Packets

24 Very Short Stories of Wonder, Horror, and Everything in Between

I remember, as a kid, reading Ray Bradbury in study hall, at Darlington Junior High School, one of those old brick fortresses with high ceilings and long windows and thick dark oak stair banisters, like something out of Hoosiers. It was in Indiana, not much different from the small-town Illinois that Bradbury grew up in.

But I digress: in study hall, if we’d finished our work, we could raise our hand – and with the teacher’s nod, vanish into the adjacent library stacks, there to slip out one of the Bradbury short story collections. R is for Rocket. S is for Space. I Sing the Body Electric. The Golden Apples of the Sun. A Medicine for Melancholy. I considered those books a kind of snack drawer, just there for the purpose of passing free time in study hall, and so I didn’t check them out and read them cover to cover – I just picked one up and read a story or two, whenever I was there.

There are short Ray Bradbury stories and long Ray Bradbury stories, and the short ones fit nicely into my study hall routine. I came to appreciate how Bradbury (and Asimov, et al) could pack a great story into just six or eight pages – and when I became a writer myself , I also began writing some short ones and some long ones. Here, I've gathered up a collection of stories that are all under 2,500 words, in the Bradbury tradition.

I like the result, and I hope the Gentle Reader does as well. There’s a wide variety: stories of time travel, AI and robots, some whimsical, some serious. Some fantasy. Some horror.

This collection is a kind of celebration of those long-ago Indiana school days, when the bell was yet to ring and I sat there quietly passing the time, as Ray kept me company…