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

6510+ Coming of age Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. No matter how old you are, there’s just something inherently relatable about coming-of-age tales. Discover the best new coming-of-age stories right here!

Coming of age Short Stories – Page 2 of 434

Her Voice, My Turn

Submitted to Contest #301

Birthday Today, I’m turning 40. My husband is out for the whole day at work. I’m at home with two of our three kids. I asked RJ to cut more wood for the seventeenth time. The stove burns the wood fast and I’m not about to turn up the furnace. He might just get motivated by the cold to get off his segg and get moving. Football season is over anyway, what could he be watching now? If the cold doesn’t do the trick, his little sister will make sure. John will be home soon and wanting a hot meal. I need to get the chicken tenders cleaned and br...

8 likes 3 comments 3
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Jimmy and Dev

Submitted to Contest #301

Jimmy did not have many friends. After he graduated from college, he broke up with his girlfriend and started hanging out with this kid Zach who went to the Hyde School at the time Jimmy was there. Zach was in a friend group with a couple of other kids, Dev who did not work, Liam who was an exterminator, and Evan who was trying to become an EMT but was having a hard time passing the initial exam. Jimmy started hanging with this group, and in particular, Dev. The Hyde School was that boarding school in Maine for kids who get...

2 likes 0 comments 0
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A Simple Story

Submitted to Contest #301

“Can’t you just drop me off at home first?” I whined. “No sugar, I’m already late for the appointment. You’ll have to come with me.” I rolled my eyes. At least I’d loaded The Lord of the Rings on my tablet before school let out and would have something to read while we waited for the stupid oil change to be over. “Why don’t we just buy an electric car? You drive an hour every day to work. That is so much carbon—it’s gross.” “This car is paid for, and anyway, I heard buying any new car creates more emissions than just keeping what you alread...

6 likes 1 comment 1
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Night Watch

Submitted to Contest #301

Clarence accepted the assignment from Campus Security. Thom, his supervisor, patted him on the back and handed him the keys. “You’re the man,” he said. All Clarence wanted, was a couple of nights’ work on the weekend to help pay for tuition, and extra time to study when he was making the rounds. “Simple enough,” he said, but he couldn’t help but wonder why the other guy had quit. He wondered about all the talk he heard on campus. “It should be a quiet night,” Thom said, but handed him a card with his number, just in case. “I’m going home to ...

5 likes 2 comments 2
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That which is spent, but cannot be repaid

Submitted to Contest #301

Josh was baffled that something so small could weigh so much.He loved to work with his hands, and his special talent was that he could almost always guess the weight of something just by picking it up. Sometimes he could guess how heavy something was just by looking at it and knowing what it was made of.It was an intuition Josh had always been blessed with. He could never tell you exactly why. Josh had never been the smartest nor the most articulate.The best math he had ever learned was how to multiply one number by another for woodworking. ...

8 likes 0 comments 0
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The Night I Passed Out and Woke Up to Myself

Submitted to Contest #301

The Night I Passed Out and Woke Up to Myself A Wedding, A Wake-Up CallBy BeeIt’s not just the bride and groom who transform at a wedding, mothers do too.The moment my child’s wedding was announced; a knot formed in my stomach. Not just nerves, this was something deeper. A cocktail of joy, pride, anxiety, and something I couldn’t name. As a mother, I had imagined this day for years, but facing it in real time? It overwhelmed me in ways I hadn’t expected.In Indian culture, weddings aren’t a single event; they're an entire season. For five days...

1 like 0 comments 0
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The Thirteenth Floor

Submitted to Contest #301

Mikal had always believed that fear was a choice—until the day it became a cage.As a boy growing up in Lusaka, Zambia, Mikal had been fearless in most ways. He climbed mango trees with reckless abandon, raced his friends through dusty streets, and laughed off ghost stories told under flickering streetlights. But one summer afternoon at the Lusaka City Library changed everything. He was nine years old, chasing a book on architecture—his budding passion—when he stepped into the library’s ancient elevator. The doors clanged shut, and the lift j...

7 likes 4 comments 4
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Hazard Lights

Submitted to Contest #301

Trigger warning: This story contains physical violence, child abuse, and mentions of death. Liam's life was supposed to be the stuff of every little kid's dream. His parents were high school sweethearts who married just a year after graduating. Everything seemed to be looking up for him. He was going to be born into a loving household to two bright-eyed, ambitious young newlyweds who were ready to take on anything that life could throw at them. Liam was supposed to have a life full of love and laughter, he was supposed to want for nothing. ...

4 likes 0 comments 0
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Our Backyard

Submitted to Contest #301

The neighborhood I grew up in had a backyard—not the kind tucked away behind a single house, but a communal, neglected space that bore no likeness to the polished front. The two coexisted like parallel lines of reality—one visible, the other hidden—and we, the children, moved freely between them, as if slipping from daylight into dusk.Our building stood right at the edge of the asphalt, its façade facing the main road. Across the street stretched the shopping center, where our parents ran errands and traded pleasantries. It also hosted the n...

21 likes 5 comments 5
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The Mascot

Submitted to Contest #301

I was in the fifth grade. Three years before the masks and mandates. Before the roll out of shots, histeria, and unexpected toilet paper rationing. My parents separated, I guess you could say I had a head start on having my world turned upside down. I was already in a state of confusion and melancholy. I stayed in the house with Mom when Dad moved out. He found a small, run-down apartment in the city. We visited one time to drop off a few boxes and his keyboard. When we returned to the car Mom said with a voice of fear and anger, " Sam, we a...

3 likes 2 comments 2
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What’s your dream?

Submitted to Contest #301

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.Gloria SteinemAs a rather unworldly fourteen-year-old growing up in the small town of Bude, North Cornwall, and attending some fairly sheltered schools including a convent school with actual nuns alive and kicking (with an emphasis on the kicking) my mind was absolutely blown the summer I watched Pretty Woman. I was a week into my nine weeklong stretch of the summer holidays and bored out of my mind. I’d already worked...

20 likes 8 comments 8
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The Odd One In

Submitted to Contest #301

Sue had always been terrified of being alone, not in the spooky horror movie sense, but in the quieter, lonelier kind of way. The kind where you are sitting in a room full of people, laughter buzzing in the air, and yet no one is talking to you. The kind of alone that feels like you are not invisible, but just overlooked.She had spent years trying to fix it. In school, when the teacher announced, “Pair up for the project,” Sue’s heart always dropped. Everyone around her would lock eyes with a friend, or someone would tug a sleeve, whispering...

4 likes 2 comments 2
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Chief Tecumseh

Submitted to Contest #301

Chief Tecumseh.Larry and me got our go-kart lined up on the sidewalk so that when the motor kicked on and the centrifugal clutch kicked-in and the V-belt from my dad’s ’57 Studebaker tightened-up on the drive shaft pulley, one of us would go flying down the sidewalk screaming our crazy heads off so fast we’d only be a blur in front of the DeWall’s house where Amaryllis and Belinda, who were twin sisters, were pretending to not notice what me and Larry were doing because they were so busy playing jacks or dress-up dolls or something with the ...

3 likes 1 comment 1
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Mania

Submitted to Contest #301

The waiting room is dimly lit and the air smells of must and something sour. The walls are a pale green and everything about this place has something inside of me screaming “run.”Not only is the atmosphere gloom and doom - but the company is as well. My eyes scan the room and I take note of the other people, seemingly around my age - brooding sitting next to their parents. There’s a girl with red curly hair and bright clothing - which is surprising considering she has mascara running down her face - an easy giveaway of the tears that had onc...

4 likes 1 comment 1
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An Empty World - 2 - The Road to Aberystwyth

Submitted to Contest #301

The morning they left the farmhouse was a bit too quiet, it was not with dread or with doubt, but with the kind of hush, that new quiet they were not quite used to yet, and with a sense of trepidation of what there was yet to come. Patsy stood by the kitchen door, her backpack snug against her shoulders, one hand resting on the weathered handle. Callum was already outside tightening the straps around the old camping gear from her father's bedroom. They had bundled it up and tied it together with some frayed rope they found in the barn. This ...

9 likes 1 comment 1
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RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

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