A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
Recurring elements in the story’s premise.
An orphan crosses the country and comes back to the town where his mother is buried.
A merchant’s self-righteous tale about an orphan’s mother forces two unhappy village women to consider the limits of obedience.
On Christmas Eve, a nine-year-old apprentice writes home for rescue from hunger, beatings, and sleepless work in Moscow.
A young joiner on trial for a double murder rejects an insanity defense and demands judgment on his own account.
At a Twelfth Night dinner, a guest asks how the household’s quiet companion came to live there and what her place has cost her.
After forty years of silence, an aging woman walks across Normandy to see the son she was forced to surrender after a secret affair.
A lonely woman adopts an orphan for love, then begins to fear the silent young man growing up inside her house.
When an orphan’s kitten vanishes in Ulthar, every cat in the village leaves home for the same night.
A wet and hungry prankster turns up at a lonely doctor's door during a storm.
A Swiss orphan torn between gratitude and love must reckon with a revolution gathering in her valley.
10 stories
