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Latest Stories

July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Days Of Future Dreams

the days of future dreams the flames once rose high thinking our lives would end up supreme thinking our future seemed a far of dream but in the end nothing is what it seems many times the winds of changed has blown this way one minute we`re lapping the cream…
July 03, 2025
General Stories L Christopher Hennessy

Bad Girl

Part 1I lost the entire manuscript when I assassinated my laptop with sauvignon blanc as I rubbed the lower back of a woman who dozed drunk on my bed, sweating. She was crazed, somewhere between screaming and lying about the orgasm. Bree was a miracle to me,…
July 03, 2025
Horror Stories Nelly Shulman

Black Is Our Colour

“I swear she could have been you. Look! This girl is your long-lost twin.” Fi nudged me, and I smiled. “Never had or wanted one.” I stood up. “Let’s go, or the bargain hunters will clear the shelves before us.” We dived into the vintage emporium across the…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

The Transformation

"I need a brake" words that twisted my heart- shattering the dream that we would never part. I asked myself 'what ever did I do wrong? sad, gloominess could`ve easily been my song. I wouldn't let the anger and misery grow or cultivate- uprising feelings I…
July 03, 2025
Flash Fiction Benoit

Jae

It was Jae’s birthday today. She turned eight. What a beautiful sunny girl! Hyo planned a surprise or two; Li, his wife, did too. Birthday cake, a puppy and … Don’t forget, they grinned just before he drove off. Traffic was intense. A long call came from…
July 03, 2025
General Stories Matias Travieso-Diaz

Fear

Leandro stood outside the Kroger, leaning forward as he shivered in the early March dawn. He hated this moment: the cold, the fatigue, the feeling of helplessness, the anticipation of another day ahead at his degrading job picking collard leaves under the…
July 03, 2025
Horror Stories Mihko Askiweno

Found You

Panic gripped her as she staggered up the steep, rocky incline, breath coming in jagged, shallow gasps. Sweat streamed down her face in torrents, her hair clinging to her forehead and cheeks in disheveled clumps. Her legs trembled with exhaustion, molten fire…
July 03, 2025
Poetry Markus J

Lost On The Path

But alas; sometimes I think we've lost our way- too many strayed opinions...one too many a survey. Walking on the road ahead, just following the herd of sheep- with a hypnotised mind, wide awake yet very fast asleep. While yelling...join the team of the…
July 03, 2025
Flash Fiction Benoit

The Brothers

Juan and Pascal were shipped to distant relatives on Delvina’s periodic hospitalisations. For smoking and breathing difficulties. She had been warned but could not stop. They did not understand the illness or the connection. Pascal stayed with cousins who…
June 04, 2025
General Stories Dylan James Harper

The Bylaws Of The Revolutionary Council

A loud clang rang through the bunker as the door slammed shut. “I really think we have a chance to win this thing!” Greg’s voice echoed throughout the cold walls. The three other inhabitants of the bunker, Jeff, Ben, and Malcolm, all sat around a table…
June 04, 2025
General Stories Michael Barlett

Resurrection

The man lay there in extremis, no longer thinking of cool abstracts like ‘catching the last train for the coast.’ He gulped great rasping breaths – holding them impossibly long – before finally exhaling in a shuttering burst of putrid air. He had been…
June 04, 2025
Flash Fiction Benoit

Time Warp

Nothing was in order, nothing optimal. Germany was awash with refugees and adventurers. Only Angie could hold it together; but then she opened the gates! Who knows why? Other politicians were dinosaurs in the museum. Integration was the solution, was it? That…

“Does it comfort you?” I finally ask. I always thought that faith and funerals were to comfort the living rather than service the dead. I never thought about what it might do for the dying.

I never had faith. We had religion, and plenty of it, in school. We rote-learned the prayers but never found their meaning. The church killed her brother. That was how she explained it to us in the time before clerical sex abuse and suicide had names, and when we were still judged too young to be told the full horror of it. I couldn’t understand how she kept her faith after that, because in school we were taught that to love God was to obey the church. They preached spiritual and intellectual slavery and called it faith.

Her only answer now is a pale smile, the ghost of the smile I used to hate when I was a child. It was a smile that told me some things were just too big and grown-up for me to understand yet.

What’s happening now is far too big and grown-up for me to understand. I need my mother. I need her to tell me what to do and how to survive it.

“Anything I can get you, madam?” I wish the baby-faced nurse would go away. I want real grief around me, or none. I don’t want her trained empathy and rehearsed sympathy that clocks in at 8 am for it’s 12-hour shift before going home again, sympathy and empathy stowed away with her uniform in her locker in the nurses’ room until her next shift.

This isn’t real. It can’t be happening. I feel detached. I feel like I am underwater while the rest of the world is above, and I’m submerged so I can’t see or hear or feel properly, I’m drowning and no one can get in to save me. Everywhere I turn there are people with mountains of platitudes and oceans of tea, but no understanding. Older friends tell me what it was like for them to lose their mothers, but no one but me can ever know what it will be like for me to watch mine fade and know that soon she will be gone. I can’t be in a world she’s not in. It doesn’t make sense.

“Please find my husband.”

I don’t want him there but without faith, I need someone there to hold me, to stop me from falling.

Bio: Naomi Elster is a writer and scientist based in Dublin, Ireland. She is the editor of HeadSpace, a creative non-profit magazine based on mental health.

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