LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

It starts on a Tuesday in October, at ten minutes to three in the morning. A low tone with no seam in it.

Hollis Pike's neighbors can't hear it. His phone can't record it. The audiologist says his hearing is fine, better than fine, and writes something down.

So he goes looking for where it comes from. The county keeps records. The house has a history. The sound is patient.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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Four young men from the city, a campfire in the Sullivan County hills, and one small man who can’t stop talking about the black hole in the hillside. He wants a story to take home. His friends want him in front. Stephen Crane was twenty when he wrote this, years before The Red Badge of Courage, and he’s having a wonderful time at his own expense: thunderous prose, a cave dripping with gothic dread, and four bold adventurers who would very much like to be somewhere else.

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John is a physician, and he has a plan for his wife. Rest. Fresh air. No visitors who might excite her. Absolutely no writing.

He's rented a colonial mansion for the summer and given her the big room at the top, the old nursery, with barred windows and a bed that won't move. She keeps a journal anyway, tucked out of sight whenever he comes up the stairs. In it she writes about the house, the garden, the baby, her husband's kindness.

Mostly she writes about the wallpaper.

Published in 1892 and still unsettling. Read by Don McDonald

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A story from the archives recently remastered.
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He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.

Now the seatbelt sign is on, the descent has started, and his brother is running out of days. In his jacket pocket is a voicemail he has never played.

There's a rule pilots follow below ten thousand feet. Nothing gets said that doesn't need saying. He always thought that sounded like a good way to live.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

Please be sure to follow on your podcast service and if you enjoyed the story please leave a five star review or rating.

For more short fiction podcasts visit shortstoryverses.com
If you enjoyed this story, buy me an e-book!
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/donmcdonald
or click FOLLOW
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Mark Twain falls into conversation with a pleasant gentleman who has mild opinions on weather, crops, literature, scandal and religion. Then the talk lands on burglar alarms, and the gentleman is suddenly not mild at all. His was the most imposing alarm in America. It had a gong the size of a washbowl, forty-seven little tags, and an expert from New York who always came when called, and always remembered to send a bill. Twain, who had an alarm put into his own Hartford house the year before he wrote this, lets the man talk.

First published in Harper’s Christmas supplement, December 1882.

This is a recently remastered story from our archive.
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