LitReading - Classic Short Stories and Timeless Tales

A farmer lies dead in his bed with a rope around his neck. That morning his wife sat in the kitchen, pleating her apron, and said she slept through it.

So the men come out to the farmhouse: the sheriff, the county attorney, and the neighbor who found her. They search the cold rooms for something that will hold up in court. Two of their wives ride along to gather a few things for the woman in the county jail. Nobody expects much from them.

The kitchen is a mess of unfinished chores and small things left where they fell.

Susan Glaspell once covered a murder case like this as a young reporter in Iowa, and it stayed with her. She wrote the story in 1917, and a century later it still hasn't loosened its grip.

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.
We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

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Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.

The card came to the forge two days later.

The blacksmith was no duelist. He was, however, a man who had spent his life learning where something hard gives.

From Short Storyverses. More at shortstoryverses.com.
We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

A man in a country pub insists his story is true. It concerns his brother Wilfred, a chemist of some genius, a jolly outdoor girl with a wholesome sunburn, and a Yorkshire baronet who spells his name with four small f's. Somebody is being kept behind a locked door on the second floor. Somebody else is about to regret asking what's true to life.

This is P.G. Wodehouse, 1926, at his most gleefully unreliable.

First published in Liberty, August 7, 1926; collected in Meet Mr. Mulliner, 1927. Read by Don McDonald. HumorUs is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

An obituary arrives in the mail, folded in thirds, no note, no return address, and the creases are sharp enough to cut with.

Roy Kittleson has not seen the man named in it since a Friday in 1986, and he has his reasons, and none of them are good. He drives up anyway. Three hours, most of it flat.

He has rehearsed nothing. He is counting on grief to arrive on its own.

“The Wrong Funeral,” is an original story written and read by Don McDonald from ShortStoryverses.com.

We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Here is the first episode of a new Short Storyverses limited series podcast, Care Protocol.

Nobody has died on a Portland street in four years. The city handed over the wheel eight years ago and got back quiet nights, clean air, and a fatality rate of zero. Ask anyone. The algorithms saved us.

Then, at 7:12 on an ordinary Tuesday, a man waiting for his morning ride is killed against a brick wall at Fifth and Glisan—in front of three witnesses who all describe the same impossible thing. Before lunch, there is a second.

The company’s lawyers called the police seven minutes after the first death. That was six minutes before anyone called them.

Special Agent Maya Restrepo catches the case: deaths that could not have happened, and a maintenance log with a sentence sitting in it where a number should be.
You’re hearing Episode One of Care Protocol as a special LitReading bonus. The story continues on its own separate podcast, and future episodes will not appear in the LitReading feed. Search for and follow Care Protocol wherever you get your podcasts.

In Episode Two of Care Protocol:
Something happens on a stretch of I-5 outside Wilsonville, caught from nine angles. By Friday morning, there isn’t a screen in the country that hasn’t run it. By Saturday, the country has decided what it means—and Maya Restrepo is the only person still asking the other question.

Episode Two arrives Wednesday, September 16, exclusively in the Care Protocol podcast feed.

Explore our multiverse of narrated short stories at ShortStoryVerses.com.
We are so honored to have been featured by Apple Podcasts as a great source for summer stories. If you don't want to miss our future stories, please Follow or Subscribe. Also, we have over 100 stories in our back catalog. Enough stories to keep you entertained for weeks.

Looking for even more stories? Check out all out narrative podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.