Frontier Road - Short Stories (written by humans)

Part One - Left Side of the Bench In the coastal town of Lincoln City, a horticulture engineer with a unique perspective on life finds unexpected connection with a mysterious, but familiar stranger. Excerpt: "Oh hey, how are you?" I responded. It was the girl. She was beautiful. I adjusted my headslightly to make eye contact with my good eye. "I think I know you," she said. The analytical mind of...

An archaeological team in Turkey had recently uncovered an ancient image beneath layers of plaster inside a church near Iznik. This image of Christ, portrayed as the Good Shepherd, was among the five oldest surviving depictions of Jesus as an adult ever found anywhere in the world. It dated from the early-to-mid third century AD and was the best-preserved early image of Jesus ever discovered. Beca...

Excerpt: "My dreams however, kept me awake—Claire, William, the breakfast at the Caffè Florian. The conflict. She was nervous, but not refined, and not always on edge, just this morning. The man, the nameless man, or William now, but that doesn’t fit. That’s ok, we will use it anyway. William and Claire at the Caffe. And there was a child, there were children, but this child, their last to le...

Short Summary: I was sitting in my car thinking about hobbies and somehow ended up inside a bookstore pretending to be a serious collector. I bought Edward Newton’s The Amenities of Book Collecting for twenty bucks, convinced for a few minutes that I had discovered the secret world of bibliophiles. Newton’s book led me to Alexander Pope, which made me feel briefly intellectual, and then to the sto...

I was a young missionary when my companion persuaded me to abandon our assigned duties and join a strange expedition to Mount Ararat in search of Noah’s Ark. What followed was five months of faith, doubt, cameras, preachers, and men who desperately wanted to prove that scripture could be found buried in the ice. We found no ark, no beams, no planks—but before I left that mountain I stumbled upon s...

an excerpt: How the estrangement between himself and his boy came about, Martin could never exactly say, though he considered a hundred different explanations. He struggled to accept what he knew, at least in theory—that in the lives of men the widest gaps often open so gradually they are not seen forming. But how had he not seen it? With a true lawyer’s mind, his analysis of his relationship with...

A Story of the Age of Empires The Dark Ages I cannot say now how the village was created. Whether it began with a cosmic spark, or whether it simply appeared because I willed the earth to open. I only remember that I did not feel hurried. Not yet. A Town Center, my Town Center, door opened and two villagers stepped out at once. They blinked in the light and then stood. Waiting their orders. Then t...

Part 3 is the conclusion of this short story series. Excerpts from this podcast: "The Professor returned to New Jersey under federal escort. When he was still at the monastery, two FBI agents met with him and explained he needed to return to the United States immediately for questioning and for his own protection. They told him handcuffs wouldn’t be necessary if he cooperated. Of course he coopera...

This is part 2 of Professor Einstein’s Light Machine (a short story). There was enough interest in part 1, in fact it was the second most listened to short story of ours (the first being The Beardless Jesus Series) to release part 2. Not to gloat or brag. We are a small book club, a niche of readers, and we like it that way. We don't have to conform to anyone telling us how or what to write. W...

“This isn’t a camera,” Professor Einstein said. “It doesn’t capture images. It reconstructs phase histories.” He turned a dial. The overhead lights dimmed automatically as the device pulled power. A soft vibration passed through the base. Not noise. Pressure. Like standing near heavy machinery that hasn’t started moving yet. Then the lens activated. At first, nothing happened. Then the space insid...

By: Jeffrey Armstead, a Gen Z author Publisher’s Note: This short story,  The Death of Brooks Porter , was selected for our short story library on ContemplateBooks.com for a few simple reasons. First, it’s a modern adaptation of  The Death of Ivan Ilyich  by Leo Tolstoy, a short novel about illness, ambition, and what happens when a life built on approval starts to fall apart. Tolstoy wrote it lat...

"This day, Mistress Dorothy Bradford, wife to Mr. William Bradford, fell overboard and was drowned.”

Why Ukraine Matters Part 1 — First Day of 9th Grade “Welcome to World History,” Mr. Hershey said as the last bell finally stopped ringing. He capped his marker and turned toward the class. “I’m Mr. Hershey. This semester we’re going to spend a good chunk of time learning about Ukraine. Its origins, its geography, the rise of its independence, and why that independence is being challenged.” A map o...

With insights into the context and story from Contemplatebooks.com. Excerpt: "But even yet I refrained and kept still. I scarcely breathed. I held the lantern motionless. I tried how steadily I could maintain the ray upon the eye. Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. [He treats stillness as mastery, the sound grows anyway. Control fails.] It grew quicker and quicker, and louder...

They found a parking spot at the cafeteria near his dorm because the other spots were full and check-in was here. Inside, the floor was new and the tables were clean. A girl in a campus T-shirt wiped a counter and changed the music to something light. There were balloons tied to a cardboard sign that said Welcome, and under it in smaller letters, Parent HQ. They set their cups down. The father tes...

*Short Summary by Contemplatebooks.com The novel starts with Dr. Manette, who has been locked away in a French prison for 18 years, so broken that he spends his days making shoes. His daughter Lucie brings him back to life, showing that love and loyalty can heal the deepest wounds. Lucie marries Charles Darnay, a French noble who rejects the cruelty of his family, while Sydney Carton, a gifted but...

It’s the story of a dad hitting mid-life, realizing he’s lost a bit of his spark, and fumbling through ways to connect with his teenage son. Ethan used to glide through life, talented in sports, confident, the kind of guy who never had to try that hard. Now he’s 45, wandering Costco aisles with his wife, quietly questioning what’s missing. His son Matthew is 17, reserved, stoic, smart in his own w...

“The Story of an Hour” is a short story written by Kate Chopin in 1894 (considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald). Her story was originally published in  Vogue  magazine and was controversial by American standards of the time. The title of the story refers to the time that elapses between...

Charles Hazelius Sternberg lived almost a century, dying in 1943 in Lawrence, Kansas. Even in his last years he was still preparing fossils, writing, and advising younger collectors. By then his sons had carried on the trade, his specimens filled museums from New York to London, and his own name had become part of the history of paleontology. He was one of the last of the old field men, men who ha...

Some will choose to scroll Instagram. And soon they land upon an influencer. She, too, is posed at an angle, the body turned just so, her head tilted toward the camera with practiced ease. Her dress is not of mourning but of sponsored fabric, tagged helpfully below the post, available for purchase with a discount code. A ring light, not sunlight, gives her skin its glow. The veil is gone, replaced...

The author Samuel Butler was born in 1835, the son of a strict clergyman who expected him to follow the same path. He resisted, left England for New Zealand, and made money sheep farming before returning to live as a writer and satirist. Butler was restless, skeptical of authority, and fascinated by Darwin’s theory of evolution, which influenced all his work. In Erewhon (1872), he built a fictiona...

I wasn’t always afraid of flying. When I was younger, I flew to Europe alone. No nerves, no second thoughts. I didn’t notice the bumps. I just watched a movie. It wasn’t until later, after kids, that the fear started. I remember a flight to Reno. Clear skies, nothing unusual. The pilot said they’d stop in-flight service early because of the mountains and wind waves. I didn’t think much about it un...

John Chapman was born in 1774 in Leominster, Massachusetts. His father, Nathaniel, was a farmer and a Minuteman who fought at Bunker Hill. His mother, Elizabeth, died when John was two. The baby she died giving birth to didn’t live long either. Nathaniel remarried a few years later and had ten more children. John grew up in a crowded house, sometimes in Leominster, sometimes farther west in Longme...

There were six at his funeral. Seven, if you count the man asleep in the chair. Eight, if you count the writer of this account, who followed at a distance and said nothing. It was June 1809. Hot, sluggish. The road out of Harlem ran quiet, except for the clattering wheels and the low talk of the procession: a couple of Black men, six drunken Irishmen in a carriage, a Quaker on horseback, and a cof...

“It’s AI slop,” Doug said, without hesitation, but with a trace of fear. He’d seen the phrase tossed around in the Reddit threads he followed.  AI slop  was the new shorthand for any piece of modern writing that felt off. Bloated. Predictable. Sanitized. Or maybe from a jealous reader. You saw it in Amazon reviews like a stamp,  This is AI slop. Don’t bother. It wasn’t a critique. It was an execut...