It’s the same outcome every time. I should have learned back in school that I couldn’t win this battle. But ever since I first saw Pearl, she had a magnetic draw.
- Length: 10 pages
- Age Rating: PG
My brother’s name is David. Our parents called him that because it means “beloved,” in case you didn’t know.
- Length: 9 pages
- Age Rating: PG
Our college reunions were usually boisterous affairs, but this one was subdued. Subdued, that is until the cocktails soaked in.
- Length: 6 pages
- Age Rating: PG
A final chink of light disappears behind me. The five steps up a narrow staircase lead me to a tiny, sacred space where showbiz magic is made.
- Length: 5 pages
- Age Rating: PG
Let me tell you about myself. My name is Donald Lally, and I am 18, and I like girls, but when I go out with one, there’s usually just the one date.
- Length: 8 pages
- Age Rating: PG
Dolan’s first weeks as a correspondent hit him hard. Not the work, but the weirdness of it all. He kept thinking it was scripted somehow as if Vietnam in ’72 was written for him as a parade of absurdities Rod Serling would love..
- Length: 7 pages
- Age Rating: PG
While I was indulging in the ritual hand blowing that characterised my Christmas travels around the graveyard, I noticed a man who was by a grave which was two rows forward and three plots along from where I was.
- Length: 6 pages
- Age Rating: PG
Meg went to the door and ran a finger over its surface and hinges coated in layers of thick paint, applied one over another for decades. The knob held firm. The lock stuck fast. This door hasn’t opened for years.
- Length: 9 pages
- Age Rating: PG
By the time I was old enough to watch my first Michael Myers movie, Halloween III, I already knew firsthand that infamous Haddonfield, Illinois, was not the only place where nightmares come true for ordinary kids!
- Length: 21 pages
- Age Rating: PG
He crouched down on both knees to look under the vehicle. When he said, “Oh God!” it wasn’t in his adult voice, but in a child’s voice, like the time he had accidentally run over his little brother’s leg with his dirt bike.
- Length: 11 pages
- Age Rating: PG
Charlie and John Green were brothers. They were raised in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Jackson County, North Carolina.
- Length: 12 pages
- Age Rating: PG
Fifteen minutes to the deadline. Fifteen minutes to write the words that would end the career of a man who had once saved his life...
- Length: 4 pages
- Age Rating: PG
I muttered a quick prayer for my soul’s renewal, hoping the words would catch on the hawk’s wings and be taken to wherever such prayers should go.
- Length: 15 pages
- Age Rating: PG
Private Alexander Huxley sat in the hull of the C-47, jaw clenched and lips twisted into a savage grimace. The weight of his parachute kept him hunched in his seat, and the straps of his harness and weapon case chafed raw swathes into his skin.
- Length: 4 pages
- Age Rating: PG
“I do hope he likes them,” Doris thought to herself over and over again.
They were, after all, very special cookies for a very special person.
- Length: 20 pages
- Age Rating: PG