Ririro.com - Short Stories

"How Manawyddan Caught A Thief" is a Welsh legend retold by Lady Charlotte Guest, following Manawyddan as he and his companions watch their kingdom of Dyved mysteriously emptied of every person, animal, and dwelling. Struggling to survive in an enchanted wasteland, Manawyddan's crops are devoured by an unstoppable army of mice — until he captures one sluggish mouse and refuses every bribe to relea...

"The Princess and the Ragamuffin" follows Pacorrito Migajas, a seven-year-old street vendor in Madrid who sells matches, newspapers, and lottery tickets while sleeping under archways and living entirely by his wits. His carefree independence is shattered the moment he falls desperately in love with a beautiful porcelain doll in a shop window. When she is bought and taken away, Pacorrito risks ever...

"The Poppy" unfolds on a moonlit night when a listener in a flower-filled meadow discovers that flowers possess their own language, feelings, and memories. Gathered voices — cornflower, lily, forget-me-not, and others — debate humanity's indifference to nature, before a luminous Poppy silences the crowd with an ancient tale: how the loneliness of Night, her tearful plea to the Creator, and the bir...

"Round the Yule-Log: Christmas in Norway" opens with a young officer, stranded and homesick in Christiania on Christmas Eve, nursing his recovery in the rooms of two elderly landladies. Drawn into their fireside gathering, he trades Norwegian folk tales with the children — stories of cunning trolls, mischievous brownies, and a terrifying midnight church service attended by the dead. As the candles...

"The Christmas Wreck" is a short story told by old sailor Silas, who recalls being stranded on a half-sunken bark in the Pacific Ocean on Christmas Eve after a devastating typhoon. With only salt-soaked biscuit to eat, two crewmates to manage, and a hold packed with unreachable canned delicacies, Silas seizes command and hatches a daring plan involving explosives to blast open the cargo — before C...

"A College Santa Claus" drops readers into a snowy Cambridge Christmas Eve with Satherwaite, a wealthy, socially comfortable college student stranded alone after a last-minute telegram cancels his holiday plans. Sulking through an empty campus, he tracks down a classmate to return a borrowed notebook and finds himself on the edge of a warm, shabby little Christmas party he has no right to join. Wh...

"Christmas Eve in War Times" follows Mrs. Anson Marlow, a soldier's wife facing eviction, hunger, and crushing uncertainty after her husband is listed as missing in battle. Alone with her two young children on Christmas Eve, she scrapes together a few cake crumbs to fill their stockings while hiding her despair behind a fragile smile. Unbeknownst to her, her wounded husband has survived and made h...

"Betty's Bright Idea" is a Christmas short story set in New York on Christmas Eve, 1875, tracing three lives brought together by a single act of generosity. Florence, a wealthy young woman bored by gift-giving, is nudged by her maid Betty toward a struggling family: John Morley, a gardener dismissed for drinking, and his wife, quietly weeping over an empty cupboard and unpaid rent. As despair and...

"The Christmas Ghost" follows Jane White, a solitary New England woman hardened by years of isolation and an old romantic betrayal, who wakes to find her fire lit and breakfast prepared by an unseen visitor on Christmas Eve. Struck down by rheumatism in a winter storm and cut off from neighbors she has long despised, Jane faces both helplessness and a creeping supernatural dread — until the identi...

"The Torn Cloak" follows Jacques, a barefoot boy who attends midnight Mass on a bitter Christmas Eve while his widowed mother lies ill at home with no firewood. Braving a blizzard to gather wood, Jacques encounters a frost-covered crucifix at the Trèves crossroads and, moved by its expression of suffering, wraps his dead father's torn cloak around the stone figure. The gesture costs him everything...

"The Christmas Festival of Flowers" draws readers into the moorland world of Paul Corolla, a mysterious flower trader on the edge of Dartmoor whose reputation for magic draws the desperate and heartbroken to his door. When a despairing young man named Philip Tremenheere arrives one evening, Paul quietly sets in motion a plan that will untangle not only Philip's ruined romance with Alice Cranstone...

"Black-and-All-Black: A Legend of the Padereen Mare" is an Irish tall tale narrated by the lovably unreliable Paddy Phats on Christmas Eve. At its heart is a diabolical horse race: the coal-black stallion owned by the Devil faces the mysterious milk-white Padereen Mare championed by a wily priest. Behind the thundering hooves lies the wager of a corrupt squire's soul — a man who sold himself to Sa...

"The Fairy Tale of Fairy Tales" opens in a mythic age when the Spirit-King Tien divides his four kingdoms among his daughters: Thalatta of the sea, Ætheria of the sky, Fiamma of fire, and gentle Hertha of the earth. Into this world steps Andrea, son of an Indian enchanter, armed with a magic mirror and a mantle, tasked with finding a bride among the elemental queens. His encounters with the proud...

"A Christmas Tale" follows Antony, an eight-year-old orphan who stumbles through a snowbound forest on Christmas Eve and discovers a warm family gathered around a Nativity scene. Taken in by the kind gamekeeper Grünewald, Antony grows into a gifted painter whose journey to Italy transforms his life — yet the debt of love he carries never fades. When the family faces ruin through a vindictive offic...

"A Christmas in the Forest" by André Theuriet opens on a bitterly frozen Christmas Eve as two friends venture through an ice-lacquered forest to visit a woodworkers' camp. Caught by sudden heavy snowfall, they share a humble supper of hare stew and rough wine around a fire, while the camp's master anxiously awaits a doctor for his ailing wife. The night deepens, distant church bells layer across t...

"A Christmas Eve in Exile" drops the reader into a Bavarian military hospital on Christmas Eve 1870, where two wounded French infantrymen — Salvette and the gravely ill Bernadou — long for the Provençal traditions of home. Salvette secretly sacrifices their last money, meant for the journey home, to buy wine and a Christmas loaf. As midnight bells toll over a silent ward of suffering men, he sings...

Joseph Golding's Last Christmas follows a wealthy, solitary old man who spends Christmas Eve confronting a lifetime of emotional coldness — toward a wife he neglected, a daughter he drove away, and a family he never allowed himself to have. When a small golden-haired girl appears at his door bearing a letter from his estranged daughter Amy, the encounter cracks open a heart hardened by decades of...

"Santa Claus Family" unfolds across three interlocking Christmas narratives that together span twenty years. A lonely seven-year-old boy named Tommy receives an unexpected visit from a young woman dressed as Santa Claus, and vows he will only marry someone exactly like her. Told first through Tommy's grown-up reminiscence, then through the woman's own memory, and finally through a letter from her...

"A Christmas Eve in Spain" captures a rural Spanish family's Christmas Eve through precise, affectionate detail: two boys sneaking fingers into milk jars, a seminarian fleeing a pedantic neighbor who ambushes him with Latin phrases, and a household buzzing with fritters, honey, and wine. When the marzantes — young men clattering wooden clogs and imitating horses — arrive at the door to sing a Chri...

"A Christmas Letter" by Stephen Leacock is a satirical short story told as a formal letter of refusal from a pompous adult declining an invitation to a children's Christmas party. With mounting comic indignation, the narrator explains why he cannot submit to blindfold games involving hobby-horse-wielding ten-year-olds, crawl on all fours pretending to be a bear, or suffer the maiden aunt's guessin...

A Snow-Bound Christmas brings together a mismatched group of train passengers stranded in a snowdrift on Christmas Eve. Among them: a grieving fireman with a five-year-old boy who desperately wants the Christmas his late mother promised him, a quick-thinking young woman named Miss Marsh, a sullen runaway boy, an elderly grandmother, and a weary surgeon. As the storm holds them captive through the...

"The Christmas Inn" unfolds on a snow-swept Christmas Eve in 1465, when a wartime truce brings two rival convoys — Lancastrian and Yorkist soldiers — sheltering at the same English inn. Among the armed men arrives tiny Lady Margery Vere, a golden-haired toddler of two and a half, followed by Barbara and Janet Barnstaples, solemn twin girls from the enemy faction. When Margery spots the twins and c...

Molly Ryan's Christmas Eve follows a small Irish girl travelling in steerage aboard the steamship Astoria on a stormy Christmas Eve crossing the Atlantic. Leaning over the rail to glimpse what she imagines is a Christmas tree in the churning black water — she has never owned one — Molly tumbles into the sea during a collision. Rescued by the rough crew of a sailing bark, she wakes in a grim foreca...

"A Race with an Avalanche" puts the Ward family's Christmas in jeopardy when relentless snowfall cuts off their Rocky Mountain town from supplies and mail. When Dr. Ward answers an urgent call to treat a badly injured miner — despite real avalanche danger — his daughter Kate is left behind, consumed by fear and grief. Then her brother Harry makes a desperate ski run down a mountain slope with a ro...

"A Recruit at Christmas" follows Lieutenant Claflin, a young naval officer manning a Bowery recruiting station on Christmas Eve, as a disheveled young man arrives to enlist. Claflin sees past the paperwork to a man at a crossroads — not a natural soldier, but someone caught between self-destruction and the chance to go home. In a quiet act that bends every regulation, he speaks honestly about what...