LitReading - Classic Short Stories and Timeless Tales

Wall Street, a spring morning at the turn of the century. The ticker is running hot, the telephone won’t quit, and Harvey Maxwell, broker, is handling it all like a man with springs where his heart should be. His clerk thinks the boss is slipping. His stenographer has something on her mind. Then a window opens, and somebody on the Exchange starts clubbing the stuffing out of Union Pacific.

O. Henry at full gallop, in a nine-minute comedy from The Four Million, read by Don McDonald.

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

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There is a job nobody warns you about. After the dying comes the paperwork, the hold music, the strangers in call centers who need proof that she is gone.

For two years she was her mother’s caregiver. Now she is her mother’s administrator. She makes lists. She keeps folders. She is very good at this.

Then she reaches the bottom of the last statement.

An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.

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Every house party has a guest who knows too much.

A mild little man named Cornelius Appin has spent seventeen years on one problem. He believes he's solved it: he has taught a cat to speak. The company around Lady Blemley's tea table does not believe him — and that, as it happens, is the last comfortable moment anyone in the house will enjoy.

Pour yourself some tea. Mind the saucer.

Saki was the pen name of Hector Hugh Munro (1870–1916), the sharpest wit of the Edwardian age. Born in Burma and raised in Devon by a grandmother and two aunts he could not abide, he became a foreign correspondent before turning his pen on polite society. He borrowed his pen name from the cupbearer in the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. When war came in 1914, he enlisted as a private at forty-three and refused a commission; he was killed by a sniper in France on November 14, 1916. His last words were “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

“Tobermory” first appeared in the Westminster Gazette in 1909 and was collected in The Chronicles of Clovis in 1911.

Read by Don McDonald. LitReading is part of the Short Storyverses network. shortstoryverses.com

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.

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Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.

He carries it home and records his diary each night, and the machine hands him back to himself, the nearest thing to company he has. Then the wax starts holding something he never put there.

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A farmer lies dead in his bed with a rope around his neck. That morning his wife sat in the kitchen, pleating her apron, and said she slept through it.

So the men come out to the farmhouse: the sheriff, the county attorney, and the neighbor who found her. They search the cold rooms for something that will hold up in court. Two of their wives ride along to gather a few things for the woman in the county jail. Nobody expects much from them.

The kitchen is a mess of unfinished chores and small things left where they fell.

Susan Glaspell once covered a murder case like this as a young reporter in Iowa, and it stayed with her. She wrote the story in 1917, and a century later it still hasn't loosened its grip.

This is a story from the archives recently remastered.
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