to blame his contact...

Too Huge

Kate Hill Cantrill

8 min

USA

Him asking me to tell him about Kolkata. Lying in a twin bed, his head on my chest, some Saturday night. The whole room lit gray, the only color his voice. Why did you want me...

Kolkata

Gabriel Monteros

9 min

USA

So it’s like the Greeks, right? And everyone has a personal afterlife tailored to them, except it’s not all dark and bleak. You do the task and you go through the thing and then there’s another...

The Lake is a Long Way From Here

Joelle Schumacher

7 min

USA

His name is Charles Jenkins, but everyone calls him Zeke. No one in Little Bend, Zeke included, knows why. This is what people know about Zeke: when Zeke was fourteen, back when he was Charlie, he...

Weather

Elizabeth Gonzalez

16 min

USA

Berne, Switzerland 1765 A season of ice descends upon the winter chalet, cracking mortar and spreading bright veins across the window glass. Water freezes in the kitchen’s basins. The cat is found stiff and white...

There Are No Bodies Such as This

Adam McOmber

16 min

USA

Old Nannie sat hunched upon herself expecting her own death momentarily. The Grandmother had said to her at parting, with the easy prophecy of the aged, that this might be their last farewell on earth; they...

The Last Leaf

O. Henry

6 min

USA

l had planned on spending the holidays with a bottle of Chablis until my sister Mag showed up, itching for a fight. At the restaurant, she switched tables three times. The first table had no view,...

Sissy

Kathy Anderson

8 min

USA

From May to September Delia took the Churro sheep and two dogs and went up on Joe-Johns Mountain to live. She had that country pretty much to herself all summer. Ken Owen sent one of his...

Lambing Season

Molly Gloss

22 min

USA

She wriggled, squirmed, just a little, but a little was too much. It started as a shimmy at her hips and twisted up through her shoulders, reminding her of the rippling way a wet dog shakes...

What Do You Remember?

Sally Shivnan

11 min