New Tales Told – Original Short Stories

He has four words. He's had them for forty-two years. He's said them in the car, he's said them in the shower with the water running, and he still can't get the stress to fall where it belongs.Now the seatbelt sign is on, the descent has started, and his brother is running out of days. In his jacket pocket is a voicemail he has never played.There's a rule pilots follow below ten thousand feet. Nothing gets said that doesn't need saying. He always thought that sounded like a good way to live.An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.Please be sure to follow on your podcast service and if you enjoyed the story please leave a five star review or rating.For more short fiction podcasts visit shortstoryverses.com

Dr. Nathan Cole measures water for a living. It's quiet work, gauges and spreadsheets, the slow arithmetic of things that don't change much. Then a reservoir gains four inches overnight with no rain, no inflow, no explanation, and gives them back by morning. Everyone blames the sensor. The sensor is fine. What follows is the worst thing a careful man can discover, which is that he's been measuring the right thing all along.If you like short stories, there's a multiverse of them at shortstoryverses.com.And do me one favor. Hit follow. It costs you nothing, it takes a second, and it's the whole reason a show like this keeps going.

There is a job nobody warns you about. After the dying comes the paperwork, the hold music, the strangers in call centers who need proof that she is gone.For two years she was her mother’s caregiver. Now she is her mother’s administrator. She makes lists. She keeps folders. She is very good at this.Then she reaches the bottom of the last statement.An original story, written and read by Don McDonald.Explore our multiverses of short fiction at shortstoryverses.com.

Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.He carries it home and records his diary each night, and the machine hands him back to himself, the nearest thing to company he has. Then the wax starts holding something he never put there.For more short stories, visit ShortStoryverses.com

Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.The card came to the forge two days later.The blacksmith was no duelist. He was, however, a man who had spent his life learning where something hard gives.From Short Storyverses. More at shortstoryverses.com.

An obituary arrives in the mail, folded in thirds, no note, no return address, and the creases are sharp enough to cut with.Roy Kittleson has not seen the man named in it since a Friday in 1986, and he has his reasons, and none of them are good. He drives up anyway. Three hours, most of it flat.He has rehearsed nothing. He is counting on grief to arrive on its own.“The Wrong Funeral,” is an original story written and read by Don McDonald from ShortStoryverses.com.

Welcome to Season Two of New Tale's Told, a collection of my original short stories. I've spent the summer creating some unique tales for you. I hope a few of them bring you a bit of pleasure.The Garden was finished before anyone in it was born. The rain arrives on schedule, in the amount that has been decided. The manual has never been improved on.Nobody touches anybody. Children learn it early, with the short rod, because correcting is cheapest when they're small.Sela is twenty-two and has never had a low year. When the tremor takes the hands of the old man who grades pears beside her, she stands up and says, "I'll take that." Nothing forbids it. There is even a provision.Two hundred and nine times. Over twenty months.Somebody is keeping the number.“The Garden’s Wall” started with a question I couldn’t put down. What would a society look like if it decided, sincerely and on the evidence, that compassion was a defect to be bred out? Not a cruel place. A reasonable one, where the punishment is measured, the reasoning is sound, and nobody enjoys any part of it.The answer turned out to be a garden, and a wall nobody built, and a gate that opens outward, and forty-one people put through it in a single lifetime.If you enjoy these stories, please check out my many short story universes at shortstoryverses.com

Enjoy a Summer Bonus Episode Before the New Season in SeptemberNora has come up to Lake Sabbath to do one hard, practical thing — close the old family house for good, and mark what will be sold. She means to stay a single night. But a house keeps its own memory: the key still on its nail, the drawer that sticks, a boat with a name. And a long, unhurried summer evening on still water can ask more of a person than they came prepared to answer. Short Storyverses is our multiverse of audio fiction — where each show spins in its own orbit but shares one sky. Classics and originals on LitReading, suspense on FRIGHTLY!, romance on Love Lit, comedy on HumorUs, new voices on New Tales Told, and tales for the youngest listeners too. Short enough for a commute, a walk, or the quiet before sleep. Press play at shortstoryverses.com.