LitReading - Short Stories and Timeless Tales

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.

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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.

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The Garden was finished before anyone in it was born. The rain arrives on schedule, in the amount that has been decided. The manual has never been improved on.

Nobody touches anybody. Children learn it early, with the short rod, because correcting is cheapest when they're small.

Sela is twenty-two and has never had a low year. When the tremor takes the hands of the old man who grades pears beside her, she stands up and says, "I'll take that." Nothing forbids it. There is even a provision.

Two hundred and nine times. Over twenty months.

Somebody is keeping the number.

“The Garden’s Wall” started with a question I couldn’t put down. What would a society look like if it decided, sincerely and on the evidence, that compassion was a defect to be bred out? Not a cruel place. A reasonable one, where the punishment is measured, the reasoning is sound, and nobody enjoys any part of it.

The answer turned out to be a garden, and a wall nobody built, and a gate that opens outward, and forty-one people put through it in a single lifetime.

Please check out my many universes of short stories at shortstoryverses.com and my long-running money podcast, Talking Real Money.

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A December afternoon, a fire going down, and a marriage stalled halfway through a quarrel nobody bothered to finish. Egbert comes in for tea prepared to be reasonable, then conciliatory, then almost penitent. Lady Anne, rigid in the armchair by the tea table, declines to participate. Somewhere above them a bullfinch works through the only tune it knows, and on the rug a Persian cat named Don Tarquinio waits with the patience of an animal who has already decided something.

Saki at his most precise: eleven minutes of drawing-room comedy built entirely out of one person not speaking, and a closing line that reorganizes everything you just heard.

"The Reticence of Lady Anne" was collected in Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches (1910). Read by Don McDonald.

Litreading is part of Short Storyverses. shortstoryverses.com

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Poker Flat is a mining camp that has recently decided to take its virtue seriously. When the town's new moral committee finishes its business, four of its most familiar faces find themselves traveling a mountain trail with strangers who know far too much about one another's pasts. Among them is a gambler whose quiet confidence suggests he has already calculated every card that has not yet been dealt.

Bret Harte's classic American story unfolds where the Sierra Nevada meets the law of unexpected consequences. In the company of strangers, with old judgments left behind in the valley below, the outcasts of Poker Flat discover that the line between sinner and saint is rarely where the town's respectable citizens believe it to be. A timeless tale about the hands we are dealt, the hands we play, and the surprising hands we never see coming.

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This is not a story.

After dozens of episodes, I thought I'd take one to explain myself. Who I am, why LitReading exists, how a story earns a place here, and why there are suddenly so many related shows sharing the same shelf. Also a few honest words about advertising, a tip jar I'd rather call Buy Me a Book, a request for a review, and a listener who found my narration unlistenable.

Don's Money podcast is Talking Real Money

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Arnold Thorndike buys a Correggio before breakfast and can price his own time to the minute. Two hundred dollars of it. So when he stops his car at the Court of General Sessions to say a word for a young stenographer who got drunk, lost five hundred dollars of his employer's money, and is due up for sentence, he figures the errand will run him about a thousand.

The court has other ideas. Richard Harding Davis, the most famous reporter of his generation, sets the Wisest Man in Wall Street down on a hard oak chair and leaves him there, unrecognized and unimportant, admitted only because he's "with Mr. Andrews," while the whole sorry parade of the city files past the bench.

This is a comedy of manners with a soft heart.

If you enjoy well-narrated short stories, check out our many story-telling podcasts at shortstoryverses.com

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High summer, and it is too hot to sing. A huntsman walks a road with a gun on his shoulder, a bird in his bag, and a dog running ahead of him. A woman steps out of the rye with a sickle in her hand and says his name. She is delighted to see him. He is not.

They sit down between two fir trees, and in the ten minutes that follow, Anton Chekhov does something very quiet and very cruel. He was twenty-five, writing fast and for money under a pen name, and he claimed later that he wrote this one in a bathhouse in a single sitting

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This story is the first story specifically written for HumorUs Stories, a funny story podcast from ShortStoryverses.com.

In Maple Glen, nothing ever happens. This week, nothing happens in three separate backyards, after dark, and everyone involved would prefer you didn't ask.

A deadpan comedy about honesty, neighbors, and one very patient dog.

Find more stories at ShortStoryverses.com — a multiverse of audio fiction spanning seven shows: classics on LitReading, original voices on New Tales Told, children's stories on Readastorus, holiday tales on Season's Readings, horror on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, and comedy on HumorUs. Every story sized to fit a commute, a walk, or the quiet stretch before sleep. We have stories buried everywhere.

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Nora has come up to Lake Sabbath to do one hard, practical thing — close the old family house for good, and mark what will be sold. She means to stay a single night. But a house keeps its own memory: the key still on its nail, the drawer that sticks, a boat with a name. And a long, unhurried summer evening on still water can ask more of a person than they came prepared to answer.

Short Storyverses is our multiverse of audio fiction — where each show spins in its own orbit but shares one sky. Classics and originals on LitReading, suspense on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, comedy on HumorUs, new voices on New Tales Told, and tales for the youngest listeners too. Short enough for a commute, a walk, or the quiet before sleep. Press play at shortstoryverses.com.

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