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The Cold - story
Ryūnosuke Akutagawa
One morning, after a fall of snow. Yasukichi sat on a chair in the physics teachers’ lounge, watching the flames in the heating stove. The flames licked up yellow one moment, then fell to sooty…

The Picture Horse - story
Pu Sung-ling
A certain Mr. Ts’ui, of Lin-ch’ing, was too poor to keep his garden walls in repair, and used often to find a strange horse lying down on the grass inside. It was a black horse…

The Universe of Things - story
Gwyneth Jones
The alien parked its car across the street and came and sat down in the waiting room. He must have seen this happen, peripherally. But he was busy settling the bill with a middle-aged woman…

Mortimer Gray’s History of Death - story
Brian Stableford
1 I was an utterly unexceptional child of the twenty-ninth century, comprehensively engineered for emortality while I was still a more-or-less inchoate blastula and decanted from an artificial womb in Naburn Hatchery in the…

Its Name is ‘Bird’ - story
Kamal Riahi
Jalal wasn’t happy unless he was wreaking havoc. He was the village’s fearsome little devil. At any time he might raid the neighbours’ chicken coops and rabbit hutches. Then we’d see him grilling the meat…

The Treasure - story
Yusuf Idris
Abdul Aal was a tall, dark-skinned plain-clothes policeman. On the back of his right hand he had an open-mouthed fish with a cleft tail and a spot on its eye. Abdul Aal was a detective….

The Policeman and the Horse - story
Zakaria Tamer
Abu Mustafa parked his carriage next to the sidewalk. With a large, gnarled hand he patted his horse’s head, then headed into the nearby shop. He began hoisting bags of firewood on his back and…

A Meditation Upon a Broomstick - story
Jonathan Swift
According to the Style and Manner of the Hon. Robert Boyle’s Meditations. This single stick, which you now behold ingloriously lying in that neglected corner, I once knew in a flourishing state in a forest….

John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist - story
Rob Doyle
When I think of Ireland, John-Paul Finnegan said as we stood on the deck of the ferry while it pulled out of Holyhead, I think of a limitless ignorance. And not just an ignorance, but…

The Man Who No Longer Wanted to Know Anything - story
Peter Bichsel
‘From now on, I don’t want to know anything,’ said the man who no longer wanted to know anything. ‘I don’t want to know a thing.’ That’s easily said. It is easily said. And hardly…