Our Collection – Page 2 – The Short Story Project

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

Israel

In the still of the night, you are surrounded by darkness in the room of your childhood. Sticky and smelling of semen, you hear the familiar footfalls that you recognize as your mother’s. Next to your...

Your Honor

Shay Aspril

25 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

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

USA

My wife is one of these people who drives on the freeway with a mattress on top of her car, held there by a single string. I first found her in a duplex made over into...

Something, Anything

Sally Shivnan

7 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

Israel

His heart suddenly flipped over in his chest. “Just like a carp in the kitchen sink,” Grigory Katz thought. To calm himself down, he stuck his nose into his scarf and breathed in his own warm...

Rooms

Anna Likhtikman

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

When my husband first announced that he was leaving me, there were no packed bags. No studio apartment had already been leased on the other, seedier side of town. There were no missing photo albums or...

Dear John

Sarah Gerkensmeyer

5 min

USA

Now that Caroline lived alone for the first time in her life, she began to be irritated by the cleanliness of her house. When she left something somewhere, it stayed there. If she didn’t enter a...

The River Warta

Amy Gustine

20 min

USA

The car that ran over Heidi didn’t even put on its brakes, let alone pull to the curb. Instead it signaled right onto Lexington Street. Heidi was a puppy, and a worried bloody smear on the...

Heidi is Dead

Sherrie Flick

8 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

Israel

Yuda is banging the wall with his pillow; Moishe is switching the lights off and on again. I lay silent, not involved in the nightly disturbance. “He’s coming!” calls Zvika, the sun-shield watcher. We get under...

Sun Shields

Yariv Sapir

2 min

USA

On the third day after they moved to the country he came walking back from the village carrying a basket of groceries and a twenty-four-yard coil of rope. She came out to meet him, wiping her...

Rope

Katherine Anne Porter

11 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

Spain

That night we were having guests for dinner, and Ines had been in a frenzy all week. She hunted down innovative recipes on the internet and buried my desk in sheets of paper as she printed...

An Enchanting Evening

Margarita Leoz

11 min

New Zealand

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled...

The Garden Party

Katherine Mansfield

21 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

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

USA

Lena was patient, gentle, sweet and german. She had been a servant for four years and had liked it very well. Lena had been brought from Germany to Bridgepoint by a cousin and had been in...

The Gentle Lena

Gertrude Stein

54 min

Italy

There was always, in the square, a curious and ancient rentable stagecoach that no one ever rented. The dozing coachman would shake himself awake at the striking of the hours from the bell tower, then his...

The Secret Game

Elsa Morante

20 min

Venezuela

You walk, you walk and you forget: that’s what she always says. Well, not in those exact words. It’s usually a more specific complaint: you didn’t call Pacheco, you didn’t check the Supercable contract, you didn’t...

Benjamin and the Walker

Krina Ber

11 min

Mexico

I met Olegario and his son William in the town cantina. I’d been on the run for weeks, travelling drunkenly from one place to another. I slept in the car and ate when I was hungry....

Sons

José Miguel Tomasena

9 min

Poland

My grandmother lived in Podlasie. The house wasn’t in the village itself. The neighborhood was known as “the colony”—scattered farms separated by stands of aspen and avenues of age-old, slender poplars. The cottage stood amid an...

Grandmother and the Ghosts

Andrzej Stasiuk

6 min

USA

On the third day of vacation, we woke in our rental cabins by the ocean to find half our flip‐flops were gone. One of the baby’s potato‐sized sandals was missing as well. By the door, out...

The Last Summer of Our Patriarch

Idra Novey

10 min

Israel

Dayton Ohio, 2006 The plane lands at the airport. It’s a connecting flight with a stopover in Zurich, and the final destination is The Dayton-Wright Brothers International Airport. A total flight time of 15 hours,...

The Eternal Israeli

Nissan Shor

26 min

Colombia

I came across him the other day when I was looking for the snorkel fins in the storage space. I didn’t even remember that I’d left him there. He was covered in dust and had a...

Bear Ears

Carolina Vegas

8 min

Spain

My sister always said that it was much better to have a niece or nephew than your own child. I suppose that my mother agreed with her. My sister said that with a nephew you got...

Oxytocin

Miguel Serrano Larraz

10 min

Spain

Miriam tells them that he built the house himself with his own hands. She tells them how he piled up the rocks on rainy days, so that they’d get good and soaked before he soldered them...

Second Residence

Margarita Leoz

10 min

Israel

My father died at six in the evening. After the doctor told us the news, we went home. Ariane drove, and I sat next to her. Neither of us spoke. The taste of the coffee from...

Coffee

Gadi Taub

7 min

Argentina

She called you two weeks ago. Just like that. Out of the blue. Today is Mother’s Day, and you’re going to see her again. You wanted to make as good a start to the day as...

You’re Only Bleeding

Matías Capelli

16 min

Catalonia

How quickly that dark line gets longer, how quickly the snuffed-out candles proliferate. CAVAFY, “Candles” (Tr. Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard) “It used to be that wars would thin the herd. Now that there’s peace,...

Engagement Ring

Jordi Nopca

11 min

Scotland

The trader accustomed to the manners of Eastern Polynesia has a lesson to learn among the Gilberts. The ridi is but a spare attire; as late as thirty years back the women went naked until marriage;...

Husband and Wife

Robert Louis Stevenson

10 min

Uruguay

It’s a rough summer morning in Misiones, with all the sun, heat and tranquility that the season can provide. Mother Nature, open to the skies, seems proud of herself. Like the sun, the heat, and the...

The Son

Horacio Quiroga

6 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

USA

“Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il rèsonne.” – De Béranger. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung...

The Fall of the House of Usher

Edgar Allan Poe

28 min

Uruguay

All day long the four idiot sons of the couple Mazzini-Ferraz sat on a bench in the patio. Their tongues protruded from between their lips; their eyes were dull; their mouths hung open as they turned...

The Decapitated Chicken

Horacio Quiroga

10 min

France

She saw me, she sighed, she guessed right away. “It was well worth it,” she said. She looked at me for a long time. “Lucie would like you to help her with her homework,” she said....

The Last Charge of the Russian Cossacks

Mathias Énard

4 min

Bolivia

After passing a sign that said they’d soon be entering Natchez Trace, Jorge told his father that it would be a good idea to stop for petrol before they entered the park. His father nodded. For...

Faulkner

Edmundo Paz Soldán

6 min

Germany

Fritz had met ‘that Hilda woman’ in a bar called Paradise Now – sheer chance, really. He never usually went to places like that. For years he had been rotating among three or four pubs and...

Sloth

Eva Menasse

13 min

The Great Illusion at Klingenreiter Lumber Sawmill and Woodworking Import Export

Germany

When Ferdinand Klingenreiter asked the audience, dear friends and family, boys and girls, to be quiet for his great illusion, some laughed; most went on talking. The Stadelmann girls interrupted their squealing chase and turned towards...

The Great Illusion at Klingenreiter Lumber Sawmill and Woodworking Import Export

Saša Stanišić

16 min

Germany

Mother disappeared on the twentieth of August nineteen ninety-eight at around eleven fifty at night. At around eight thirty in the morning of the twenty-first of August nineteen ninety-eight, Father called and informed me: ‘Mother died...

Motherdeath

Michael Lentz

22 min

Israel

In those days I talked a lot about weapons. There was Alex, the lone soldier who lived with the old lady. It was unclear whether they were related. On Friday afternoons Alex was always out on...

Copy and Paste

Yoav Rosen

11 min

Chile

Romina had been staring at him, that was true. She had been staring at him from the other checkout line at the supermarket. And, finally, she’d said to him, “Nice to see you.” Then she corrected...

Gorillas in the Congo

Alejandra Costamagna

3 min

Mexico

Back then I was just a child, and children aren’t generally prejudiced, even if most of them don’t know why they’re sitting at their wooden desks with a satchel full of pencils and exercise books listening...

Back then I was Just a Child

Guillermo Fadanelli

4 min

USA

Paul Espeseth, who was no longer taking the antidepressant Celexa, braced himself for a cataclysm at SeaWorld. He wondered only what form cataclysm would take. Espeseth had tried to veto this trip, making his case to...

Pending Vegan

Jonathan Lethem

19 min

Argentina

My name is Tomás. I’m thirty years old. I live with my father. We’re two bachelors in a big house who run into each other at odd hours and treat one another with respect, but we...

The Song We Sang Every Day

Luciano Lamberti

9 min

Spain

The incident with my wife occurred during an excursion into the jungle. It was an overwhelmingly green afternoon, the kind of thing you boast about to your guests. (“The sun that evening was incredible, wasn’t it?...

What’s Wrong, Honey?

Matías Candeira

5 min

India

The postmaster first took up his duties in the village of Ulapur. Though the village was a small one, there was an indigo factory near by, and the proprietor, an Englishman, had managed to get a post office...

The Postmaster

Rabindranath Tagore

8 min

USA

I stand here ironing, and what you asked me moves tormented back and forth with the iron. “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure...

I Stand Here Ironing

Tillie Olsen

9 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

Argentina

The Christmas that Father Christmas came to spend the night at my house was the last time we were all together. After that night Mummy and Daddy stopped fighting, but I don’t think Father Christmas had...

Father Christmas Spends the Night

Samanta Schweblin

7 min

France

In Rue Las Cases it was as quiet as during the height of summer, and every open window was screened by a yellow blind. The fine weather had returned: it was the first Sunday of spring,...

Sunday

Irène Némirovsky

24 min

Romania

For the first few hours they drove silently. His father simply sat there without saying a word, just sniffling from time to time. It seemed to him that he was doing it ostentatiously. He could see...

The Cold

Augustin Cupsa

8 min