📖 Short stories

Emily works at a cafe. She makes coffee and talks to customers.

Mia works at a café. Today is very busy, but she helps many people and feels happy.

Lila travels to Rome with her friend Mark, who shows her that the best parts of a trip aren't just the big sights—but the small, unexpected moments.

Mai shows her friend Lila around a Vietnamese market, and Lila learns why Vietnam is called the heaven of food.

Lila travels by train with her aunt, discovering China's vast size and beautiful places through rolling hills, flower fields, and a panda reserve.

Max struggles to speak English. He makes a website for shadowing practice, and it helps others too.

Mr. Lee, an old man, exercises every morning to stay healthy. A young girl named Lila notices and learns his secret.

Lila is nervous to play Juliet in her school's *Romeo and Juliet*. Her friend Kai, as Romeo, helps her find confidence—and they learn something about friendship.

Lila digs through her dad's garage to find a World Cup ball for her class. But the box holds a secret that changes what 'history' means.

A woman waits for a first date at her usual café, her nerves fraying when he doesn't show. But the barista, who knows her order by heart, has a secret that could change everything.

Lila travels to Paris with a smudged postcard from her mom. Can she find the café where her mother wrote, 'Meet me here'?

Lila practices English by shadowing a mysterious voice on an old recorder—but the voice isn't who she thinks. Tomorrow, her abuela arrives.

Lan writes to her friend Hoa, who's been away, to share her plan to use a new ESL app to improve their English conversations. She mentions their old study days and asks for a voice message.

With an investor arriving on Friday, the owner of a struggling bookbinding workshop pays to have everything fixed, polished and repainted. But the visitor is looking for something very different.

Roofers repairing storm damage in Harwick have found a homemade device that has quietly been measuring the town's weather for years. Residents think they know who built it.

Ruth writes to her detective-mad old friend because someone has been letting themselves into her cottage while she is at work. Nothing is ever stolen. Things are only ever fixed.

At her father's seventieth birthday, a woman finds an old job offer folded inside a family album, and finally asks the question she has avoided for thirty years.

A year of failed attempts at a family recipe, a lot of wasted chicken, and one simple question from the only person who knew the answer.

She has crossed the same cold stretch of sea more than six thousand times. Captain Lena Sorvik talks about storms, a midnight wedding, and the one skill she has never learned.

Jonas has a job interview in an hour, and his flatmate has locked herself in the bathroom with his only good shirt.

The tide is rising fast, Mira's phone has no signal, and someone below the cliff is calling for help.

Bo the frog loves to sing, but his songs keep the whole pond awake. One night, a hungry visitor comes to the water.

Your best sweater can stay warm and soft for many winters. Learn five easy habits that protect it.

Part 1 of 5. On her first day at a new school in Dublin, a girl takes the wrong bus and meets a boy who doesn't say a word.

Part 2 of 5. The silent boy by the window always draws in a black notebook. Today he shows her one page.

Part 3 of 5. A folded note in her locker says only 'Music room. Four.' There is no name, just a small drawing.

Part 4 of 5. The concert is on Friday. She is going to sing for three hundred people, and Cian has a secret about his father.

Part 5 of 5. The night of the concert. The hall is bigger, the lights are brighter, and Cian's father is sitting in the front row.

Part 1 of 5. At 2 a.m., a young man working nights at a station's lost property office receives an old suitcase with his own name on the label.

Part 2 of 5. An old woman in a red coat comes to see the mysterious suitcase. She doesn't want to take it. She only wants to look at Theo's face.

Part 3 of 5. Security cameras show who really left the suitcase, and a secret is hidden in its lining: eleven letters that were never sent.

Part 4 of 5. Theo shows his mother an old photograph, and she finally tells him what his grandfather once said about a night at the station.

Part 5 of 5. Theo must decide what to give Iris after forty-five years: eleven letters of apology, or what is still hidden on three old rolls of film.

Part 1 of 4. Museum archivist Nadia Brandt removes the frame from a donated harbour painting and finds a second, hidden signature that no biography mentions.

Part 2 of 4. Nadia visits the donor, a retired teacher living among unlabelled canvases, and learns who really painted the harbours.

Part 3 of 4. Nadia takes her proposal to the museum director, who has built his whole career on the name Halloway. He has a folder he has kept locked away for twenty-five years.

Part 4 of 4. The museum board must vote on whether to change twenty-three labels, and what that will cost. Margit Halloway finally gets her name back, or does she?

Grandpa Leo is seventy-two and very slow. When the big fast boys laugh at him in the park, he has one trick left.

Mia calls home on Saturday evening. Her dad is cooking for the first time in years, and something is making a very loud noise.

Hana is travelling alone in Lisbon. She writes to her friend Sam about a blue door, a tiny garden and a new friend with four cats.

Every day at one o'clock, an old man orders two coffees and drinks only one. The new waitress wants to know who the second cup is for.

Three years ago, a doctor said 'you have to exercise'. Expensive shoes and a big plan lasted eleven days. What worked was much, much smaller.

Jun downloads an app so he will stop forgetting his mother's birthday. Soon it starts reminding him of things he would rather forget.

A teenager's short film of a hidden mountain lake brings hundreds of unexpected visitors to the tiny village of Valdorno in a single weekend.

Walter Brand has tuned more than twenty-five thousand pianos in forty-one years, but he has never owned one. He explains why.

She only wears grey, black and, on brave days, navy. Today she bought a bright orange coat, and now she has to decide whether to wear it to work.

An old miller promises his mill to whichever of his three sons brings him the most valuable thing by the next full moon.

A decade of remote work, four jobs and one laptop fire later, a home worker realises the commute never disappeared. It just moved into her head.

For twenty years she has helped nurses, pilots and students sleep better. By her own admission, Dr Amara Kell is a terrible sleeper herself.

Somewhere over the sea, a photograph slips out of a sleeping stranger's book. The woman laughing in it has Lena's face, and it was taken thirty years ago.

A sourdough starter kept alive since 1912 disappears from a locked room in Elmbridge, and the whole town comes to the rescue.

Two years after skipping his brother's wedding, Daniel finally writes to explain where he really was that day, and why.

Forty-five minutes before the end-of-year exams, a panicking teacher discovers the papers are missing. The school secretary does not look up from her keyboard.