A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
Two friends promise to send a sign after death, and a meeting on a San Francisco street tests their pact.
A tenant sees the former owner of his rented house in a room with no exit.
A soldier survives an ambush on the frontier and returns to a fort where no one accepts his account.
A man hears a familiar tapping in a room where no one else can be.
A physician tests a friend’s fear of an inherited watch and sees how serious it is.
A hunter dies after an attack by something his companion cannot see.
A rancher claims he killed his Chinese worker over a simple task, but a local witness tells another story.
An exhausted traveler checks into an Atlanta hotel and wakes to find his room occupied.
Two travelers shelter from a storm in a house whose owners disappeared years earlier.
A stranger at a desert campfire tells how four prospectors were trapped in a cave thirty years earlier.
A writer tends a wounded widower beside his wife’s coffin and listens as he tries to explain a despair he cannot explain to himself.
A solitary landowner explains how love entered his friends’ household and remained unspoken while duty and hesitation consumed the years.
A driver recalls how his little sister carried a village’s money through a forest after robbers attacked their father.
On a Black Sea steamer, a disillusioned landowner recounts how his worship of a beautiful neighbor drew him across Europe.
A visit to his brother’s long-dreamed-of estate forces a traveler to ask what private happiness costs those left outside it.
At a remote Siberian ferry, a hardened exile tells a homesick young man that survival depends on wanting nothing.
While servants play cards in a dark coach-house, a lodger dies nearby and an old tale turns a child’s unease into terror.
On a remote railway line, an engineer’s late-night argument leads him to confess the human cost of his youthful nihilism.
A merchant’s self-righteous tale about an orphan’s mother forces two unhappy village women to consider the limits of obedience.
A boastful young lover challenges a lawyer to argue him out of marriage—and discovers how quickly conviction can yield to eloquence.
On the road to an inquest, a magistrate challenges a doctor to explain a healthy woman’s precisely foretold death.
A dignified old gardener answers a debate about justice with a legend about a town’s extraordinary faith in human goodness.
A teacher terrified of disorder hides behind rules and routines, until a lively woman and her defiant brother disturb his sealed existence.
While showing an architect a condemned tenement, a landlord recalls how one family’s ordinary poverty became a rapid descent.
