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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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Music

WILD cat was listening to the melody of distant hounds tracking a remote fox. She shinned up a tree as the dogs burst into view below her and stifled their songs upon the body of their victim...

< 1 min read · Rating: G · Read story

The Bell In The Fog

A writer becomes obsessed with a portrait of a young girl.

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

A Pair Of Patient Lovers

We first met Glendenning on the Canadian boat, but Mrs. March clutched my arm and bade me not speak a word. The older of these ladies was a tall, handsome matron, and she accepted my chair in the...

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

Odour of Chrysanthemums

A small locomotive engine came clanking, and the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. A mother and son stood at the foot of the three steps, and the mother watched her son's...

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

The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Often cited as the first detective story. The genre arrives pretty much fully formed: a brilliant detective, the bumbing police officer and

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

The Strange Adventures of a Private Secretary in New York

Jim Shorthouse's private secretaryship was never clear to me. Mr. Jonas B. Sidebotham watched him narrowly and struck a match. The two men talked in low voices for another hour, and then the silent...

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

The Man with the Watches

An apparently impossible scenario involving the diappearance of three people from and the appearance of a totally unknown - dead - fourth on

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

A Prisoner in the Caucasus

An officer named Zhlin was serving in. He saw a red-bearded Tartar on a grey horse and drew his sword and dashed at him thinking. Zhlin hardly slept at all, peeped out of the hole in the wall, saw...

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

Unfair" death?

Andrew learns the value of spending time with loved ones after his grandfather's death.

4 min read · Rating: PG · Read story

How Reuben Allen "Saw Life" in San Francisco

The junior partner of the firm of Sparlow & Kane was gazing meditatively out of the corner of their little shop in Dupont Street when Madame le Blank entered, complaining of a head injury. The...

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

The Prussian Officer

The Captain was a tall man of about forty, with reddish-brown, stiff hair, and a Prussian aristocrat. He grew madly irritable and harsh and cruelly bullying his young soldier, using contempt and...

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

The White Stocking

Whiston lay still and looked at his wife, who scrambled her hair before the mirror. He sobered down to navy blue, but she tripped beside him. Elsie blushed and laughed, went to the arms of Sam...

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