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Small town stories
A small town is useful in a short story because everybody already knows everybody, so nothing has to be explained and every arrival is noticed. These use that.
A community garden with a rule book and a grudge. A volunteer fire company with a duty roster and a sign out sheet. A county dispatcher covering six hundred square miles alone. A rural mail route where a flag going up is an event.
Three episodes each, complete, free to read with no account.
12 stories tagged small town
- The Seven Second Delay by Nadine Greer — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I host the overnight show alone, midnight to five, with seven seconds of delay between me and the transmitter. The same man gets through every night, and what he wants is my shift.
- Every Tuesday at Station Two by Cass Ewing — Horror, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. Our company meets every Tuesday to check the pump, raise the ladder and eat badly. Pack six keeps coming back logged as inspected in my handwriting on nights I went home early, and one of our runs is still open.
- 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 Tomatoes Were His by Ada Rowe — Romance, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I inherited my aunt’s garden plot, thirty dollars of dirt, and the man in plot eleven who says the tomato hanging on my side of the fence is his. He is wrong. He is also the only person in this town who knew her.
- 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.
- Four Minutes Fast by Megan Pruitt — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 9 minutes, complete and free. For six Thursdays a man sat in booth four for eleven minutes, paid for his pie with a 1994 five, and left. I knew who he was. I knew where he was going when he left. He didn’t.
- Keep Her Company by Gail Ferraro — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I teach a Tuesday night class on living with the talking box in your kitchen. This fall, one of the boxes started coming to class.
- An Inch a Week by Jim Hadley — Science Fiction, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. I pay eleven dollars an acre for an inch of rain a week, and the gauges swear I get it. So why is my milo knee-high and dying while my neighbor’s, who never paid a dime, stands waist-high and green?
- Let the Record Show by Joan Pemberton — Humor, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. Nobody else wanted to be secretary of our homeowners association, so I said yes, and I took the minutes word for word because the bylaws said to. Our president makes jokes. Our vice president seconds everything. We are now paving the duck pond.
- Slow, Slow, Quick, Quick by Ron Esposito — Humor, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. My daughter signed me up for ballroom dancing without asking. My partner is a retired drill sergeant who counts like the room is on fire, and I have eight Tuesdays to find a way out.
- Feet on the White by Calvin Truax — Fantasy, 3 episodes, about 11 minutes, complete and free. When I shove my stop sign up at a speeding car, the whole street freezes for thirty seconds. Now the city has a camera on my corner, and it keeps losing exactly thirty seconds.
- Thirty Days, Not a Month by Lorraine Petty — Fantasy, 3 episodes, about 10 minutes, complete and free. On the first of every month, a young man lays his hands on my father’s glass counter and pawns a little more of his luck to make rent. A man who buys from me is waiting for it to forfeit.