New Tales Told – Original Short Stories

Winter, 1906. A clerk who speaks to no one from Saturday to Monday buys a mahogany graphophone for far less than it’s worth. The widow selling it keeps her eyes on the snow. Her husband, she says, liked to keep his own voice.

He carries it home and records his diary each night, and the machine hands him back to himself, the nearest thing to company he has. Then the wax starts holding something he never put there.

For mo...

Nobody in New Orleans had ever made Bernard de Marigny look foolish in public. He was rich past counting, small as a foil, and very likely the most dangerous man in Louisiana with a pistol in his hand. Then a blacksmith from a far parish, seven feet of him and slow to speak, said something true on the floor of the legislature, and the whole chamber laughed.

The card came to the forge two days later.

The blacksmith was no duel...

An obituary arrives in the mail, folded in thirds, no note, no return address, and the creases are sharp enough to cut with.

Roy Kittleson has not seen the man named in it since a Friday in 1986, and he has his reasons, and none of them are good. He drives up anyway. Three hours, most of it flat.

He has rehearsed nothing. He is counting on grief to arrive on its own.

“The Wrong Funeral,” is an original story wr...

Welcome to Season Two of New Tale's Told, a collection of my original short stories. I've spent the summer creating some unique tales for you. I hope a few of them bring you a bit of pleasure.

The Garden was finished before anyone in it was born. The rain arrives on schedule, in the amount that has been decided. The manual has never been improved on.

Nobody touches anybody. Children learn it early, with the short rod, because cor...

Enjoy a Summer Bonus Episode Before the New Season in September

Nora has come up to Lake Sabbath to do one hard, practical thing — close the old family house for good, and mark what will be sold. She means to stay a single night. But a house keeps its own memory: the key still on its nail, the drawer that sticks, a boat with a name. And a long, unhurried summer evening on still water can ask more of a person than they came...

This is the season finale of New Tales Told.

I wrote this one because of a fact I couldn't put down. The universe is expanding, and it isn't going to stop, and the stars are burning the only fuel there is. The bright ones go first. The small, dim, stubborn ones last the longest, trillions of years, and then, someday, the last of them goes out, and there is no morning after it. The lights simply go off, for good.

I kept thinking a...

In August 1864, thirty thousand Union prisoners were dying behind a wall of felled pine in southern Georgia. The man in command was a Swiss-born captain with a ruined arm, a sick wife back home, and a daughter whose portrait he kept on his writing table. His name was Henry Wirz, and a year later he would be the only man executed for war crimes after the Civil War.

"Man or Monster" follows him through a single day. The morning re...

Henry Pollard has always had a dangerous relationship with words.

In 1861 Indianapolis, while the country rushes headlong toward war, Henry would prefer to remain where he is: alive, sarcastic, and safely distant from glory. But a simple errand on behalf of a worried mother places him at a recruiting table outside the statehouse, where one ordinary moment begins quietly rearranging the rest of his life.

The Pen is an ori...

In April, 2026, an American F-15E Strike Eagle went down over western Iran. The weapons officer ejected into the Zagros Mountains and was eventually recovered, in an operation whose full scope remains classified, but which is understood to have involved the destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars in American aircraft on the ground rather than risk leaving them, or him, behind.

The Crevice is a work of fiction built o...

There are things we expect from the world.

Walls stay still. Rooms hold their shape. The spaces we live in behave.

And when they don’t, we look for explanations.

Old houses settle. Pipes shift. Light plays tricks.

But sometimes the world doesn’t explain itself.

When an answer can’t be seen, that doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

There is something.

Something all too real.

Something ...

This story is not about the America we live in.

It’s about an America that could exist—slowly, legally, and quietly—if people stop asking questions.

Civic Duty follows a retired teacher whose life is reduced to data points, compliance scores, and administrative decisions.

A speculative warning about what happens when systems replace judgment and loyalty becomes measurable.

The Right Call is a work of fiction, loosely inspired by a real turning point in my own life.

The events, characters, station, and circumstances have been changed. What remains is the emotional truth of a moment many people recognize: standing at a crossroads between what looks sensible and what feels right.

This story isn’t about radio.

It’s about listening—to others, and to yourself—when the scrip...

No one remembers the first human thought.

But it remembers us.

We tell ourselves that memory lives in bones, in blood, in history books and hard drives. But memory is older than all of that. Memory is the original technology. And once it learned how to survive us, it never stopped evolving.

The Eternal Code is a story about inheritance that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with continuity. About the quiet...

Before there were screens, there was a fire, a voice, and a story. Narrator and author, Don McDonald invites listeners back to humanity’s oldest tradition—listening. New Tales Told features original fiction inspired by the timeless tales that made us human—stories written for adults, but you won’t need to cover the kids’ ears. Gather by the fire—or more likely, on your walk or in y...

Frank has reasons for not decorating anymore. Christmas is quieter now. Darker. Easier to ignore.

Then a new neighbor moves in next door—six years old, endlessly curious. What starts as a simple conversation turns into a small act of defiance against grief, routine, and the belief that some lights, once turned off, should stay that way.

The Star is a gentle story about unexpected persuasion, borrowed wonder, and how the...