Featured Stories
(See top menu for all 1,500+ stories}
This story from Octavia Butler takes place in a violent, post-apocalyptic world. A virus has killed billions and left most survivors unable to speak, read, write or understand spoken language. Governments and the corporate world have collapsed, there are no police or community services, fuel is scarce. People must fend for themselves. The protagonist, whose husband and children fell to the virus, is contemplating suicide. The desperate woman finds and cruelly loses a new lover, but in the process discovers a renewed purpose in life. Themes: the importance of language, isolation, loneliness, fear, violence, hope.
This story by Bienvenido Santos is about an aging Filipino expatriate who feels cut off from his culture. After years of menial work in the United States, the protagonist has no remaining family and only one local, possibly terminally ill, Filipino friend. Rather naïvely, he decides to approach and offer to host to a group of visiting tinikling dancers. He is ignored, but makes an audio recording of their performance to remember them by. In the depressing denouement, he faces the grim reality of losing them all. Themes include nostalgia, connection with one’s roots, aging and death.
In this story by Anton Chekhov, a young man plays a trick on a terrified lady-friend by whispering a ghostly I love you as they speed down a mountain on a toboggan. Unsure of what she heard, the woman asks the man to repeat the ride over and over. Each time they do so, he whispers the same words. Soon it becomes an obsession and every day she wants to go up the mountain to listen for the words. Her reaction when she thinks she has the answer is a surprise. Themes include fear, innocence, playful deception, confusion, obsession, regret.
In this story by Mariana Enríquez, a six-year-old girl changes dramatically after a family visit to a supposed witch. She develops a series of severe phobias that make it impossible to leave her house and live a normal childhood. In her teens, her older sister tells her that the witch’s visit cured her mother, grandmother and herself of similar fears. Seeking help, they revisit the witch and learn that her family had had the witch cast an irreversible spell transferring the “old evils” inhabiting themselves to the girl. Themes include irrational terror, demonic possession, betrayal, despair, the supernatural.
This story from Jane Bowles examines the toxic relationship between three troubled sisters who share a city apartment. One of them is midway through a ten-week holiday in a Camp Cataract cabin as part of a long-term plan to move out and live independently. When another turns up uninvited, hoping to convince her to cut the holiday short, they arrange to meet for lunch the next day. Both have different recollections of what happens the following morning. Madness intervenes, and only one of them survives the day. Themes: self-analysis, identity, independence, mental illness, spinsterhood, female relationships.
This humorous but unlikely story by O. Henry is set in the office of Harvey Maxwell, a busy New York stockbroker, over the space of a single morning. When Harvey sits down at his desk, it is as if he changes from a man into a machine. He puts everything else out of his mind. It is a bad day on the stock market and, when things get quieter at lunchtime, he realizes that he has forgotten something more important than making money. Themes include the pressure of ‘modern’ business, love, preoccupation, workplace conflict, gender roles.
This tongue-in-cheek story by Guy de Maupassant could be said to reflect two English proverbs: ignorance is bliss, and money can’t buy happiness. A recently widowed man of modest means is shocked to learn that his seemingly perfect wife had been living a decadent secret life. When he discovers that her “fake” jewels are real, he quits his job, becomes a man of leisure, and remarries a “very virtuous” woman who causes him much sorrow. The story introduces several important themes: appearances (things aren’t always as they seem), infidelity, vanity, hypocrisy, French bourgeois morality, exploitation of the working class.
This story by Gary Paulsen focuses on an adolescent boy’s efforts to understand his father’s unusual behavioral lapses, which his mother describes as “Vietnam Syndrome”. He is uncomfortable with the behavior at home and embarrassed when it manifests itself in public. Initially, he tries to research the condition at the library and by asking teachers. When this doesn’t work, he has the courage to ask his father. What he learns brings a measure of understanding, and gives him the strength to be more tolerant. Themes: father-son relationships, the brutality of war and its after-effects on veterans, communication, understanding and tolerance.
