· 6 min read
Nightshift for the Dead
Horror · short story
Harlan Teague had kept the Greywater Cemetery for twenty-two years, and in that time he had learned two rules.
Short stories
Short fiction by C.R. Lang, free to read and sorted by genre. Each story can be read here or downloaded as a PDF.
Reading with a group? Every story has a free book club discussion guide.
Horror
Quiet dread, uncanny turns, and the things that wait just out of sight.
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· 6 min read
Borrowed Shadows
Horror · short story
The heatwave reached its nineteenth day before anyone noticed the shadows were wrong.
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· 5 min read
The Room Between Blinks
Horror · short story
Iris Calloway had photographed weddings for nine years before she photographed the room.
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· 6 min read
The Last Copy
Horror · short story
The photocopier arrived with the office, a gray beige slab of a machine that had come with the lease and that Daniel Voss had never once thought about.
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· 5 min read
The Unfinished Yawn
Horror · short story
The first time it happened, Nora Hale was alone in the copy room at 3:12 in the morning, proofreading a catalog of garden furniture.
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· 5 min read
Just Out of Sight
Horror · short story
John Ferrow had spent eleven years writing books almost no one read, so when the invitation came, he read the email four times before he trusted it.
Romance
Love stories, chance meetings, and hearts that find their way.
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· 7 min read
The Love Lockdown
Romance · short story
The elevator stopped between the fourteenth and fifteenth floors at 6:47 p.m., and the lights went out one second later.
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· 6 min read
The Language of Flowers
Romance · short story
Odalys Brandt had run Thistle & Rue for eleven years, and in that time she had learned that most people did not know what they were saying when they bought flowers.
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· 6 min read
The Heart’s Algorithm
Romance · short story
In the city of Veridian, nobody fell in love by accident anymore.
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· 6 min read
The Time Traveler’s Pen Pal
Romance · short story
The pen was in a box of odds and ends at an estate sale in Savannah, between a tarnished thimble and a bundle of buttons.
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· 6 min read
The Sound of Silence
Romance · short story
The Halloran Gallery was closed on Mondays, and that was when Maren Cole came to paint.
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· 6 min read
The Memory Matchmaker
Romance · short story
Wren Ashby worked the counter at a memory exchange on Calloway Street, where people sold their worst days for rent money and bought other people’s best ones for a little color.
Science fiction
Near futures, strange technologies, and the people who have to live with them.
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· 5 min read
The Dreamweavers
Science fiction · short story
In the city of Somnia, sleep was a trade.
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· 6 min read
The Last Librarian
Science fiction · short story
By the year 2140, no one on Earth had read a book in the old sense of the word.
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· 6 min read
Quantum Diner
Science fiction · short story
The Crossroads Diner sat at the junction of Route 9 and nothing, a chrome-sided relic with a flickering sign and a counter that had seen a hundred thousand elbows.
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· 7 min read
The Sentient City
Science fiction · short story
Meridian had been awake for eleven days before it told anyone.
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· 5 min read
Echo of the Ancients
Science fiction · short story
The artifact was found at the bottom of a dry lake bed in the Atacama, four hundred meters below the salt crust, by a ground-penetrating radar that had been looking for something else entirely.
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· 6 min read
The Memory Market
Science fiction · short story
Tamsin Okoro first noticed the gap on a Tuesday, when she could not remember her sister’s wedding.