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Stories about family secrets
These are stories about the arrangement a family has quietly agreed to: the thing everybody knows and nobody says, the money that moved, the person who was left somewhere, the letter that kept arriving.
Some are told years afterwards by somebody who was a child at the time. Some are happening now to the person least equipped to stop them. In all of them the secret is a practical arrangement before it is a revelation, which is what makes it hold.
Complete, free, and nothing locked.
14 stories tagged family secrets
- Eleven Years of Thursdays by Helen Abbott — Family Drama, 27 parts, about 63 minutes, complete and free. Claire’s mother died in July. In September a landlord calls about an apartment eleven minutes from the house Claire grew up in, three months behind on rent, paid in cash the first week of the month for eleven years. Somebody is still living in it.
- My Father’s Sunday Calls by Helen Abbott — Family Drama, 3 episodes, about 5 minutes, complete and free. My father called me every Sunday at four o’clock for almost a year, and I never once picked up. Forty-one voicemails sat unplayed in my phone. Then he died on a Tuesday, and there were not going to be any more.
- My Husband’s Second Phone by Helen Abbott — Thriller, 5 episodes, about 17 minutes, complete and free. My daughter said the gym bag was buzzing. My husband’s phone was on the kitchen counter where it always is. There was a second one sewn into the lining, with a single contact saved, and a message that said don’t bring the kid.
- Sound Events by Theo Vance — Horror, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. My son talks in his sleep, and the app on my phone logs every sound it hears with a timestamp. It logged eleven of them on a night the room was empty.
- Keep, Auction, Wreck by Miles Redding — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. We empty houses after the funeral. At the Dunlavy place every object already wore a numbered index card in a dead woman’s printing, and at two in the afternoon the box wrote one for me: keep.
- Four Minutes Ten by Marcy Loeb — Thriller, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. Eleven open lines in four months, all of them from a house that burned down in 2022, and nobody on the other end ever spoke. It took me until the eleventh to work out that somebody else out there was hanging them up for him.
- The Flag on Box 1181 by Gwen Tarrant — Mystery, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. Eleven years box 1181 has taken mail and never sent any. Tuesday the flag was up, and the card inside forwards a dead man’s mail into town. Friday I have to carry the Postal Service’s confirmation back up that driveway.
- The Thursday Lid by Linda Marchetti — Family Drama, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. Every Wednesday I fill my father’s pill organizer, and this week Thursday’s lid came back full. He says he forgot. I counted the bottle. He does not forget.
- The Letter Opener by Doug Ostrowski — Family Drama, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. My mother-in-law is in rehab with a pinned hip and I am the one with her house key. I water the plants, run the taps, and bring in the mail. My husband will not set foot in the place. This week I open something that is not mine.
- Purple Dauber by Beth Callahan — Family Drama, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. My grandmother won’t drive after dark, so I take her to bingo, and lately she writes a check at the table between games. My mother wants the checkbook gone. I know where the money goes. I just haven’t said.
- New Earth Tonight by Rebecca Sorensen — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. My daughter calls me from the Moon every Sunday at seven, twenty minutes, with 2.6 seconds of lag. I taught science for thirty-one years, so I should have looked harder.
- Hello, Mother by Sean Mulroney — Humor, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I took one screen out of my mother’s kitchen window, and now her parrot lives in the neighbor’s oak. She video-calls him Sunday at six, so my brother, my sister and I bought an understudy.
- A Hair Sharp by Paige Oberlin — Fantasy, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. The old upright in Mr. Stockdale’s front room has not been played in nine years. When I tune it slowly, it plays anyway, and it always stops in the same place.
- Exactly As Written by Renee Dufresne — Fantasy, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. My great-aunt left me a tin box of recipe cards. When I cooked my grandmother’s pot roast exactly as written, she sat down at my table and asked for the end piece, and now my brother and sister want different cards.