English
0 min 70 min
The Birthmark USA
In the latter part of the last century there lived a man of science, an eminent proficient in every branch of natural philosophy, who not long before our story opens had made experience of a spiritual...
The Birthmark
Nathaniel Hawthorne
25 min
Aquarium’s Most Wanted USA
When I’m feeling down, I go for nighttime swims with the aquarium turtles. I was hired as a security guard because people keep trying to steal our very expensive penguins. In my opinion, the sea turtles...
Aquarium’s Most Wanted
Sophie Hoss
0 min
The Fig Leaf USA
The nodes were like beetles, their black metal bodies shining between the attendant’s fingers. “Just a pinch, dear,” he said, leaning in and fixing the nodes to my temples, measuring symmetry with my eyes and his....
The Fig Leaf
Benjamin Shane Evans
6 min
For the Love of Goat USA
The kid—they call him Spud—sees it while walking the mile to where he catches the school bus every morning except Thursdays when his mom pulls a shift at the school cafeteria and drives him there at...
For the Love of Goat
Clif Travers
14 min
Face USA
Clemens hated doctors. When he came of age in the late ‘80s, they invariably made him feel worse—even the ones whose off-the-cuff diagnoses and hair-trigger antibiotic prescriptions made him, physically, better. They’d ugly-eye his hacking coughs...
Face
Douglas Silver
30 min
Cuddlebug USA
8:44 am Tuesday greets me with pale golden light, singing the song of the morning, the song of opportunity. I rise from my bed without using the snooze button even once, ready to meet the promise...
Cuddlebug
Jenna-Marie Warnecke
25 min
Wants USA
I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library. Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified. He said,...
Wants
Grace Paley
3 min
The Wrong Man USA
The room blazed with color. It seemed that the gorgeous things which the women were wearing had for this once managed to subdue the strident tones of the inevitable black and white of the men’s costumes....
The Wrong Man
Nella Larsen
7 min
Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven USA
The Shackleford house was haunted. In the skittering of leaves across its rotting porch, locals heard the whispered misery of ghosts. Footsteps creaked on stair boards and sobs filtered through walls. An Atlanta developer had planned...
Those Who Are Dead Are Only Now Forgiven
Ron Rash
13 min
The Green Door USA
Suppose you should be walking down Broadway after dinner, with ten minutes allotted to the consummation of your cigar while you are choosing between a diverting tragedy and something serious in the way of vaudeville. Suddenly...
The Green Door
O. Henry
10 min
Services USA
September 12, 1950. The survivors limp down the mountain to a 6×6 that drops them at the field service platoon behind the hills. Seven men remaining from forty, stunned and filthy as they line up for...
Services
Gordon Haber
8 min
Are You Enjoying Your Forgiveness? USA
It was the 15th of the August of 1999, the morning before the wedding of Benjamin Kern and Maitreya Scheffer, ceremony and celebration to be hosted by the bride’s parents at their home in Bethel, Vermont,...
Are You Enjoying Your Forgiveness?
Julia May Jonas
31 min
A Mighty Nice Man USA
The child Charlotte sat on the narrow curbstone, her cheek against one knee, drawing idly in the dust with a stick. She sniffed at the flesh of her leg, smelt the dust and the sweat on...
A Mighty Nice Man
Patricia Highsmith
8 min
Rollingwood USA
It’s still dark when the weeping erupts, so Mather knows it’s early. How early he isn’t sure, but he won’t be able to fall back asleep, so it doesn’t matter. He pulls the extra pillow over...
Rollingwood
Ben Marcus
30 min
10 to the 16 to 1 USA
But the best evidence we have that time travel is not possible, and never will be, is that we have not been invaded by hordes of tourists from the future.                                                                               Stephen Hawking, “The Future...
10 to the 16 to 1
James Patrick Kelly
36 min
The Other Woman 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
The Enigmatic Crime of the Signals Private Iraq
Gentlemen, my name is Jamal Ahmad. I work as a signals private in Forward Reconnaissance Unit 312, engaging the American enemy in the south.   I confess in your presence, and I am of sound mind,...
The Enigmatic Crime of the Signals Private
Ali Badr
7 min
A White Heron 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
The Curfew Tolls 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
Cannibalism In The Cars 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
Soul Anatomy 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
The Other Two 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
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
Leaving the Meadows 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
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