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Discover weekly, the best short stories

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

150+ Contemporary Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. All the newest modern day stories to thrill and inspire, all in one place.

Contemporary Short Stories – Page 7 of 10

Up a Tree

Submitted to Contest #320

Up a TreeTo a young park ranger, fresh out of training at the academy, Sequoia National Park was like playing in the big leagues. Six hundred and thirty-one square miles of dense forests on the side of the Sierra Nevada Mountains was Heaven to a man who loved the outdoors. A place where you can walk among majestic sequoia trees over three thousand years old. A place where trees over two hundred feet tall stretch into a brilliant blue sky. And a place where a person can find a kind of solitude unlike any other place in the country.Josh Howard...

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Catching Fire

Submitted to Contest #320

Catching FireBy J. A. IRVING I’ve known George and Marisa for a long time. We fell in love with SF and the 1960s and ’70s together, as teens, and spent a lot of time reading and analyzing magazines from the ’50s and ’60s, watching Roddenberry-era Star Trek. We listened to The Beatles, Hendrix, Moog, Pink Floyd. We read Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke. Andre Norton. Poul Anderson. Space Opera. Robbie the Robot. From the planets to the stars. And of course, pulp-paper magazines with lurid covers. Complicating matters for me, at least, they became par...

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Danger in the Woods

Submitted to Contest #320

Kacie walked between the pine trees, sunlight trickling through the needles. A bit of smoke tinged the air, a remnant of the Canadian forests that burn each year. Each step she took she felt her heart lighten. Nature brought her to center. Something she definitely needed, more than ever. She spoke to her mother that morning, as she washed their breakfast dishes by hand. Her mother always played Fox News in the morning, something that Kacie tuned out. She never cared for those talking heads, and her professors told her they were horrible peop...

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Grans House

Submitted to Contest #320

Serena stepped out of the car, the air was thick with the smell of wild garlic, she was home. Everything was exactly how she had remembered it; only older and decayed. Gran wasn’t in a state to get around the property in those last few years, much less maintain it. This was a mistake. She should focus on her career path. There were no Biochemistry jobs in this small town. Still, she wanted to be there. After cramming every night to complete her PhD in 4 years, all she wanted was to feel close to Gran again. Serena went into the woods, aside ...

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Chronic

Submitted to Contest #320

Am I out of the woods?She lets herself hope from the sterile waiting room. It’s familiar. Not because she’s been in this room before but because all waiting rooms take up the same position in space and time. Liminal spaces connected through a sense of dread and misplaced hope. She’s called in. The nurse mispronounces her name. He takes her blood pressure. Looks great! She steps on the scale. It shows her weight in kilograms and she’s silently thankful that she doesn’t have to know how many pounds she’s lost since her last appointment. The nu...

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Lost in the Woods

Submitted to Contest #320

Lost in the Woods Red huffed and puffed, the extra twenty pounds she’d gained over the year saddling her like a pack horse. She’d been looking for the last of the chamomile plants to dry out and grind up for the winter. For over an hour, she spun around and around, unable to see through the heavy forest mist that clouded aspens of birch as soon as she’d passed through them. She leaned on a large, mossy oak to catch her breath.“Where is that goddamned crooked tree?” she spit out, putting down her woven basket.. Her red cloak and hood, usually...

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THE NAME’S HUMANKIND; HER’S MOTHER NATURE; THEIRS’ S COLONY RABBITS

Submitted to Contest #320

In the burning grasslands, Mother Nature and Humankind faced off under a sky bruised with ash.“Mother Nature, look at your devastation—these poor rabbits,” Humankind said, voice tight, as if blaming her would fix anything.Mother Nature’s reply was the wind rustling through the brittle branches before she spoke.“Preposterous, Humankind. Maybe you should consider your actions before you question mine.”Below, chaos. Thumper, the matriarch, caught the scent of something wrong—smoke, sharp and bitter. She nudged her kittens urgently.“Stay close!”...

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An Overstory Homage

Submitted to Contest #320

I do not remember my sprouting. I remember a pressure like a thought, a push in the dark soil, the split of shell, the bright burn of sky through leaf-litter when that first slender hook of green shouldered the world. Yet the moment itself—the exact hinge when I was not and then was—slipped away long ago. Memory in trees is not a line; it is a set of rings, a quiet grammar of wider and narrower, wet and lean, frost and fire. We keep our diaries in wood. Anyone with patience and a keen blade can read the chapters I have carried, the drought t...

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The Woods of a Broken Mind

Submitted to Contest #320

TRIGGER WARNING: Depression, Suicide Attempt, Death, Car Accident, Mental Health THE WOODS OF A BROKEN MIND On September 14th, 2025, many things happened: Some with the potential to shatter the world, others forgotten as soon as they had transpired. Charlie Nightworth, head nurse at the children’s hospital in London, did not care about a single one of them, newsworthy or not. Not anymore anyway. In the distance Big Ben declared it was the eleventh hour of the night – telling her it had been four hours now since her heart had gone cold, her...

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The Pyre of Grand Gestures

Submitted to Contest #320

I had spent twenty years writing poems about the heart, and now I was driving toward a real one, blazing in the hills, hoping it would finally make me famous. The radio crackled between stations as I took the canyon curves too fast. Static mixed with emergency broadcasts. Sanhedrin Ridge was burning. Voluntary evacuations. Red-flag winds. I clicked off the noise and pressed the dictaphone closer to my mouth. "The dragon spreads its wings of flame," I said into the machine. My voice sounded theatrical, desperate. Like I was auditioning for my...

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Pathogenic

Submitted to Contest #320

PathogenicBy: Andrew Fruchtman Henry wasn’t an art collector. He wasn’t even the sort of person who went to art fairs. He’d only gone because the weekend felt too bright to waste and because the park where the fair was being held was near a bakery that made excellent cinnamon rolls. He told himself he’d just look, that he didn’t really need anything. He walked between the rows of tents, coffee in hand, squinting at paintings of crashing waves, city skylines, landscapes and portraits of children he didn’t know. The air was sharp with autumn, ...

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Not All Who Wander

Submitted to Contest #320

“All that is gold does not glitter,Not all those who wander are lost;The old that is strong does not wither,Deep roots are not reached by the frost.From the ashes a fire shall be woken,A light from the shadows shall spring;Renewed shall be blade that was broken;The crownless again shall be king.”- J.R.R. Tolkien The car swerved as I drove down the winding, woodsy roads. The headlights showed flashes of red, yellow, and orange. Twilight streamed through sections of the leaf canopy as I continued. I needed to keep going. I needed it all to...

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Samantha's Choice

Submitted to Contest #320

There was an air in these woods, something that drew you in. Something that captured your imagination and took you places you felt you had never been. Between the trees, among the moss and grass of the forest, some say it was a kind of force, others a hint of something beyond oneself. Either way, it was intoxicating. One need not imagine much to glimpse the truth that many had lost themselves among these woods; be it fall or spring, summer or winter. They always beckoned. And there was always someone willing to heed the call and follow...

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A Shelter from the Fog

Submitted to Contest #320

The blank page glared at Clara, a pristine white desert mocking her completely empty mind. For the fifth time that hour, she squeezed the bridge of her nose, a familiar headache blooming behind her eyes. The digital pen felt alien in her hand, a useless stick. She was an illustrator, a creator of whimsical worlds filled with charming woodland creatures and sun-dappled glades. But the well of her imagination had run bone dry, replaced by the choking dust of deadlines and corporate-approved color palettes.So she had run. She’d rented a tiny, i...

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You Can Call Me Frank

Submitted to Contest #319

I am tired of being called his monster. I am literally exhausted. Seriously, when someone says “Frankenstein,” and then some arrogant little twerp adds, “I think you mean Frankenstein’s monster, the doctor was Frankenstein,” I believe we should all be able to cannibalize that person for parts. You should just call me Frank. It’s much easier, neater, we can all be on the same page of the same classic. And yeah, I know. I know. I am a monster. I scare people with my oddly colored skin and my mismatched limbs. But the thing is, aren’t we all ju...

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RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

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