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Sitting by the fire in his hut, the monster tells Victor of the confusion that he experienced upon being created. He describes his flight from Victor’s apartment into the wilderness and his gradual acclimation to the world through his discovery of the sensations of light, dark, hunger, thirst, and cold. According to his story, one day he finds a fire and is pleased at the warmth it creates, but he becomes dismayed when he burns himself on the hot embers. He realizes that he can keep the fire alive by adding wood, and that the fire is good not only for heat and warmth but also for making food more palatable.  In search of food, the monster finds a hut and enters it. His presence causes an old man inside to shriek and run away in fear. The monster proceeds to a village, where more people flee at the sight of him. As a result of these incidents, he resolves to stay away from humans. One night he takes refuge in a small hovel adjacent to a cottage. In the morning, he discovers that he can see into the cottage through a crack in the wall and observes that the occupants are a young man, a young woman, and an old man.

the eyes have it by philip k. dick 00:00:02 the pedestrian by ray bradbury 00:10:51 the fun they had by isaac asimov 00:18:37

Randolph Carter has been found wandering through swampland in an amnesiac shock. In his statement, Carter attempts to explain the disappearance of his companion, the occultist Harley Warren.  Warren has come into the possession of a book, written in an unknown language, that he forbids Carter from seeing. Carter mentions that Warren has other "strange, rare books on forbidden subjects", several of which are in Arabic.  From his mysterious book, Warren apparently deduces that doors or stairways exist between the surface world, and the underworld, through which demons may travel. He encourages Carter to travel with him to the location of one such portal, an ancient graveyard near Big Cypress Swamp. Upon arriving, Warren locates a particular tomb, and opens it to reveal a staircase that descends into the earth. Taking a lantern, he leaves Carter on the surface, and follows the stairs into the darkness, communicating with his companion by a telephone wire.  After several minutes of silence, Warren suddenly begins to make vague, panicked outbursts that culminate in a desperate plea for Carter to flee. Finally, after Warren is silent for several minutes, Carter calls to him down the line, only to hear an alien voice telling him that Warren is dead.  The Statement of Randolph Carter By H. P. Lovecraft

The villagers of a small town gather together in the square on June 27, a  beautiful day, for the town lottery. In other towns, the lottery takes  longer, but there are only 300 people in this village, so the lottery  takes only two hours. Village children, who have just finished school  for the summer, run around collecting stones. They put the stones in  their pockets and make a pile in the square. Men gather next, followed  by the women. Parents call their children over, and families stand  together.  Mr. Summers runs the lottery because he has a lot of time to do things  for the village. He arrives in the square with the black box, followed  by Mr. Graves, the postmaster. This black box isn’t the original box  used for the lottery because the original was lost many years ago, even  before the town elder, Old Man Warner, was born. Mr. Summers always  suggests that they make a new box because the current one is shabby, but  no one wants to fool around with tradition. Mr. Summers did, however,  convince the villagers to replace the traditional wood chips with slips  of paper.

One rainy day, Victor wakes to find his old feelings of despair resurfacing. He decides to travel to the summit of Montanvert, hoping that the view of a pure, eternal, beautiful natural scene will revive his spirits.  When he reaches the glacier at the top, he is momentarily consoled by the sublime spectacle. As he crosses to the opposite side of the glacier, however, he spots a creature loping toward him at incredible speed. At closer range, he recognizes clearly the grotesque shape of the monster. He issues futile threats of attack to the monster, whose enormous strength and speed allow him to elude Victor easily. Victor curses him and tells him to go away, but the monster, speaking eloquently, persuades him to accompany him to a fire in a cave of ice. Inside the cave, the monster begins to narrate the events of his life.

On a cold New Year's Eve, a poor, young girl tries to sell matches in the street. She is already shivering from cold and early hypothermia, and she is walking barefoot after losing her two large slippers that had belonged to her mother to an impertinent pedestrian. Still, she is too afraid to go home, because her father will beat her for not selling any matches, and also as the many cracks in their shack can't keep out the cold wind. The girl takes shelter in a corner formed by two house projected further out into street and sits down.  The girl lights the matches to warm herself. In their glow she sees several lovely visions, starting with a warm stove, then a luxurious holiday feast where the goose almost jumps out at her, and then a magnificent Christmas tree larger than the one at the rich merchant's house. The girl looks skyward and sees a shooting star; she then remembers her late grandmother saying that such a falling star means someone is dying and is going to Heaven. As she lights the next match, she sees a vision of her grandmother, the only person to have treated her with love and kindness all through her life. To keep the vision of her grandmother alive for as long as she can, the girl lights the entire bundle of matches at once.  After running out of matches, the child dies and her grandmother carries her soul to Heaven. The next morning, passers-by find the girl dead in the nook, frozen with a smile on her face, and guess the reason for the burnt-out matches beside her. They feel pity for her, although they had not shown kindness to her before her death. They have no way of knowing about the wonderful visions she saw before her death or how gloriously she is celebrating the New Year in Heaven with her grandmother.

The story features Leonard Mead, a citizen of a television-centered world in 2053. In the city, roads have fallen into decay. Mead enjoys walking through the city at night, something which no one else does. "In ten years of walking by night or day, for thousands of miles, he had never met another person walking, not one in all that time." On one of his usual walks, he encounters a police car, which is possibly robotic. It is the only police unit in a city of three million, since the purpose of law enforcement has disappeared with everyone watching television at night. When asked about his profession, Mead tells the car that he is a writer, but the car does not understand, since no one buys books or magazines in the television-dominated society. Neither the police car nor its occupants can understand why Mead would be out walking for no reason and so decides to take him to the Psychiatric Center for Research on Regressive Tendencies. He is forced to get into the car. As the car passes through his neighborhood, Leonard Mead in the locked confines of the back seat says, "That's my house.", as he points to a house warm and bright with all its lights on unlike all other houses. There is no reply, and the story concludes.

After Justine’s execution, Victor becomes increasingly melancholy. He considers suicide but restrains himself by thinking of Elizabeth and his father. Alphonse, hoping to cheer up his son, takes his children on an excursion to the family home at Belrive. From there, Victor wanders alone toward the valley of Chamounix. The beautiful scenery cheers him somewhat, but his respite from grief is short-lived.

The story begins with a husband and wife on an evening stroll walking by a train station. It seems they are alone, but they are not. The third character is the moon, which “peeped up from the drifting cloudlets and frowned, as it seemed, envying their happiness and regretting her tedious and utterly superfluous virginity.” I think this is the first time that Chekhov has given an inanimate object a personality. And she is a jealous, self-pitying moon. When an unexpected uncle shows up with his family and a governess in tow at the station, the couple turn on each other, much to the petty moon’s delight. Had the formerly happy couple not stopped to watch the train arrive, but dined on chicken and sardines in their cottage instead, the family still would have appeared, upending their tranquility. If that had happened, would the moon have enjoyed the couple’s misery as well?

Framton Nuttel, seeking a "nerve cure" prescribed by his doctor, visits a rural area where he knows no one. His sister provides letters of introduction so he can meet people there.  He pays a visit to Mrs. Sappleton. While he waits for her, her 15-year-old niece keeps him company in the parlor. When she realizes Nuttel has never met her aunt and knows nothing about her, she explains that it has been three years since Mrs. Sappleton's "great tragedy," when her husband and brothers went hunting and never returned, presumably engulfed by a bog. Mrs. Sappleton keeps the large French window open every day, hoping for their return.    When Mrs. Sappleton appears she is inattentive to Nuttel, talking instead about her husband's hunting trip and how she expects him home any minute. Her delusional manner and constant glances at the window make Nuttel uneasy.  Then the hunters appear in the distance, and Nuttel, horrified, grabs his walking stick and exits abruptly. When the Sappletons exclaim over his sudden, rude departure, the niece calmly explains that he was probably frightened by the hunters' dog. She claims that Nuttel told her he was once chased into a cemetery in India and held at bay by a pack of aggressive dogs.