The Talent Show Confession
I work at the Heritage Museum in town.
Playful and teasing mature stories
Stories in Mature tagged playful and teasing, ranked by how many readers finish them. Reads run 22 to 26 minutes. Writers to know: River Quota, Ivory Turn and The Breeze Draft. Readers usually start with “The Talent Show Confession” and “The Welder and the Waitress”. Some are free to read in full; the rest open with a free preview.
Playful and teasing mature stories, ranked by readers
01 02 The Welder and the Waitress
The grinder screamed and threw sparks across the tarp I'd nailed over the carpet, and I was so deep in the work that the knock at my door…
03 Letters from the Crossing
The ferry terminal at Harrows Neck smelled like diesel and old coffee, and Sam Delilah had been sitting in the same molded plastic chair…
04 Hop and Sway
The rope went with a crack you could feel in your teeth.
05 The Altar of Her Hands
*This one was written in the quiet hour after midnight, thinking about how gentleness is not the opposite of heat.
06 The Bidding War
*This one came from thinking about how the most interesting things can happen in the most boring places.
07 The Premium on Irma
The Tap and Rail closed at midnight on Fridays and Charlie let me sit while he counted the drawer.
08 Rooftop Exchange
I am forty-six years old and I had somehow reached the middle of a writing retreat in the Swiss Alps without anyone learning my name.
09 Shift Change Confessions
Carol had been a night-shift ER nurse for six years now, three of them at St.
10 Operator, Please
My name is Lindsay Hill, I'm 38 years old, and for the last four years I've made my living talking dirty to strangers.
11 The Roast of the Century
Peg was fifty-two years old and she had been roasting coffee for the better part of twenty years, so she found it ridiculous, standing in…
12 The Driver's Test
The dispatch note said pickup at four, which meant by any sane math I should have been loaded and rolling by five.