Short Reads
Stories you can finish in about ten minutes or less (under 2,300 words). Good for a coffee break, a bus ride, or one more before bed.
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Take It In
Every Tuesday an old man brings the same navy suit into a tailor shop in Stockton, with an index card of measurements for the person it's meant to fit. They aren't his. Every week, they're a little less like anybody's.
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One Task at a Time
The scanner only shows you one task at a time. At 2:04 in the morning, it sends a night-shift warehouse picker to Aisle 40, Bin 0. There is no Bin 0.
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The Unmarked Stop
Ruth Halvorsen has played the organ at Trinity Lutheran for forty-eight years, mostly for funerals. When the restorer took the console apart, he found one drawknob that had been panelled over in 1958. It has no name engraved on it, and it doesn't make a sound. Not from the organ, anyway.
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The Other Half
The other half of our duplex has been empty for eleven years. Every night, through the bedroom wall, a couple in there rehearses the conversation my wife and I will have tomorrow.
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Corrections
I keep a grocery list on a notepad stuck to my fridge. Lately someone has been adding to it, in my handwriting. So far, everything they've added, I've needed.
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The Tide Tables
My grandfather left me his cottage, his boat, and forty years of tide tables written in his own hand. They are accurate to the minute. They also have a third column.
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Retention Schedule
I work at a records storage warehouse outside Kent, Washington. Two hundred thousand banker's boxes, every one barcoded, every one with a destruction date. Last Tuesday I found a box with my name on it in an aisle that isn't on the map. It's scheduled for destruction tomorrow.
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Walking Night
On the island where I married, there is one night at the end of October when every house sets its shoes out on the step, a pair for everyone inside and one pair more. In the morning the extra pair is gone, and that is a good year.
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The Tell-Tale Heart Classic
A narrator who insists he is perfectly sane explains, very calmly, why the old man's eye had to go.
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Halves
Someone has been eating exactly half of everything in my apartment. Half a sandwich. Half a glass of milk. Half of one grape, cut so cleanly it looks like it was done with a scalpel. I live alone. I've weighed everything.
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Self-Guided Tour
Welcome to the Ashcombe House, a historic home museum preserved exactly as the family left it in 1891. Please collect a headset from the front desk. Enter the number posted in each room to hear about it.
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Siskiyou Summit
Every trucker who runs I-5 at night knows the rule for the man walking in the left lane near the Oregon line. Flash twice, move over, don't stop. My husband stopped.
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The Maze
My family has cut a corn maze into the same eight acres every fall for thirty years. Every year, from the air, there's a path in it that none of us cut. My grandfather had one rule about it.
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Burn Morels
The spring after a wildfire, the burned forest fills up with morels, and pickers come from all over the West to pick them. The buyer at the Okanogan camp gave me eight rules on an index card. The one about the green tree is the only one I broke.
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July Ice
On the night of July 11th the reservoir above our town in Montana froze solid, in the middle of a heat wave. Half the town walked out onto it. Under the ice, the lights of the old town were on.
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Please Stay on the Line
After my father died, I spent a week in his house closing his accounts. The last one was the landline he'd had since 1974. The phone company's automated system said it could only cancel service with the account holder.
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Home Inspection Report, 18 Tamarack Lane
A pre-purchase home inspection report for a 1962 Cape in coastal Maine, shared by the buyer who commissioned it. The roof needs work. The water heater is near the end of its life. The basement stairs have fourteen steps going down and thirteen coming up.
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Stay Until I Fall Asleep
On the night shift at a small county hospital, the call light in Room 4 comes on most nights around two. There is an old woman in the bed who only wants someone to sit with her. There is one rule about it.
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Next Row Over
My great-aunt picked huckleberries in the Washington Cascades every August for seventy years. She taught me two rules. If you hear someone picking in the next row over and nobody's there, don't answer when they call your name. And never eat from a bucket you didn't fill.
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Smoke Report
Letters from a seasonal fire lookout to her sister, written from a tower on a remote peak. She has been reporting a column of smoke in the valley below every evening. It doesn't drift with the wind.
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Bed Three
I'm a night technologist in a hospital sleep lab. I watch people sleep on infrared video and read their brainwaves off a screen. The man in Bed Three was dreaming two dreams at once, and one of them was talking to me.
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Last Pass
I drive a county snowplow on the night route up to Tamarack Pass. The road ends at a gate at the summit, and on the worst nights of the year, it doesn't.
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Route Fourteen
In 1988 I delivered the morning paper in Aberdeen, Washington. One house on my route had been empty for years, but it had a subscription going back to 1931, and every Friday there was an envelope of coins on the porch rail to pay for it.
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The Train Horn at 4:44
A thread from a small town's community forum. A few residents have started hearing a freight train's horn at 4:44 every morning. The town's rail line was torn up in 1979.
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The Interlopers Classic
Two men whose families have feuded for generations meet one winter night in a disputed Carpathian forest, rifles in hand.
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Select All Squares
The login page for a client's server asked me to prove I wasn't a robot. Select all squares with traffic lights. I got it wrong, so it gave me another one. Select all squares with the man in the doorway.
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The Hymn Board
A letter left in the sacristy of a small country church for the incoming pastor, by the man who has kept the building for forty-one years. He would like to explain about the numbers.
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The Boarded Window Classic
Why did the old hermit of the Ohio woods board up the only window of his cabin? The answer begins with his wife.
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Gate B0
Stranded overnight in an airport after a cancellation, I heard the boarding call at 3 a.m. for a flight to my hometown that my father took in 1999. It was boarding at Gate B0. The B gates start at 1.
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[inaudible]
I transcribe focus-group recordings for a market research firm. The rule is verbatim: you type everything you can hear. In the files from one facility, there's someone talking under the room tone.
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You Have Four Saved Messages
My grandmother moved into memory care in the spring. She calls me most nights and leaves long, wandering voicemails. Lately she's been talking about a nice young man who visits her after lights-out, and how much he knows about my apartment.
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Lost & Found
Selected listings from the Lost & Found column of a small-town weekly paper, collected by a reader who spent a summer going through its back issues on microfilm. Most of it is dogs and car keys.
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The Bowmen Classic
Outnumbered and facing annihilation on the Western Front, a British soldier murmurs an old Latin motto, and the battlefield changes.
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Roadside
Part of my job on the highway crew is pulling unpermitted roadside memorials. On one stretch of Highway 395, white crosses keep appearing for people nobody remembers dying. Then I found out they hadn't.
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Metes and Bounds
A land surveyor is hired to retrace an 1884 deed in the hill woods before a sale. The deed carves out a single acre that is "not to be entered." Its corners are not where they ought to be.
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Continue Watching
A new show turned up in the Continue Watching row on our TV. Season 1, Episode 4. Neither of us had ever heard of it. The thumbnail was our kitchen, from up near the ceiling, at night.
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RE: Updated Seating Chart (4th Floor)
An email thread forwarded to us by a reader who used to work in claims processing. It begins with the most boring message ever sent in an office, and a desk nobody can account for.
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An Inhabitant of Carcosa Classic
A man wakes in an unfamiliar wilderness with no memory of how he arrived, and begins walking toward the city he remembers.
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Ancient Air
I work in an ice core lab. When we melt Antarctic ice in a vacuum chamber, it gives up tiny bubbles of air that have been sealed since before people painted caves. Our new pressure sensors are sensitive enough to record what that air was carrying. Sound.
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Yuki-Onna Classic
Two woodcutters caught in a blizzard shelter in a ferryman's hut, and only one of them survives the visit of a woman dressed in white.
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Sredni Vashtar Classic
A sickly ten-year-old boy, ruled by a strict guardian, worships a secret god he keeps in a hutch in the garden shed.
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The Seven-Ten
When I was a girl in Cale, Nebraska, a pale blue sedan drove down Orchard Road every summer evening at ten past seven, full of waving people. We all waved back. Within the month, whoever had been in it moved away.
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Inside Pocket
I bought a gray wool overcoat at a consignment shop in Minneapolis for forty dollars. Every morning there is a fresh slip of paper in the inside pocket with an address on it. I have been to six of them.
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Dagon Classic
A morphine-addicted sailor writes his last statement, describing what he found when the sea floor rose to the surface.
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Soundings
Extracts from the survey log of a small research vessel mapping the floor of a remote northern sound. The seabed there is supposed to be flat, and sixty meters down.
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Minutes, Regular Meeting
Excerpts from a year of homeowners' association minutes in an Arizona subdivision. The main items are pool hours, a dispute about a basketball hoop, and the house at the end of Mesquite Court, which is not on the plat.
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Notes for the Subletter
I sublet a fourth-floor walk-up for the summer. The tenant left me a typed page of notes about the apartment, taped inside the kitchen cabinet. Most of them are about the radiator.
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Mujina Classic
A merchant walking on a lonely Tokyo slope at night finds a young woman weeping beside the moat.
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Thermal
Every winter I count elk from a helicopter over the Idaho backcountry with a thermal camera. Elk show up as bright white shapes on the snow. On a ridge above the Lochsa, the camera showed twenty-three shapes standing in a circle, and they were not elk.
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The Oval Portrait Classic
A wounded traveller sheltering in an abandoned château is transfixed by a portrait that looks almost too alive.
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Buddy Check
The summer I was nineteen I lifeguarded at a lake camp in the pines. Every twenty minutes I blew the whistle and the kids raised their hands in pairs. That was the summer the count stopped coming out even.
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The Open Window Classic
A nervous man arrives at a country house for a rest cure and is entertained by the hostess's very composed fifteen-year-old niece.
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The Mother
The bakery I work nights at in Pittsburgh has used the same sourdough starter since 1911. There is one rule: it gets fed at two in the morning, every morning, no matter what. I was late once.
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Same Name, Same Number
Nine days out of Honolulu on a solo delivery, my chartplotter showed another boat two miles ahead of me on the AIS. It had my boat's name and my boat's identification number, and it was sitting exactly where I would be in six hours.
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The Pipe
Behind our elementary school there was a concrete drainage pipe you could crawl through, sixty feet from end to end. Kids who went all the way through came out a little different. Dougie Ferro came out left-handed.
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Jikininki Classic
A travelling Zen priest seeks shelter in a mountain hamlet on the very night a death has occurred, and stays to keep watch over the body.
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Covered Dish
Every September at the Grange hall harvest supper, there is one casserole on the long table that nobody brought, with a family's name on masking tape on the lid. I've been Grange secretary for twenty-two years. It's my job to deliver it.
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Unsigned Turnout
Every spring, crews dig the North Cascades Highway out from under thirty feet of snow. The highway is closed to the public the whole time. The rule on the crew is simple. If you see a viewpoint sign that isn't brown, don't read it, and don't pull in.
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Room 7
My robot vacuum builds a map of my house with a laser. My house has six rooms. The map has seven, and every night at 2 a.m. the vacuum spends forty minutes cleaning the one that isn't there.
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Overflow Lot
The outlet mall off the interstate puts holiday shoppers in an overflow lot across the frontage road. I parked in Row K. When I came back out in the fog, the rows went past Z.
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The Wolves of Cernogratz Classic
A newly rich family buys an old castle, and their elderly governess claims to know the legend of its wolves.
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Phenology
For thirty years I have kept a record of my backyard's seasons, the first crocus, the first robin, the first frost. This spring there is a circle of lawn under the old apple tree where it is still last October.
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Where Are Your Parents
When I was eleven in Tacoma, every kid on our street knew a phone number you could call to find out exactly where your parents were right now. It was always right. I collected what other people remember about it.
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The Cats of Ulthar Classic
In the town of Ulthar, no man may kill a cat. This is the story of how that law came about.
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Whorls
In March my phone stopped recognizing my thumb. In April a background check said my fingerprints belonged to a nineteen-year-old who went missing in Idaho in 1987.
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A Note Below A
A standard piano has eighty-eight keys, and the lowest is an A. I've tuned pianos for twenty-six years. The old upright in the Halasz house in Dubuque has eighty-nine.
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The Music on the Hill Classic
A newly married town woman persuades her husband to move to his remote family estate, where she mocks the old woodland superstitions.
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Occultation
Pages from the observing log of an amateur astronomer in the high desert of eastern Oregon. He was timing stars as they blinked out behind the Moon. Then they started blinking out where the Moon wasn't.
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Telling the Bees
My grandmother kept bees in the Willamette Valley and taught me the old rule: when someone in the family dies, you have to go and tell them. She also taught me what the bees do if nobody tells them.
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Estate Inventory, Lots 1–64
An estate liquidator's working inventory for a farmhouse in Vermont, sent to us by the heir. Everything in the house came in pairs, one for the man who lived there and one for someone else. Lot 64 is not for sale.
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Pot Forty-One
On my first season crabbing the Bering Sea, one of our pots came up with a man's wedding ring tangled in the mesh. The man it belonged to was standing next to me on deck, wearing it.
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You Are Here
I took the overnight custodial job at a rest area in the Columbia River Gorge. The man before me left a page of notes in the supply closet. Most are about the toilets. One is about the map.