Stern Warning
The email came on a Tuesday.
Dark and intense mature stories
Stories in Mature tagged dark and intense, ranked by how many readers finish them. Reads run 24 to 26 minutes. Writers to know: Drift Diary, Vermilion Fiction and Sable Folio. Readers usually start with “Stern Warning” and “Late Return”. Some are free to read in full; the rest open with a free preview.
Dark and intense mature stories, ranked by readers
01 02 Late Return
My name is Sammie and I'm thirty-eight years old, and I have worked the front desk at the Maplewood Curling Club for eleven years.
03 The Sour Hour
I turned sixty-two last March and I celebrated it the way I have celebrated most things lately, that is to say I did not celebrate it.
04 Code Red
It was two in the morning and I was thirty-eight hundred lines into Rudy's garbage code.
05 The Foley Artist's Frequency
The bus let me off on a stretch of road that had no business being a bus stop, just a post with a faded sign and a gravel shoulder already…
06 Backstroke at Midnight
The greenhouse smelled like wet soil and orchids.
07 The Rooftop We Never Left
Ten years.
08 Late Blooming Desire
Beverly had driven twenty miles of freeway and then past the address twice before she worked up the nerve to park.
09 Off-Season Dares
The ferry dock at Salt Creek was empty when I got off it, which was normal for a Tuesday in January.
10 The Icewater Dare
My name is Alanna Mathews, I'm forty-seven years old, and I've been a deckhand on the M.V.
11 The Birthday Lesson
The quarterly reports had gone soft on me.
12 The Oil Lamp Confession
Hilary heard the press before she saw it, the way she always did, the big Heidelberg humming through the floor of the press room like a…
13 Whiskey in the Rig
The cargo terminal at the regional airport was the kind of place nobody built on purpose, a big steel barn with a loading dock on one end…
14 The Last Regular
Bennett Mayfield was twenty-four years old, and she had exactly one plan for the evening, which was to drink two whiskeys at The Anchor…
15 Base Leave
I turned sixty-two in March and I still work the night shift at Red Canyon Warehouse, out on the edge of Dry Mesa where the highway bends…