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Where Words Matter

Where storytellers meet readers.

Read, write, and explore. Connecting writers with a new audience, and readers with new short stories.

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Dan the Cat

Dan was a space cat and got a lot of mail. He liked being a cat and liked being a boy.

1 min read · Rating: G · Read story

With Intent to Steal

Shorthouse persuaded me to lend him my company after a sudden change in my attitude. One of the stablemen saw a dark substance hanging down from one of the rafters and raised his face from the gun...

45 min read · Rating: PG-13 · Read story

Storyboard

He documented his facial expressions, traced pathways with his finger, mimed the resulting sequences, and waited for something to fill the blank spaces behind.

< 1 min read · Rating: G · Read story

Maison Tellier

The five girls and the refined, virtuous Madame of a Normandy brothel shut up shop in order to attend a confirmation.

46 min read · Rating: PG-13 · Read story

About The Monk Amador

The Monk Amador was obnoxious to Louis the Eleventh because he was a pilferer, a loiterer, and a bad soldier of the ecclesiastical militia. The lady of Cande reprimanded him for being a Christian...

36 min read · Rating: PG-13 · Read story

Acorn Duly Crushed

Dear stupid forest. Dear patently retarded forest. Dear beautiful ugly stupid forest full of nightingales why won’t you shut up. What do you want from me. A train is too expensive. A clerk will...

< 1 min read · Rating: G · Read story

The Daughters of the Late Colonel

Two sisters readjust their lives following the death of their father.

35 min read · Rating: PG-13 · Read story

Banal Story

He ate an orange, slowly spitting out the seeds, and sat down upon the stove, feeling good. Mascart had knocked Danny Frush cuckoo in the second round, twenty-one feet of snow had fallen in...

3 min read · Rating: G · Read story

The Man Who Could Not Lose

Champneys Carter had married in haste and refused to repent at leisure. Dolly Ingram fell deeply in love with Champneys Carter and he with her, but Carter left him without speaking, and Dolly...

65 min read · Rating: PG-13 · Read story

Doorstep Acquaintance

One of my friends is a blithesome troubadour, but prefers with the expanding spring to lay aside his grimy basket. A little old Genoese lady comes to sell us pins, needles, thread, tape, and the...

34 min read · Rating: G · Read story

The Terror of the Beautiful Is Our Terror Too

We can’t be other than we are and we are hungry for some fruit...

< 1 min read · Rating: G · Read story

Substitution

A man who wrote in code was killed and left in a bathtub. He was found by mistake. Soon a story surfaced about a man who thought in code. His body was found in a bathtub some weeks later. A man who...

1 min read · Rating: PG-13 · Read story