Short Stories
THE FALSE GEMS by Guy De Maupassant Problems with formatting? Click here. Monsieur Lantin had met the young girl at a reception at the house of the second head of his department, and had fallen head over heels in love with her. She was the daughter of a provincial tax collector, who had been dead…
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The hot pain in May’s left side woke her. For a moment she was paralyzed, only able to flick her tongue across parched lips. She tasted salt from dried tears.
TRUE!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them
The Gift of the Magi by O.Henry One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony
The Steadfast Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen There were once five and twenty tin soldiers. They were brothers, for they had all been made out of the same old tin spoon. They all shouldered their bayonets, held themselves upright
“Are you going to be my new daddy?” she asked directly.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking down at the flowery dress squirming beside him on the edge of the living room couch. “I like your mom, but to get married you have to really, really like each other.”
My Daughter’s Best Friend by Michelle Reynolds “Here you go Missy.” Elizabeth hears her daughter say as she enters the kitchen. Brooklyn is sitting
Emily Bradley wanted a smart phone for her tenth birthday. Her mother and step-father had been reluctant to give her one because they felt it was a luxury for a child to have
I was born with a birthmark that looked like a bruised flower. It trailed along the left side of my face, from hairline to where neck and shoulder met. I grew accustomed to open stares, sidelong glances, and children being chastised for pointing.
Three elderly women stood huddled in a corner of the funeral home, whispering and glaring at the deceased’s wife.
Today is the worst day I have ever experienced. But it’s not over yet. It’s not going to end for thousands of seconds. Thousands of raw, grating seconds. I know, I’m the one with the problem. Not you. You have coping mechanisms. Your brain has worked out that to experience every second of every day would quickly lead to
The freaks are out again tonight. I hear them howling. I hear branches cracking off trees. There were out last night, too. It has been warm and heat draws them to the streets. It’s been like this since the war, or since the raids, but really it started with the slave ships.
It was dark, and the party was going to start on the other side of the freshly-plowed south pasture anytime. Bob impatiently stomped through the damp earth toward the Thompson Farm.
At the ripe age of 21, Ariel lives in failure of that first step. She’s filing papers now, an administrative assistant at the Dropbox headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley. She watches the computer engineers check in and out behind the front desk on the third floor, and all day this plagues her with a sense of inadequacy. She thinks about her upbringing in an upper-middle class