What God Can Do With 57 Cents

(author unknown) A little girl stood near a small church from which she had been turned away because it was "too crowded." "I can't go to Sunday School," she sobbed to the pastor as he walked by. Seeing her shabby, unkempt appearance, the pastor guessed the reason and, taking her by the hand, took her …

The House Faces North

(by William J. Rudd) The Smith family (unrelated to any Smiths I have met) knew that their historic family farmhouse faced North. It was a deeply held conviction handed down from one generation to the next as if it were right out of The Good Book. They and most of the people close to them …

The Stand

(by Bill Blood) It was a grey, dreary day, and thunderheads were gathering on the horizon. Charlie could see his neighbor's cows grazing in the pasture in the distance as he sat and drank hot, black coffee. He had tried to sleep last night, but sleep had eluded him. When he was done with his …

Charlie’s Bear

(by Bill Blood) Charlie was the only one left now. All of his hunting buddies from the police force had passed away over the years. They were all retired cops from Anchorage Alaska. Charlie still made the hunt each year, if nothing else for the memories that he and his buddies made in this little …

Reggie

(author unknown) They told me the big black Lab's name was Reggie, as I looked at him lying in his pen. The shelter was clean, no-kill, and the people really friendly. I'd only been in the area for six months, but everywhere I went in the small college town, people were welcoming and open. Everyone …

A Collapse of Horses

(by Brian Evenson) (The unnamed narrator is obsessed by his confusion about two seemingly unrelated things: the house in which he convalesces from a workplace accident, and a group of horses he’s seen lying down in a nearby paddock.) I am certain nobody in my family survived. I am certain they burned, that their faces …

The Speed Trap

(by Frank W. Brennan) (Are you a risk taker?) Thirty, he thought, the speed limit was forty-five. His hand barely glided atop the wind as it hung out the car window. His mother wasn’t a risk taker. Not like him. He was the boy who would trade his entire childhood if it meant being old …

Patient Zero

(by Tananarive Due, adapted for this article) (A ten-year old boy has been quarantined for having a strange virus that has infected the world. While his caretakers diminish in number, he questions the world around him and what is happening.) September 19 The picture came! Veronica tapped on my glass and woke me up, and …

Sticks

(by George Saunders) (Life at the pole) Every year Thanksgiving night we flocked out behind Dad as he dragged the Santa suit to the road and draped it over a kind of crucifix he'd built out of metal pole in the yard. Super Bowl week the pole was dressed in a jersey and Rod's helmet …

The Gecko

(by J.B. Stamper) (Howard’s solution to his cockroach problem had an unexpected result.) There was a young man in his twenties, who moved into a new apartment in New York City. The night he moved in, he was lying awake in bed when he heard strange noises coming from his kitchen. When he turned on …