Our Collection | The Short Story Project

USA

“I am in love with my wife,” he said–a superfluous remark, as I had not questioned his attachment to the woman he had married. We walked for ten minutes and then he said it again. I...

The Other Woman

Sherwood Anderson

14 min

USA

It’d been a year since the fire. In the months that followed the blaze people still talked about it, still tried to understand what happened, still gathered occasionally to stare into the remains like parishioners at...

The Fire

Megan Benjamin

1 min

USA

I wait, listening for your footfalls, heavy, weary from your work. The sun will rise soon. I have readied the water; warm for your bath, cold for your clothing. The latch clicks, then the floorboards protest...

Soap and Water

Sonrisa Holmes

1 min

USA

In another world, Icarus ignored the sun. He soared through the air and relished in the ecstasy of flight. His arms were wings and he was the most glorious of birds. The sun became nothing more...

Fallen God

Madison Siwak

1 min

USA

“This song’s about you.” He leaned against the slick mahogany bar, watching a jazz trio perform Lady in Red. She glided past him and stood a few feet away, so as not to appear that she...

Medusa Wore Red or Testing the Waters

Stephanie Lewis

1 min

USA

Hot July, the taint of creosote. My brother sniffled, wiped his nose with the back of a dirty hand, leaving a brown smudge. Converse sneakers shifted, dragged. “Well? Go ‘head.” “Just a sec.” Steven Santilli’s sand...

Evel Knievel

Maribeth Mundell

1 min

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

That autumn we knocked down the old barn foundation I asked the man with the backhoe to dig a grave in the center of a huge patch of tiger lilies. This was in case Annie died...

Dogs Know Those Who Dig Graves

Sharon Roznik

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