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

150+ Historical fiction Short Stories to read

Submitted by writers on Reedsy Prompts to our weekly writing contest. Whether you’re looking to step back into ancient civilizations, the 19th-century, or anywhere in between, our collection of historical fiction stories is here to keep you riveted.

Historical fiction Short Stories – Page 2 of 10

A Love From Beyond

Submitted to Contest #317

A LOVE FROM BEYONDDedicated to my Uncle Paul, whose singing cello led me into music If you could bring back your loved ones back from the dead, this planet would collapse under the weight of all the souls.But I believe they’re all around us, in the wind and the rain, in the morning gold and the twilight blue. We can’t see them anymore but the veil between the worlds is thin. Every now and then the veil tears open and a soul slips through. How else can I explain what happened to me and those around me, changing our lives forever?It began last...

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Up the Goblin Market

Submitted to Contest #317

Content notice: it's a bit sexy. (I hope.) This didn’t feel like sleep. But the space between getting here, and what came before - all darkness. She remembered her desk, her monitor, the cursor blinking unhelpfully. Imagination and history were one big knot she couldn't unravel. By the monitor, the one in her memory, she saw berry tea steeped so long it was basically syrup. Nothing else. What obsession had drawn her so far in she’d lost the way back? She drew in breath and let it out slowly, holding herself still. When she wrote, it sometime...

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Times of My Lives

Submitted to Contest #317

I was given past life regression hypnosis when I was still in college. I don’t usually tell people about it, because at the time I thought it was just a con trick, and now I’m scared. My buddies and I had been out drinking on a Friday night, and we met a guy who said he’d done it and found out about his past life as a Roman centurion. We all had a good laugh at that, but he gave me a card and told me I really ought to try it. The next day as we all recovered from our hangovers, I found the card in my pocket. The guys wanted me to try it out ...

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Hollow’s End

Submitted to Contest #317

When Nathan discovers a mysterious note from his grandmother, he is drawn to a forgotten town no map remembers. In Hollow’s End, he finds a past alive and a warning that the town is destined to vanish — unless he preserves its memory. The first time Nathan saw the name Hollow’s End, it was written in his grandmother’s hand. He’d been sorting through a box of her things in the attic — photographs curling at the edges, brittle letters, smudged recipe cards. Tucked inside a cracked leather journal was a folded scrap of paper. The ink had faded,...

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Sixty-Thousand Years of Solitude

Submitted to Contest #317

The canyon had devoured the trail completely.Bobbie Jean’s fingers scraped against bare sandstone where the metal markers should have been bolted. Gone. Not just the markers—even the drill holes in the sandstone were smooth, as if no hand of iron had ever touched it.Her chest constricted. Not from the altitude, but from something colder creeping up her spine.This was impossible. She’d hiked this loop a dozen times since the divorce. She knew every switchback, every cairn. Trails didn’t just disappear.At fifty-two, her body was already stagin...

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The Circus

Submitted to Contest #317

My dear sister, I’m exceptionally proud of your advancement in the program thus far. Your first mission! Hooray! Yes, a timeline correction does seem like it has world-ending consequences (and indeed it can. I’ve ended the world twice with my own blunders, but thankfully my mentor was able to undo the errors). Believe me though, the guardians wouldn’t have selected you if they didn’t think you were up to it. Your flurry of panicked questions in your last letter gave me a laugh. So similar to my own when I first started out! But your fears ar...

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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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Man Out of Time

Submitted to Contest #317

George looked for all the world like a fish out of water as he skulked around the crowd gathered at the Independence Hall in Philadelphia that hot day in July as the grim men filed from the building and crowded around the podium at the head of the stairs. Like all “Gentlemen” of the era, most had on white powdered wigs that beshoke the seriousness of the business at hand this historic day. As the tall man at the podium stood and stared out over the crowd, he had a determined look on his face that said he would not back down from the major co...

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Orlando Juvenescens- A Reverse History of the Knight

Submitted to Contest #317

ORLANDO JUVENESCENS- A Reverse History of the Knight In Memoriam Lodovico Ariosto 1474-1533 The stirrup made the knight. A man and a horse are separate creatures and the man chooses the trappings he puts on the horse. A man can ride a horse without bridle or harness or saddle or shoe. He can certainly ride without stirrups. But a knight cannot. A knight is a composite of man and horse. When the man dismounts at the end of the day he may still be addressed as “Good Sir Knight of…” but he knows he is really only a knight when he sits astride...

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The Midnight Pub

Submitted to Contest #317

The name “The Midnight Pub” was not its own but given by desperate hopefuls and the lucky few who claimed to step inside. Nestled, or rather hidden in Soho, London, the pub has been compared to Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), for its share a strikingly similar, impossible premise. Yet this is not cinema. This is rumor, myth and obsession. And, if you believe the stories, this is reality. No one had The Midnight Pub on their 2025 bingo card. It doesn't appear on Google Maps. It has no phone number, no listed owner, no records in city ...

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The Stories of Hero and Oat

Submitted to Contest #316

Many thousands of years ago, into a thriving community of Early People, onto the warm and fertile soil of the Eurasian continent, the first human storyteller was born. Her name was Oat.Early People tended to wait to give children names until the community noticed something particular about them. This made names easier to remember. Some community members, like Oat, were named for the kinds of things they did best. Oat spent most of her time in the oat patch, gathering oats and speaking. She was actually better known for her speaking. During O...

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The Parents

Submitted to Contest #316

A blaze erupted from the match and it slowly brought out its light into the world. William bent over to light all four lanterns on the table. He looked out and admired his work with a smirk. Four chairs which he personally built and a table from the neighbor John. In William’s town, there was not very many people and so he made sure to be as friendly as possible to anyone who came by. William quite hated the table, always had. He found the edges unrefined and the craftsmanship shoddy. One of the corners stood up from an error in measuring. “...

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Exit Strategy

Submitted to Contest #317

There is an old adage when you are involved with a project that can be risky, “When the red lights start flashing, you’d better have an exit strategy.” My grandpa told me that. My grandpa worked on the Manhattan Project. Maybe you have heard of it. The research and experimental testing at Los Almos, New Mexico.My grandfather Cecil Monroe was a professor of physics at Princeton university. The head of the department was Albert Einstein who had developed where his theories had advanced nuclear fission. As he told me, Los Almos became a bee...

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The Hidden Pearl Revealed

Submitted to Contest #316

Even Tomas did not know his true identity. Everything changed for the quiet deckhand on the wooden sailing vessel after the new travelers joined the next voyage. Tomas had hair that looked like the wet ropes he coiled on the decks and his pale eyes were the color of the sea in the fog. He seemed very ordinary. “So quiet, almost like a clam,” said one of the other sailors, nodding toward Tomas. “Yes, but I bet there are no pearls inside that clam,” said another sailor. The two sailors laughed. Tomas pretended not to hear them, although their ...

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The Lonely wader

Submitted to Contest #316

Their boots vanished into the brown waters, the wavelets gently lapping at their feet. The tide was low, no higher than their ankles but raising, and as they walked, the mud resisted their steps, holding on with a vacuum-sucking squelch. The man in front slowed, and as he crouched down, he shifted the weight of his gun from one tweed shoulder to the other. He raised his hand, and the other two men bent down behind him. The reeds swayed as they waited, their hands buried in their armpits, resisting the cold. The glass of their binoculars caug...

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RBE | Illustrated Short Stories | 2024-06

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