Featured Stories

The Patient Cat

The Patient Cat: Short story by Laura E. RichardsThis short fable by Laura E. Richards teaches a lesson about patience. The cat showed patience in waiting for the bird to lay all of its eggs, and then waiting until the eggs had hatched. It also showed patience in not pouncing as soon as the chicks were born, but leaving them until they started to get fat. There was a point shortly after this where the cat should have enjoyed its meal. This leads to the moral of the story: being patient is a good thing, but it is equally important to know the right time to act.

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Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry

Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry: Short story by Elizabeth McCrackenIn this story by Elizabeth McCracken, a homeless woman with no family has spent her life traveling the countryside and staying at the homes of people she says are distant relatives. Now in her eighties, she visits a young couple claiming to be the niece of the man’s great-grandfather. While there, she forms an unlikely attachment to a neglected, undisciplined young boy living nearby. When the truth comes out and it is time for her to leave, she considers taking the boy with her. Themes include homelessness, deception, family, loss, connection.

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Almost No Memory

Almost No Memory: Flash story by Lydia DavisWhen Lydia Davis wrote this flash story, she may have been reminded of a quote attributed to Albert Einstein: Never memorize what you can look up. Some people have a knack for remembering almost every detail of past events; others have a talent for putting names to faces or remembering facts and figures. However, most of us forget more than we remember. A word that often comes up in describing Davis’s writing is “playful”. Here she takes a playful look at memory (or rather lack of it!), and then moves on to memories and their relationship to original thought.

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The Crowd

The Crowd: Short story by Ray BradburyIn this chilling story by Ray Bradbury, a man badly injured in a car accident senses something ominous about the onlookers in the crowd that gathered around him. Several weeks later, he notices these same individuals at another accident. He searches newspaper archives and discovers that they and similar groups had attended hundreds of accidents over the last decade. Their sinister purpose is revealed when he has another car crash and they decide to “make him more comfortable”. Themes include morbid curiosity, schadenfreude, anonymity and the possibility of evil in a crowd, the supernatural.

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Inside Out

Inside Out: Short story by Francisco JiménezThis is a chapter from the The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child, a collection of autobiographical short stories by Francisco Jiménez. Here. Jiménez describes his first year at school. Although slightly nervous because of his older brother’s stories about his first grade experience, he is excited to learn. However, his academic progress and relationships with classmates are held back by a complete lack of English. Frustrated, he compensates through daydreaming, artistic expression and interaction with the class caterpillar. Themes include family, poverty, language and communication, isolation and loneliness, persistence, understanding and forgiveness, art, personal growth (metamorphosis).

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The Busker

The Busker: Short story by Paul JenningsBoth adults and children have been known to cry at the end of the story within a story in this tale from Paul Jennings. Its major theme is that giving money to people (or in the narrator’s case, spending it on them) doesn’t make them like you. Other themes: folly (the narrator, desperate for $10, searching the beach for a shipwreck), companionship and teamwork (between the Busker and his dog, Tiny), jealousy (when the Busker realizes Tiny is the star of their act), animal cruelty (Tiny in the well), and unconditional animal love (the Busker in the well).

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My Kinsman, Major Molineux

My Kinsman, Major Molineux: Short story by Nathaniel HawthorneThis Nathaniel Hawthorne story is set in the unsettling times shortly before the American Revolution. A naïve eighteen-year-old man travels from the countryside to an unnamed town seeking promised favors from Major Molineux, a distant relative and officer in the British army. Whenever he enquires about the Major’s address, he is met with either scorn or an evasive answer. He learns why when his tarred-and-feathered kinsman is led past him in a street parade. Fortunately, thanks to a kind stranger, there is still a possible future for him in the town. Themes: hope, political unrest, disorder, loss of innocence, compassion.

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The Flight

The Flight: Short story by Kamala DasThere are two “flights” in this story by Kamala Das. The first occurs after a successful sculptor finds city living and her city models devoid of inspiration. Once dependent on her husband, who is now disabled and dependent on her, she has a new sense of control over her life. They move to a dream house by the sea where, re-inspired, she becomes infatuated with a seventeen-year-old nude model. She once again “takes flight” upon finding her husband having sex with the girl, this time into the sea. Themes include marriage, lust, gender roles, control, art, betrayal.

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