Ririro.com - Short Stories

"The Shadows on the Wall" is a gothic short story in which three sisters — Caroline, Rebecca, and Emma — gather in the family home following the sudden death of their youngest brother Edward. As dread and unspoken accusation circulate among them, a shadow resembling Edward begins appearing each night on the study wall. Their brother Henry, a physician who argued violently with Edward the night bef...

"The Lady, or the Tiger?" is a short story built around one of literature's most agonising unanswered questions. In a semi-barbaric kingdom, a king dispenses justice through a brutal trial: the accused must choose between two doors — behind one waits a ravenous tiger, behind the other a bride. When the king's own daughter discovers her low-born lover has been condemned to the arena, she secretly l...

"The Minister's Black Veil" is a short story by Nathaniel Hawthorne in which the Reverend Mr. Hooper arrives one Sunday wearing a mysterious black veil he refuses to remove — ever. His congregation recoils, friendships dissolve, and his betrothed Elizabeth pleads with him to explain, only to be met with cryptic words about secret sin and universal guilt. As Hooper ages into Father Hooper, the veil...

Macbeth, the short story retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy, begins on a desolate heath where two victorious generals encounter three witches whose prophecies ignite a deadly hunger for power. When Macbeth learns he is destined to be King of Scotland, his ruthlessly ambitious wife pushes him past the point of no return. Murder follows murder — a trusted king, a loyal friend, an innocent family — y...

A Modest Proposal is Jonathan Swift's devastating satirical essay, narrated by a coolly rational economist who presents a stomach-turning solution to Irish poverty: selling one-year-old infants as food for the wealthy. With each numbered "advantage" and calculated figure, the narrator's cheerful logic grows more monstrous — and Swift's fury at English colonial exploitation of Ireland grows impossi...

"The Story of an Hour" is a short story by Kate Chopin that follows Louise Mallard, a woman with a heart condition, as she processes the sudden news of her husband's death in a railroad accident. Alone in her room, gazing at a spring sky through an open window, she feels something unexpected rising within her — not grief, but a fierce, almost terrifying sense of freedom. What unfolds in that singl...

"The Lost Ghost" is a short ghost story told by Rhoda Meserve to her curious neighbour, recounting the years she boarded with two gentle sisters in a house with a terrible secret. A small, pale child in a nightgown appears without warning, hands purple with cold, repeating the same heartbreaking words: "I can't find my mother." As the story of the child's fate slowly surfaces — neglect, abandonmen...

Hamlet, the short story retelling of Shakespeare's great tragedy, follows Prince Hamlet of Denmark as he uncovers a devastating truth: his father was murdered by his own uncle, Claudius, who has since seized the throne and married Hamlet's mother. Torn between grief, doubt, and a deep reluctance to take a life, Hamlet delays his revenge while those around him — Ophelia, Polonius, his mother — are...

The Lady of the Fountain is an Arthurian legend in which Owen, a knight of King Arthur's court, sets out to find a mysterious black knight who guards a magical fountain deep in an enchanted forest. After defeating the knight in battle, Owen falls in love with the beautiful countess who rules the fountain's lands — and chooses to stay, neglecting his duty to Arthur and his promise to return. Loyalt...

"The Jogi's Punishment" is a short story by Andrew Lang set in the ancient city of Rahmatabad, where a rajah places his trust in a seemingly holy hermit — a jogi whose piety masks dangerous obsession. When the rajah's beautiful, sharp-witted daughter secretly visits the shrine and sees through the jogi's desires, his wounded pride turns to calculated vengeance. He convinces the rajah that his own...

"The Fairy Nurse" is a short Irish fairy tale in which a farmer's wife near Coolgarrow is spirited away in the night by fairy folk, leaving her husband and children behind in grief. The story unfolds through a brave midwife drawn blindfolded into a fairy rath, who glimpses the captive woman and learns of a desperate chance for rescue — a moonlit roadside encounter where one man must hold fast agai...

"Abdullah the Fisherman and Abdullah the Merman" follows a desperately poor fisherman who, after forty days of empty nets, hauls up a mysterious creature from the sea — a merman who offers him a life-changing pact: daily fruit for baskets of precious jewels. As Abdullah's fortune transforms his world, a deeper bond forms between the two men, drawing the fisherman beneath the waves into a breathtak...

"The Story Of A Very Bad Boy" is a short story by Andrew Lang following Touéno-Bouéno, a lazy French village boy whose mother doubts he could ever catch a wolf by the tail — until one day, hiding in a hollow tree, he does exactly that. What follows is a chain of audacious schemes: a wolf sold as a prized ram, a fake resurrection whistle, and a sack tossed into a river. Each time the farmers think...

The Shifty Lad is a free short story set in the land of Erin, following a widow's son who chooses thievery as his trade despite his mother's warnings that he will "hang at the bridge of Dublin." Apprenticed to the notorious Black Gallows Bird, the boy quickly surpasses his master in cunning — stealing sheep through clever misdirection, outwitting an entire royal court, and ultimately dispatching t...

"The False Prince And The True" is a short story by Andrew Lang in which a young nobleman faces execution after striking the royal prince during a tennis dispute. With his trial just days away and no legal defence in sight, a mysterious old woman offers him a lifeline — but her price is marriage. What begins as a desperate bargain unravels a web of hidden births, secret royal marriages, and a deca...

"The Rich Brother And The Poor Brother" is a short story in which a disinherited man, cast out for a secret marriage, spends years in grinding poverty while his brother inherits everything. When a greedy sister-in-law drags the family into a bitter legal dispute over a gift of unfinished houses, the poor brother's journey to court spirals into a chain of fresh accusations — a poisoned onion, a tai...

"Sun, Moon, and Talia" is a dark fairy tale short story in which young Talia falls into an enchanted sleep after a prophecy about flax comes grimly true. She awakens to find herself a mother of twins — Sun and Moon — without understanding how. When the king who fathered the children returns, his jealous queen sets a deadly trap: she orders the children killed and Talia burned alive. Talia's fate h...

"The Rose Elf" is a short story by Hans Christian Andersen in which a tiny elf, small enough to sleep inside a rose petal, accidentally witnesses a brutal murder when a young man is killed by his beloved's jealous brother. Trapped in a world of grief and secrecy, the elf carries the terrible truth to the grieving girl through her dreams. As sorrow slowly claims her, the jasmine she tends over her...

"The Schoolboy's Story" by Charles Dickens unfolds through the voice of a sharp-tongued schoolboy recounting the strange fate of Old Cheeseman — a lonely, mild-mannered figure who grew up at the school as an orphan, became a despised Latin master, and was branded a traitor by his fellow pupils. Sustained only by the quiet loyalty of Jane, the school's wardrobe woman, Cheeseman endures mockery and...

Nobody's Story follows an unnamed labouring man living beside a great, ever-flowing river — a symbol of time's indifferent current — who works tirelessly, raises his family in poverty, and asks only for education, fair governance, and simple human dignity. When the powerful "Bigwig family" quarrels endlessly over politics and doctrine, his children fall to ignorance, his neighbours die in a pestil...

"The Child's Story" by Charles Dickens follows a lone traveller on a magic journey through life, meeting companions at every stage — a joyful child, a learning boy, a young man in love, a busy father, and finally an old man who only remembers. Each companion is lost in turn as the seasons of the wood deepen from spring green to autumn gold. Dickens captures the tenderness and quiet grief of time p...

"The Christmas Tree and the Wedding" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky opens at a children's New Year's ball where a narrator quietly observes the powerful and self-important Julian Mastakovich. Among the guests is an eleven-year-old girl with a dowry of three hundred thousand rubles — and Mastakovich is already counting. What the narrator witnesses in a quiet side room is deeply unsettling: a grown man's col...

The Curse of Yig draws readers into the dust-choked plains of 1889 Oklahoma, where an ethnologist's search for snake-god folklore leads to a locked asylum cell — and something inside it that defies easy explanation. At the story's heart are Walker and Audrey Davis, Arkansas homesteaders whose fragile peace unravels when Audrey unknowingly destroys a nest of rattlesnakes sacred to Yig, the half-hum...

"A Ghost" is a chilling short story in which the elderly Marquis de la Tour-Samuel confesses a 56-year-old secret: a single errand to a dead woman's locked room that left him permanently scarred by fear. Sent to retrieve private letters from a grieving friend's abandoned château, he encounters a tall woman in white who asks him, in a soft and plaintive voice, to comb her ice-cold hair. What unsett...

"Young Goodman Brown" follows a young Puritan man who leaves his wife Faith one night to walk a dark forest road outside Salem village — and meets a sinister stranger bearing a serpent-carved staff. As the journey deepens, Brown recognises faces he trusts most: his minister, his deacon, his childhood teacher. At a hellish midnight gathering, even Faith may not be who she seemed. Hawthorne builds s...