Menu

Menu
Prompts
Contests
Stories
Blog
Featured stories
Activity feed

Discover weekly, the best short stories

Looking for a steady supply of adventure short stories? Every week thousands of writers submit stories to our writing contest.

8550+ Adventure Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. From riding the high sea to climbing behemoth mountains, there isn’t any action that’s out of reach when it comes to adventure stories.

Adventure Short Stories – Page 42 of 571

Before I Wake

Submitted to Contest #275

If I hold my breath, I won't confuse the movements of my limbs with the expansion of my chest. My muscles aren't working right. I'm suspended slightly by the air, unable to get my footing and turning to stone as I wrestle an atmosphere rapidly thickening like caramel simmering in a pot. My suspension breaks. The air is gone, and a gravitational force rips me down and pins me to the ground. A glass tube encircles me. It feels like I'm being sucked into the 2nd dimension.Wasn't I running from something? The ground releases me as the air above ...

10 likes 3 comments 3
Read story

Following a Black Cat

Submitted to Contest #275

Here I am sitting in what once was my grandfather’s chair in the backyard, drinking coffee, eating a doughnut, but being totally alone, not even a  single squirrel in sight. It’s been a long time now that I have been alone. No wife – she died in a car crash five years ago. No son – he moved to Australia ten years ago, and won’t answer my calls. No brother, he is in ‘the home’ for the aged, and never speaks when I visit him. No pets in my life either, our last dog was in the car with my wife in the car crash.&nbs...

13 likes 2 comments 2
Read story

Endless Time does Eventually End.

Submitted to Contest #275

To better understand the consequences of believing something that may or may not end, it is better to only half believe it ever existed. Anyone who wants to believe they will live forever (here on earth) is almost always fooling themselves with the notion that they are invincible. This is the story of someone who was out of time from the day they were born, and yet were living their own lives as wreckless and as hapless as they could possibly live it. This started even from birth where they followed a simple idea and expanded on it with brut...

7 likes 1 comment 1
Read story

The Time Merchant

Submitted to Contest #275

Dr. Eleanor Chen had exactly forty-three hours, twelve minutes, and seven seconds left to live. She knew this with scientific precision because she'd paid good money to find out. The Time Merchant's shop occupied a sliver of space between a laundromat and a defunct video rental store. Its window display consisted of a single antique hourglass, the sand frozen halfway through its journey. Eleanor had passed it a thousand times without really seeing it, until her diagnosis made time suddenly, painfully relevant. "Welcome," the Merchant had sai...

10 likes 5 comments 5
Read story

The Art of Being Dead

Submitted to Contest #275

Being dead isn't nearly as boring as you might think.  I discovered this on my third day of non-existence, when I finally stopped trying to open doors and learned to simply pass through them instead. The trick, I found, is to forget you were ever solid to begin with. Forget the weight of bones and blood, the constant pull of gravity, the way air once caught in your lungs. Remember instead that you are now made of the same stuff as moonlight and memory. My name was – is? – Thomas Webb, and I've been dead for approximately eight months, t...

10 likes 2 comments 2
Read story

Until We Meet Again

Submitted to Contest #275

An eerie wind blew through the black police cruiser’s cracked windows, swirling wisps of Detective Jimmy Daleson’s Camel Straight out into the moonlight. The street lamp just down the road cast spooky shadows across the sidewalk, leaving plenty of dark spaces for the night’s denizens to slink into.  Halloween stakeouts always posed challenges for detectives, sleuthing for their mark amongst costumed revelers. “Halloween is busy tonight. Seems like the crowds are thicker than last year,” his partner Officer Dominguez remarked, eyeballing...

14 likes 4 comments 4
Read story

The Glass Elevator

Submitted to Contest #275

The alarm wasn’t supposed to go off yet. There was still so much that had to be done before we would be ready for the evacuation, but I must have dozed off somehow and well… here we are. Kurt heard the sirens first, nudging me in the ribs. “We have to move,” he growled at me. I hate waking up to the sound of his voice when he’s like this, irritable. We’re all stressed, understandably so, but don’t take it out on me. I’ve always told him the energy he gives me will be given back tenfold.I shot a look at him. “The alarm wasn’t supposed to go o...

9 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

The Final Tick

Submitted to Contest #275

Zaman’s back was almost always sore, his eyes perpetually strained from countless hours bent over his cluttered workbench, meticulously fixing the watches and clocks people brought to him. His tiny shop was cramped and dimly lit, tucked away on an old street rarely touched by the light of day. The air was thick with the smell of brass and dust, and the gentle, layered ticking of hundreds of timepieces filled the silence. Each clock carried its own story, its own distinct rhythm, and Zaman treated every single one as though it were a part of ...

9 likes 1 comment 1
Read story

Capitulation

Submitted to Contest #275

The world is full of broken people, and I’m one of them. Right now, I’m as broken as it gets.  Broken beyond repair. Some things creep up on you. Life has a habit of doing that. An inexorable movement that ceased to be noticeable via our ignorance of the very nature of our existence. An incessant flow that carries with it sticky flotsam and jetsam. All that crap accumulates and wears you down. Weighs you down. Until you sink without trace. Laying there on the riverbed of reality. If you bother opening your eyes, you’ll see life pass you...

13 likes 12 comments 12
Read story

The Beginning of the End

Submitted to Contest #275

I will walk out of this room, out of this life, and into something completely different. I can feel the weight of the decision pressing down on me, like a heavy cloak that I can never take off once it's been placed upon my shoulders.As I stand up from the ancient desk, the chair creaking in protest at my movement, I can't help but glance around the dimly lit room one last time. The shadows dance along the walls, whispering secrets that only they know. The air is thick with anticipation, crackling with energy that seems to hum beneath my skin...

11 likes 2 comments 2
Read story

The Cat, The Wolf and The Moon

Submitted to Contest #275

It would be a fun night. She wasn’t sure if she would go, but her neighbors had been so insistent, wanting to include her and it was just a short walk around the block. “I guess I’m ready…ready to get out into the world of the living again….on the Night of Dead! How appropriate!” She told herself, shaking her head as she sat looking at her dramatic feline make-up in the mirror of her dressing table. She finished off the look with dark red lip stick and a spritz of her signature Chanel No. 5. “Meow!” she growled, flexing h...

11 likes 1 comment 1
Read story

Following the Cat

Submitted to Contest #275

Follow the neighbor's cat was always something I had dreamed about over the last month. Of course, it was nearing the one month that cats, along with other ghouls and goblins, were revered and "worshipped". I was not looking forward to the actual moment, yet I was not so much dreading that month either. Okay, back to the point at hand about my neighbor's cat. It was a solid black cat with a temperament and disposition to match its appearance. As I was getting ready to leave my apartment this one morning, there the cat was purring and trying ...

7 likes 1 comment 1
Read story

Night Creatures on the Ship Destiny's Dreams

Submitted to Contest #274

Two million years ago a turtle munched tender green morsels while she floated on a giant mass of vegetation in the Pacific ocean.She did not know that someday, in the 1800s, her story would be part of the songs and myths sung by the people of the Andes Mountains in South America, to the music that a young boy named Paulo would play on his flute.One of her descendants would help rescue a clipper ship called Destiny’s Dreams in the 1800s from a creature of the sea depths.The hard-backed turtle, drifting on her living raft, also did not kn...

39 likes 19 comments 19
Read story

The Lurking Shadows

Submitted to Contest #275

There’s a peculiar sensation that creeps into your bones when you’re alone at night, the kind of chill that a flashlight’s beam struggles to stave off. I’d felt it many times walking through the woods behind my childhood home, the curved trail lined with gnarled trees and crumbling stones of an abandoned graveyard. Ever since my sister, Emily, vanished two years ago, those woods have become a prison of my memories—both tender and haunting.It was a stormy evening in late October when I decided to confront my demons. The eerie winds howled aro...

12 likes 0 comments 0
Read story

The Day the Lawn Gnome Came to Life

Submitted to Contest #274

Once upon an uneventful Tuesday in the perpetually sleepy town of Burton Bay, something so bizarre, so utterly extraordinary happened that it would forever alter the town’s claim to fame. Burton Bay, until that day, was best known for its annual pie-eating contest, where grandmas and kids alike faced off in battle, wielding whipped cream and cherry filling. But this Tuesday, something far wilder than a pie-eating contest was afoot. It all began in the front garden of one Trixie Quibble, Burton Bay’s most dedicated gardener. Known for her pre...

6 likes 2 comments 2
Read story
RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

Bring your short stories to life

Fuse character, story, and conflict with tools in Reedsy Studio. All for free.