A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
How the story is told.
An orphan girl races through an approaching storm to find a kindly cobbler who can free her brother from a hollow tree.
Two peasants keep vigil beside a shrouded stranger while a nervous pilgrim discovers that faith offers little protection from fear.
A conscientious husband hires a midwife by night, but his rigid sense of fairness turns every ordinary exchange into an ordeal.
A bored husband reads his wife’s rambling letter and lectures her ignorance, exposing a contradiction in what he expects from women.
A retired lieutenant spends a sweltering day condemning the town’s idle natives while his own hours slip away.
After an opera, a sixteen-year-old tries to turn two admirers into the material for her first grand romantic sorrow.
Once a year, a lazy village drunk becomes an exacting artist whose work belongs to an entire community.
An impoverished landowner lectures a promising guest on aristocratic superiority while his daughters wait for a chance to speak.
Five children turn a forbidden late-night game of loto into a small world of greed, vanity, kindness, quarrels, and sudden sleep.
Escorted through autumn mud, a nameless tramp describes the free Siberian life he hopes awaits him beyond prison.
On Easter night, a ferry monk mourns the gentle hymn writer whose words the celebrating monastery never learned to value.
At an Epiphany fête, three prosperous old men recall what severe cold meant before wealth protected them from it.
A toddler’s first walk beyond the nursery turns ordinary streets, strangers, animals, and sounds into an overwhelming new universe.
Beneath the stars of the steppe, shepherds and an overseer trade legends of treasure and wonder what happiness might be.
A minor journalist turns one night’s writing into a sacred ordeal, forcing his household to serve the drama of his creativity.
A boy approaches confession with fear, rivalry, hunger, and a vivid hope that absolution will make him new.
While servants play cards in a dark coach-house, a lodger dies nearby and an old tale turns a child’s unease into terror.
A wet graveyard walk leads to an actor drinking beside the neglected grave of the man who shaped and ruined his life.
An impatient scholar waits to dismiss his late young secretary, then finds that their digressions are the part of the evening he values most.
A man tries to explain why the ordinary habits that once irritated him become forgivable when they belong to the woman he loves.
A grieving cabman carries strangers through the snowy city, searching among them for someone willing to hear about his son.
A rational man recalls three ordinary sights that, in solitude and darkness, became sources of overpowering terror.
A sleepy family turns the last evening before Lent into an earnest campaign of lessons, tea, ritual, and still more food.
While Easter bells summon the city outside, an impoverished clerk spends another holiday night trapped in a smoky office.
