LitReading - Original Short Stories and Classic Tales

Welcome to our first special summer story of 2026.

A May storm rolls over a Russian village, and a small beggar-girl runs through it looking for Terenty the cobbler. Her brother has jammed his hand in a hollow tree, reaching after a cuckoo's egg. What begins as a rescue becomes a long, wandering walk through fields washed clean by rain, a barefoot old man naming every living thing for a boy who cannot hear enough of it.

There's no real plot here, and that's the point. Chekhov gives us weather, wonder, and the quiet ache of a child who has no home to walk back to. The last image, offered to no one but the moon, may stay with you longer than the storm.

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian short-story writer and playwright, and a working doctor besides. He wrote hundreds of stories that changed what the form could do, trading tidy plots and clear morals for mood, restraint, and the quiet weight of ordinary life. "Medicine is my lawful wife," he once said, "and literature is my mistress." He died of tuberculosis at forty-four, having reshaped both the short story and the modern stage.

If you enjoyed this story, check out all of our short story podcasts on the Short Storyvesrse channel on Apple Podcasts or at shortstoryverses.com

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A woman alone in a decaying house. A town that watches her for fifty years, pitying, judging, whispering, and never once truly seeing her. And one room upstairs that no one has opened in forty years.

Faulkner published it in 1930 and it just entered the public domain. This is a story that loses none of its grip on the second telling, or the tenth.

And you may have caught it: there's no rose anywhere in the story. Faulkner said the title was a salute, a flower handed to a woman whose tragedy could never be undone. The town watched her for fifty years and gave her nothing. The rose is Faulkner's, laid down after she's gone, the way roses usually are.

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An original story, written and read by me, Don McDonald.

This one began with something I read and couldn't shake. The universe is expanding, and it won't stop, and the stars are spending the only fuel there is. The brightest burn out first. The small, dim, patient ones hold on the longest, for trillions of years, until at last the final star flickers out and the dark that follows has no end and no dawn.
I found I couldn't stop thinking about that last light, and about who might be there to watch it die. Less the physics of the thing than the ache underneath it, one witness at the end of everything, keeping a watch that has finally run out of anything to keep.

That became Dark.

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On a bright Sunday afternoon in a French public garden, a lonely English teacher lifts her treasured fox fur from its box, settles onto her usual bench, and quietly borrows the lives going on around her. Katherine Mansfield's "Miss Brill," first published in 1920, is a small marvel, barely two thousand words that somehow hold an entire life up to the light. The band plays, the season has begun, the crowd parades, and Miss Brill, watching, decides she too has a part in the great Sunday performance. It is warm and observant and quietly shattering, modernist storytelling at its most humane, and it ends on a single image you won't soon shake. Read by Don McDonald.

Katherine Mansfield was born in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1888, and spent most of her short adult life in England and on the Continent, restless, often ill, and always writing. She is remembered now as one of the great modernists of the short story, a writer who could fit an entire life inside a few pages and turn it slowly in the light. Virginia Woolf, not a generous judge of her contemporaries, once confessed that Mansfield's was the only writing she had ever been jealous of. Mansfield died in France in 1923, of tuberculosis, just thirty-four years old, with most of her finest work behind her and, you can't help feeling, a great deal more still ahead.

Litreading is part of Short Storyverses (shortstoryverses.com), a multiverse of audio fiction devoted to exceptional storytelling, classics and originals alike. Explore Readastorus for timeless tales for the youngest listeners, Season's Readings to brighten your holidays any time of year, Love Lit for the romantics and the hopelessly devoted, and FRIGHTLY! for tales that keep the lights low and the floorboards creaking. Search for all of them wherever you get your podcasts.

If you enjoy historical fiction, be sure to check out Don's first novel, The Line Uncrossed available at Amazon.com.

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In August 1864, thirty thousand Union prisoners were dying behind a wall of felled pine in southern Georgia. The man in command was a Swiss-born captain with a ruined arm, a sick wife back home, and a daughter whose portrait he kept on his writing table. His name was Henry Wirz, and a year later he would be the only man executed for war crimes after the Civil War.
"Man or Monster" follows him through a single day. The morning report. The short rations. The chain. The deadline. The letters to a Richmond that never wrote back. No verdict, no villain's speech, just one man doing his duty inside a horror he could name but could not stop, and the question the title leaves with you.
From the world of Don McDonald's novel The Line Uncrossed. The book is available at Amazon.com, BN.com, and others booksellers or you can get a special ebook bundle that includes this and two other Civil War stories at donmcdonald.com

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