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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.
4 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.