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A police superintendent’s idea of justice changes each time a biting dog seems to belong to someone more powerful.
An ailing bank manager meets a petitioner whose helplessness proves more exhausting than any official problem.
A magistrate questions a peasant who cannot understand why taking one railway nut for a fishing weight is a crime.
A landowner discovers the exact price of being noticed in a government office.
A peasant asks every authority he can find to free his convicted brother, but no one can tell him where justice actually resides.
Two childhood friends reunite warmly at a railway station until one learns the other’s official rank.
In a weary provincial courtroom, a peasant faces a murder charge while officials move through justice as if following a machine.
A school director promises a disabled teacher a lifeline, then discovers how quickly principle yields to well-connected pressure.
Two men look up at a flock of starlings, and an entire town manufactures a crisis around their gaze.
A ticket inspector vows to reform, but each attempt to perform his duty only makes a sick passenger’s night worse.
While Easter bells summon the city outside, an impoverished clerk spends another holiday night trapped in a smoky office.
A pompous official receives a tribute from his subordinates whose solemn meaning may not survive the trip home.
A cattle merchant crosses Russia by freight train, paying at every stop while schedules, regulations, and neglect consume his profit.
One accidental sneeze sends a timid clerk into an escalating panic over rank, manners, and official displeasure.
A gifted speechmaker is hired to honor a dead civil servant, but his polished tribute proves more reusable than anyone expected.
A provincial household prepares for a high-ranking uncle whose summer visit unsettles its routines, loyalties, and ideas about cultivated life.
On the long road back to her village school, an exhausted teacher confronts the life that work and isolation have reduced to routine.
Three friends invent time travel, claim prehistoric America as a nation, and discover that founding a country is harder than reaching the past.
In a future where nations rent battlefields and fight by remote control, an untested pilot is handed three warships at once.
A road trip through Italy becomes a tour of suspicious officials, theatrical hospitality, and the small absurdities of a country under Fascism.
A wealthy idler devotes himself to earning the red ribbon he has coveted since childhood, despite having done nothing to deserve it.
A newly appointed State Councillor scatters favors across Paris until one generous recommendation threatens his carefully polished importance.
A lone prospector crosses Venus’s deadliest desert while strict cash-only services deny him the supplies he needs to survive.
23 stories
