Our Collection – Page 2 – The Short Story Project

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

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

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

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

Israel

I can’t recall when I first started scribbling those little notes I later stashed in various hiding places around the apartment. It sure as hell could not have been a lot earlier, because at the time...

Sunflowers

Michal Yaara Carmi

3 min

Israel

The alien wasn’t green and had no antennas on his head. He looked ordinary except that he was about a quarter size. In fact, with his gray clipped mustache and his gloomy countenance he reminded me...

Alien

Zeev Smilansky

8 min

Sweden

A cat was lying in the ditch by the exit road to Skogså, one of those long, strange autumn days when I’d just entered seventh grade but mostly tried to learn about magic, if any occult...

The Cat

Andrea Lundgren

24 min

USA

Hugh Furlong tells people that the single, snapshot moment that’s been burned into his brain to mark the end of his childhood was the moment he saw his brother Peter’s fist make contact with Albert Frank’s...

Pan and Pirates

Ashley Cowger

11 min

USA

My parents always had visitors. They would come in the evening and sit in folding chairs on the back porch of our small house in New Brunswick. They greeted me—an only child —with the warmth of...

The Last Communist

Steven Schwartz

32 min

USA

SOV THADE TAGE EM EREB, OF RER IN KARHIDE, ON GETHEN I live in the oldest city in the world. Long before there were kings in Karhide, Rer was a city, the marketplace and meeting ground...

Coming of Age in Karhide

Ursula Le Guin

31 min

USA

His father was now his mother but he was still an epic asshole. “He won’t even let me get a tattoo,” Josh said. “He gets his whole dick cut off and he won’t even let me...

Bull

Kathy Anderson

11 min

Israel

On the night before her last spell in the hospital, Dawn was haunted again by that old dream about the stone men. As always, she woke the moment she couldn’t stand being terrorized any longer. She...

Heart of Stone

Nir Yehudai

26 min

Slovakia

My mother said to me: ‘You must go to school, or they will lock up your father.’ There were five of us children at home, four girls and one boy. The eldest was my sister, then...

How I Went to School

Tera Fabiánová

18 min

Israel

“Sonya, how could you? How can you wear those short dresses covered with pea-green dots?” “Sonya, have you said your prayers?” “Sonya, how can you listen to those fascists?” “Sonya, have you read Sholem Aleichem?”...

Chicken Morning, Noon and Night

Tasha Karluka

8 min

USA

My hatred for Agnes led directly to our family’s appearance on Oprah. You’d say, oh, you didn’t hate her; she was just your older sister. But she was not my older sister. She looked older, but...

Antropolis

Sharma Shields

15 min

Ireland

She sat at the window watching the evening invade the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty cretonne. She was tired. Few people passed. The...

Eveline

James Joyce

7 min

Israel

I remember when my breasts developed. I would hold them in my hands, squeeze them in front of the mirror, examining them from every angle. I inspected the color of the nipple, checked for the first...

Breasts

Yoav Katz

27 min

UK

Prison more like, said Madeleine. Come now, said Mr Kramer. If I run away they bring me back, said Madeleine. Yes but, said Mr Kramer. Mr Kramer often said, Yes but to Madeleine. Something...

Asylum

David Constantine

12 min

Chile

How could I serve myself from such distant plates, when the home had broken, when not even mother could be forced from the lips. How could I dine on nothing. César Vallejo I was born...

The Need to Be a Son

Andrea Jeftanovic

10 min

Ireland

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its...

Araby

James Joyce

6 min

Israel

Mr. Harlamov was a big man. He was a fearless man too and when he sat himself down at the harmonium (which was a kind of piano played with a foot bellows, or a kind of...

Harlamov

S. Yizhar

9 min

Israel

In the geography lesson the teacher, Mr. Levy, was talking about the Yarkon, and for this reason Hefzibah locked herself in the Girls’ Room during the morning recess. At the beginning of the lesson, the teacher...

Invisible Mending

Ruth Almog

20 min

Israel

A few months before Mother’s madness was officially announced, though there were hints that something out of the ordinary was happening, and our daily routine suffered small blows, life went on and the days were all...

Will Somebody Please Shut the Gate

Mira Magen

13 min

Germany

Holger’s parents had already gone to bed. The taste of unfamiliar toothpaste on my tongue, I was sitting on the duvet in my pyjamas. Holger was standing by the aquarium and feeding the guppies. ‘Oh no,...

Nowhere Else

Matthias Brandt

14 min

Germany

It was the end of January, not long after the Christmas holidays, when the fat girl came to me. That winter I had started lending books to the children from the neighbourhood, who were supposed to...

The Fat Girl

Marie Luise Kaschnitz

10 min

Israel

Before Elyakum reached the age of seven, he had found the woman of his dreams and swore he would marry her. She was round all over, even her nose was round, not protruding very far from...

The Seamstress

Benjamin Tammuz

17 min

Germany

The military school of St. Severin. The gymnasium. The class in their white cotton shirts stand in two rows under the big gas lights. The gym teacher, a young officer with a hard, swarthy face and...

Gym Period

Rainer Maria Rilke

7 min

Mexico

We only learned about the curse three months after Mom had sold our apartment, bought this land, and unceremoniously upped and moved us here. The Land came with a rudimentary house, mature trees that plied us...

Back to The Land

Laia Jufresa

7 min

Spain

The first thing that hit me when I entered, I mean my first impression, was of walking into a place that was extremely strange and humid and dark, not just because of the closed doors and...

Just a Few Millimeters

Sara Mesa

24 min

Israel

Gila was a lovely girl, a little plump, and when she laughed she’d laugh to tears, while Hansie was a lovely and slender girl whose smile was also slender. They would both shine on dance nights,...

Gila

S. Yizhar

13 min

Israel

The stuff remakers of dreams are made of Joel would always cherish the day he met Morris Sadovski. Sitting in a living room whose walls were covered to the brim with colorful oil paintings, Morris looked...

Beit Hakerem. Jerusalem, 1985

Nir Baram

21 min

The Sad and Ambitious Girls of the Province

Israel

Bella loved it, to drive through the sleepy burnt out city, nothing but a few lit windows; and outside the darkness, thin and tangible. This time she was completely guilt free, despite leaving her two babies...

The Sad and Ambitious Girls of the Province

Nurit Zarchi

18 min

Denmark

It was the night Dirch Passer the comedian died. He collapsed onstage. His heart was sick and he was taken away by ambulance to the hospital, where they said he was dead on arrival. It was...

The Winter Garden

Dorthe Nors

4 min

USA

As the train rocked dead at Livingston he saw the man, in a worn khaki shirt with button flaps buttoned, arms crossed. The boy’s hand sprang up by reflex, and his face broke into a smile....

Walking Out

David Quammen

44 min

Canada

After collecting the beer bottles from the bunkhouses at the sawmill, the brothers headed into the forest behind their house to eat wild blackberries, until their bellies were rotten with them and their fingertips were stained...

The Spider in the Jar

Théodora Armstrong

5 min

Israel

We arranged to meet at the Bagration Underground station and walk to Gorbushka to see a Siberian punk band. Gromov explained how I would recognize him: “I wear glasses, the bridge is held together by wire....

Dance of the Swans

Alice Bialsky

11 min

India

The old Cool Water Well is said never to dry up, but it is now sealed, and serves only as a traffic roundabout. The streets around the well house contain a number of middle-class housing colonies....

The Cool Water Well Junction

Aravind Adiga

14 min

USA

She sat on a chair her hair cut short revealing her narrow neck. I wanted to cry and I wasn’t quite sure why exactly, that’s not true, I knew why. She gave me that intrusive thought that...

The Parts Where Your Pee Comes From

Emily Brout

6 min

Russia

Trees cannot talk and they stand as if riveted to the spot, but they are alive nonetheless. They’re breathing. They keep growing for as long as they live. Even enormous old-man trees – they grow a...

Two Brothers

Evgeny Schwartz

23 min

UK

Going to the shore on the first morning of the vacation, the young English boy stopped at a turning of the path and looked down at a wild and rocky bay, and then over the crowded...

Through the Tunnel

Doris Lessing

15 min

Taiwan

“Business savvy just doesn’t run in the blood,” my mum often says – in which there lies a veiled criticism of me, and a hint of regret. But no such regret existed until after I turned...

The Magician on the Footbridge

Wu Ming-Yi

22 min

Israel

Bitterness is a disease of old age; I aged early and by the time I was thirty six it had metastasized through every part of me. I loathed my past as much as I feared the...

The Kid

Rave Sagie

5 min