Our Collection – Page 2 – The Short Story Project

Russia

Our friends the Zaitsevs live out of town “The air is so much better out in the suburbs,” they say. That is, they can’t afford to live where the air is bad. A small group of...

The White Flower

Teffi

4 min

Morocco

I held an unusually long reed in my hand and I dipped it as deep as I could into the river. It fell in and disappeared in front of me. I took my feet out of...

Ladybird

Latifa Labsir

7 min

Israel

I remember a tree. Its crown awning the path. I remember a large trunk, thicker than any I had seen before. I remember roots cleaving the black earth, bursting it asunder, like snakes fighting free and...

Close to the Body – Fifth Place

Sarit Elkon

9 min

Israel

I wash my hands, scrubbing them. They still smell of shit. 1. Sophie went joyfully down the slide, straight into Danny’s waiting arms. When he offered to help her climb back up, she said, “By myself.”...

Safe Zone

Deakla Keydar

9 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

Israel

“I have not yet begun to fight!” John Paul Jones 1 The road descends all the way to the sea, as though the whole world was a huge basin where everything drove, sailed, glided...

And The Sea Is Not Full

Edna Shemesh

11 min

Italy

“As long as there’s the sun … the sun!” the voice of Don Peppino Quaglia crooned softly near the doorway of the low, dark, basement apartment. “Leave it to God,” answered the humble and faintly cheerful...

A Pair of Eyeglasses

Anna Maria Ortese

25 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

Palestine

Although I was only ten years old, I could understand that something important had happened. Every time our bedroom door opened, my mother shut it again so we wouldn’t hear the frantic whispering in the living...

Scandal

Alaa Hlehel

4 min

UK

It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was...

The Tree of Knowledge

Henry James

23 min

Israel

The man who has been the dearest person to my mother for the past 42 years is dead. Facing a dead man is a shitty feeling. A baby’s howling creeps through the open window. It’s midnight....

Prostheses

Iftach Alony

9 min

Ireland

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the...

The Dead

James Joyce

62 min

UK

CHAPTER I–THE PROMISE “An old-fashioned Christmas.–A lively family will accept a gentleman as paying guest to join them in spending an old-fashioned Christmas in the heart of the country.” That was the advertisement. It...

An Old-Fashioned Christmas

Richard Marsh

22 min

UK

When Glory’s parents christened her Glorybetogod Ngozi Akunyili, they did not foresee Facebook’s “real name” policy, nor the weeks she would spend populating forms and submitting copies of her bills and driver’s license and the certificate...

Glory

Lesley Nneka Arimah

20 min

Canada

I thought that Mr. Purnell was a little young to be a funeral director, but he had the look down cold. In the instant between his warm, dry handshake and my taking my hand back to...

By His Things Shall You Know Him

Cory Doctorow

20 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

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

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

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

Canada

My cat is in the driveway, gnawing on fine bones. The rain has begun: a warm muzzled sound, large soft drips, not the rapid dark downpour of yesterday. Everything wet and green, sopping, soaking. My cat...

Meat Eaters & Plant Eaters

Jessica Treat

4 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

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