A name you know. A mood you’re in. Ten minutes to yourself. Start anywhere.
The narrator’s attitude toward the story.
Two friends promise to send a sign after death, and a meeting on a San Francisco street tests their pact.
A wounded lieutenant seeks his unit near Stone’s River, but the battlefield has changed around him.
A Union picket officer fears a corpse more than the enemy near his position.
A shoemaker accepts a forty-mile running bet while three men follow close behind in a cart.
An abandoned Vermont farmhouse draws three neighbors who want to test its haunted reputation.
An inventor claims that machines can think, then a visitor hears a struggle inside his workshop.
Identical twins share more than a face as one brother’s engagement turns dangerous.
Lost in a California forest, Halpin Frayser dreams of a deadly encounter with someone he knows.
An exhausted traveler checks into an Atlanta hotel and wakes to find his room occupied.
A hunter spends the night in an abandoned gulch cabin and hears a struggle he cannot see.
A stranger at a desert campfire tells how four prospectors were trapped in a cave thirty years earlier.
Two eager parents try to trap a schoolteacher into marrying their daughter, but their sacred evidence is less reliable than they think.
Two peasants keep vigil beside a shrouded stranger while a nervous pilgrim discovers that faith offers little protection from fear.
An ailing bank manager meets a petitioner whose helplessness proves more exhausting than any official problem.
A conscientious husband hires a midwife by night, but his rigid sense of fairness turns every ordinary exchange into an ordeal.
An indecent antique passes from one grateful professional to another as each admirer searches for a respectable way to lose it.
After an opera, a sixteen-year-old tries to turn two admirers into the material for her first grand romantic sorrow.
A sober, pious man steals a midnight drink, swallows paraffin instead, and spends the night preparing for death.
Once a year, a lazy village drunk becomes an exacting artist whose work belongs to an entire community.
A barber learns midway through a free haircut that poverty has cost him the woman he loves.
Two schoolboys arrive home for Christmas with maps, a pistol, and a secret plan to cross Siberia and seek gold in America.
Five children turn a forbidden late-night game of loto into a small world of greed, vanity, kindness, quarrels, and sudden sleep.
A village choirmaster drills his singers for months to impress a visiting count who may not care to hear them.
A toddler’s first walk beyond the nursery turns ordinary streets, strangers, animals, and sounds into an overwhelming new universe.
