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A Doorway on Lenox

Winner of Contest #317 🏆

Theo had been staring at the same sentence so long the letters bled together. Lineage in Postmodern Black Poetics. He mouthed the words once more, flat and sour on his tongue. His coffee from the bodega on 121st sat cold beside him, the surface gone slick and oily, but he drank anyway.The radiator groaned in protest, the pipes rattling like brass warming up before a set.Theo pressed a palm against the open book, willing the words to stay still. For a moment they held. Then the page trembled beneath his hand.He told himself it was fatigue.The...

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The Truth Show

Danielius Spamas

Winner of Contest #316 🏆

On the far couch, Sentinel sits hunched, elbows on knees, spine shaped like a question mark. No wedding ring. No nervous fidget, either. Just tremor, clockwork and incurable. Mara makes a note on her tablet: “minimize closeups.” They’d rolled out the promo campaign last week: “A Night With Sentinel—An Icon Returns.” Hashtag: #FirstAmongUs. Old newsreel cuts, drones screaming over city skylines, the slow-motion shot of Sentinel punching through the river wall at Carthage. Twenty years ago, every other apartment had his face on the fridge. Now...

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Birthday Bones

A'maurie Duckwitz

Winner of Contest #315 🏆

The story’s the same every year. Light the candles, blow them out, eat the cake. I smile while everyone sings, I party with my friends, I have a few drinks, and I go home. Then, the second the clock hits 3:27, I sit up straight in bed and wait for my bones to break. It’s an ugly sight, my limbs cracking and twisting, and the smell of blood and marrow isn’t exactly the most appetizing thing. But the worst part for me, without a doubt, is the sound. The crunch and pop of bone, the whine of stretching skin, the wet splat of blood an...

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An Afterlife Denied

James Scott

Winner of Contest #314 🏆

It was almost impossible to make out the lone figure, shuffling slowly across the expanse of sand, far below. Only his movement gave him away. Wrapped in pale shreds of clothing, caked in tan grit and burnt red by the oppressive sun, he was all but a part of the desert already. Anubis, crouched in the shade of a rocky outcrop, panted his jackal tongue in an effort to cool himself. The heat of the clear day was extreme, the weight of its pressure, unrelenting. He pressed as much of his bare skin against the rocks as possible, his fingers spre...

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Dibble Dop

Rose Brown

Winner of Contest #313 🏆

Content warning: This story includes themes of grief and the death of a child. “Are you there, God? It’s me. Help me break her heart today. And can you bring back the sun?”But the clouds burst. I breathe in earth and taste mineral tang, wet wind whipping my face. I should’ve known not to come—should’ve stopped when the steeple down the road knifed dark clouds. But she begged, and I couldn't refuse. Not today.I fumble with an umbrella before the wind yanks it, tossing it against the monkey bars. I leap from the bench. Bigger kids shriek and r...

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O.peration P.rovidence U.nified S.ystems

Nicholas Andrew Clark

Winner of Contest #312 🏆

Seldon stares at the blinking cursor. It is the eye of the Devil, he thinks, and writer's block is its favorite form of torment. The save file for last week's sermon (a total flop called "Tackling Spiritual Doubts") taunts him atop a stack of other pressures, including an e-mail from church leadership flagged with a red exclamation point for urgency. This is why the ashtray on his desk overflows with butts. He turns to the Devil's second favorite instrument: an Internet search engine. Types How to write a sermon that doesn't bore people to t...

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Chronicles of a Limerent Object

Carina Caccia

Winner of Contest #311 🏆

1.He hadn’t meant to idealise her, to put her on a pedestal, to overwhelm. Radiant, she was. She drew people in, shook their hands, pulled up chairs for them. Are you the organiser? she’d been asked. No, she wasn’t. Just a woman with a smile, a woman in a sundress who scooted over and made room for others. What was her name again?And then she directed her smile at him, her warmth, her questions. Matthieu stirred in his seat, gripped tight the neck of his bottle so as not to tremble. He did that sometimes, or rather, the nerves did – as thoug...

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Letters from Lucknow, 1886

Lisa Guth

Winner of Contest #310 🏆

“Intercultural Book Club. Join us! Every Sunday 6pm.”The poster hung alone on a blank wall in my dorm building. As someone who had just moved in and loved novels it seemed like an easy way to meet people. So that Sunday evening, I grabbed my current read and headed to the common room.A small group had already gathered, steaming cups of tea in hand despite the lingering summer heat.“Hi, I’m Louise. Is this the book club?”“Yes! Come in. Tea?”A girl with dark curls and round glasses smiled warmly. Without waiting for my answer, she handed me a ...

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Barney in the Rubble

Annalisa McMorrow

Winner of Contest #309 🏆

The first time they bumped into each other, she was holding a bouquet, and he was giving a bride away. She could feel him looking at her, and she blushed the same color as her peonies and tried not to smile more than the beatific Mona Lisa half-grin she’d had plastered on her face all morning. She'd smiled so much her face hurt. She couldn’t wait to get back to the hotel room and drink alcohol from tiny bottles and frown at her reflection in the mirror in order to flex the overworked muscles in the opposite direction. It’s never appropriate ...

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Sack of Bones

Rose Brown

Winner of Contest #308 🏆

Content warning: brief mentions of child abuse and domestic violence. I can’t tell if the yowling’s for the dead or the heat. It’s cicada hiss and lawn mower growl hot—so hot, it’s disrespectful. But as Dad shovels dirt over Papa, I’m cold. I can't cry, and it feels like sin.“It's alright to grieve,” Aunt June whispers. “Ain't no shame in it.”She fans herself with a program as tears drip below her sunglasses. She means it's shameful not to cry, especially for your own. But I can't put on grief like wide-brimmed hats and pearls and black dres...

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The Paperweight Library

Stevie Burges

Winner of Contest #307 🏆

Mavis was now in her second year of retirement. Most days, she found things to do, but to be honest, she felt bored. Money was tight; it always had been. For decades, she’d worked for a large cleaning company that serviced offices, shopping malls, and municipal buildings. The staffroom was always full of women, but they weren’t exceptionally social. They exchanged greetings, asked after each other’s families, then hurried home to husbands and children who needed feeding and fussing. After Clive’s early death, Mavis simply got on with it — to...

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Threads Left Unread

Alexander Valsamis

Winner of Contest #306 🏆

To: old.inbox.julian@gmail.comSubject: trying againDate: 12/03/2025, 21:14Julian,I know you won’t read this. Maybe it’ll bounce back like the last time.But I saw someone today — someone who walked exactly like you.Same tilt of the head, same impossible hands.It shook something loose.Five years. No explanation.And still I write like you’ll answer.Iris To: iris.n@postmail.deSubject: re: trying againDate: 13/03/2025, 04:22You shouldn’t have written at all.Please delete this e-mail address. To: iris.n@postmail.deSubject: re: [re] trying againD...

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The One That Falls Apart

Aditi Rastogi

Winner of Contest #305 🏆

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life. “James Waters was the best man I ever knew.” I didn’t know the guy. An hour ago, I didn’t even know his name. If his goofy face hadn’t been framed next to his casket, I wouldn’t even know what he looked like. I didn’t know he even existed. Well, he didn’t anymore, so that was a moot point. It was still uncertain if this was my biggest lie—it depended on whether or not it would fall apart. But it was certainly about to get bigger because people in the room were still waiting for me to...

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The Ghost and the Hack

Francis D

Winner of Contest #304 🏆

Thomas Mcoy, no second C, is a name you’ve probably never seen. Maybe you’ve spotted “Tommy M.” buried in the acknowledgments of a bestseller or scrawled on a Starbucks cup while he tapped away on a Chromebook in a corner booth. But you won’t find his name on a book cover.Tommy, you see, is the best ghostwriter in America. Maybe the world.The book about the astronaut who battled alcoholism? Tommy.The one by the Yankee who named names with too much pride? Also Tommy.Fourteen CEOs, each with a different spin on leadership: “The Pyramid of Powe...

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Feral

Dan Thonberg

Winner of Contest #303 🏆

I taught her to lie before she could spell her name. Told her people were soft, stupid, and always looking for a story that made them feel good about parting with money. Back then, our narrative was the plain truth: an amputee raising his kid on his own. Before long, we noticed how different people responded to different aspects of our lives. Our narrative then developed into a collection of short stories we kept at the ready. I curated those tales, and she delivered them with big eyes and borrowed grief. We weren’t thieves; not in our minds...

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The Wrong Seminar

Scott Monson

Winner of Contest #302 🏆

Marcus Lee had twenty-seven dollars in his checking account and a sticky note on his fridge that read, “Succeed or starve.” He wasn’t dramatic by nature. The sticky note was practical. Inspirational, even. He had written it after watching a free webinar called Unleash the Inner Giant Within You, hosted by Bryce Chandler, America’s favorite millionaire-turned-messianic-life-coach—a man who looked like a cross between an energy drink and a televangelist caught mid-exorcism.Marcus had signed up for a $299 seminar that promised to awaken his pot...

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Digesting Darkness

Daniel P. Douglas

Winner of Contest #301 🏆

THE FIRST TIME I ate someone’s grief, it was an accident.My aunt had just died, and my cousin couldn’t stop crying at the funeral. She clutched her mother’s wedding ring so tight her knuckles grew white. When she hugged me, she pressed the ring into my palm.“I can’t look at it anymore,” she said. “Just take it away.”I slipped it into my pocket, and something strange happened on the drive home. A warm sensation spread through my gut, like I’d swallowed a shot of good whiskey. By the time I parked in my driveway, I felt freaking amazing—light,...

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The Big Deep

Orwell King

Winner of Contest #300 🏆

I’m a miner. I dig holes for a living. ‘Dig’ is a generous word, really. I blow things up so we can go deeper. Drill, charge, blast then bog it out. Then repeat. It’s loud, dirty, and dangerous. But it’s honest work, and there’s a rhythm to it, one that makes sense. Until the day it didn’t The mine is called Kalgara Deep, carved beneath the sun-blasted hills of Western Australia, three hours from the nearest servo, and six from anything you could call a town. It’s not on any tourist map. Just a dot behind a red dirt road lined with scrub and...

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The Flag

D Gorman

Winner of Contest #299 🏆

The trouble started when the class hamster got out of its cage. Judy Jenkins was on hamster duty and I think she forgot to close the little door after she’d replaced the hamster’s newspapers. Kids are so easily distracted these days. It used to be all a teacher had to do was chant “1,2,3, eyes on me” to get a room back in order. Attention spans have gotten so bad that I’ve taken to firing a starter’s pistol to get the kids back on track. Had to buy it myself, but the gym teacher told me the union rep is going to see if we can get ammunition ...

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Theria's Lace

EV Throne

Winner of Contest #298 🏆

Reagan Theriault stepped back from her easel, paintbrush tucked between her lips, studying the swirl of blacks and greens on the canvas. To others, it was just another ode to mold—but to her, it was beauty. She leaned in, adding a hint of iridescence with a fine brush dipped in cobalt teal and titanium white. Her studio smelled of oil paint and damp earth, kept at 78% humidity for what she called “atmospheric authenticity”—awful for electronics, perfect for art.Reagan had always gravitated toward the overlooked. As a child, she collected dea...

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A Quiet Way To Spend Ten Years

Mack Gage

Winner of Contest #297 🏆

On a cool, clear day in late September, I went out for my final cup of tea. There was a place I liked downtown. Yemeni. The girls who worked there wore sleek headscarves printed with bright, abstracted patterns. Sunny spirals that went on for years.Handing them my last ten dollars, I took my tea out for a walk beneath the elms. Joggers raced their dogs into the evening gloom, in a park-turned-arboretum that I remembered from my college days. Tracing the path back to a familiar bench I slung my backpack down and sat. I poured my tea into a th...

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Mouths Full of Rain

Kane T

Winner of Contest #296 🏆

I didn't mean to create a frog cult. I named the first one Cletus, after a guy my dad used to buy pills from. It felt right. Greasy name. Like something that would survive the apocalypse by crawling into the crawlspace and licking the mold off the copper pipes. Cletus stared at me through the glass like he knew I was broken. Like he approved. Dumpy tree frog. Litoria caerulea, if you’re trying to impress a vet tech. People call them “Dumpy” like that’s an insult. Like their weight’s a problem. These frogs don’t give a shit. They sag and spre...

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The "What If" Lives of Jeanie the Dreamer

Avery Sparks

Winner of Contest #295 🏆

'Let’s have no two ways about it. Jeanie really could be a twat.'El leaned over the lectern and looked the front row of mourners straight in the eyes. She had one elbow on the celebrant’s notes, and for all the world looked like she was ordering a pint of Bishop’s Finger down at her local in Dalston.'Oh no, it’s the ex wife, I can see some of you thinking. How’d she get up there?'She chuckled.The celebrant suddenly took on a very bird-like stance, her gaze flitting from El’s biceps, tattooed with pitchforks and spades, to the family sitting ...

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Unspoken Orders

Alex Marmalade

Winner of Contest #294 🏆

"I've said too much," Jack muttered, watching the maître d's smile fade like a dimmer switch. The restaurant fell silent, conversations halting as heads swiveled in his direction. Jack tugged at his waiter's collar. "Occupational hazard of being British. We're supposed to communicate exclusively through weather observations and apologizing."The woman at table seven stared, her Botoxed forehead struggling to register offense."Mr. Harmon, a word." Marcel, the maître d', beckoned him toward the kitchen with a manicured finger.Jack followed, sho...

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I Left the Baby in Dimension X

Robert Egan

Winner of Contest #293 🏆

There's a baby in the back of the glider, but it's not mine. Sure, she looks like my baby, but my baby never cries when we're cruising through the Kuiper belt. Quite the opposite. Cruising through the solar system's outer reaches is sometimes the only way I can get her to fall asleep. But this baby is wailing like an electric guitar. And if there's any doubt, then there's the smell, or the lack of it. My baby farts like a race horse. No filtration system known to man can completely dilute it. Weaker noses would rush for the airlock, but I'm ...

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Thousands of Short Stories to Read Online

Featured recently

A Doorway on Lenox

The Truth Show

Birthday Bones

An Afterlife Denied

Dibble Dop

O.peration P.rovidence U.nified S.ystems

Chronicles of a Limerent Object

Letters from Lucknow, 1886

Barney in the Rubble

Sack of Bones

The Paperweight Library

Threads Left Unread

The One That Falls Apart

The Ghost and the Hack

Feral

The Wrong Seminar

Digesting Darkness

The Big Deep

The Flag

Theria's Lace

A Quiet Way To Spend Ten Years

Mouths Full of Rain

The "What If" Lives of Jeanie the Dreamer

Unspoken Orders

I Left the Baby in Dimension X

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