Looking for audio stories in a specific genre?

Browse our genre-specific collections. We have organized our stories into twenty-one genre-specifc collections.

The Swirls Collection includes stories about relationships, love, and the complexities of living with others.

Meeting Celeste

At a quarter to nine in the evening, Rick turned off the computer systems and pulled on his socks and his custom cowboy boots which had been made for him during a trip to Spain. He buttoned his blue-gray silk shirt that he had found in Milan. And, in spite of the muggy, South Carolina heat, he put on his black leather jacket, the one he had discovered in Montreal.

He walked down the open stairwell, then across the parking lot, and over a couple of short blocks to the Ramada Inn hotel where a live band was playing in the Lounge. The Friday night customers were filling all the small round tables around the parquet dance floor. A lot more action than three nights earlier, and this time he had drug along his working partner, Mike.

He brought Mike into the Lounge, sat him at a round table, and ordered him a drink. In the 1980s, South Carolina still required cocktails to be served without alcohol. Customers were handed a small bottle from which they added their own. Mike dumped the whole bottle into his seltzer drink. Scotch and soda is not worth much without the scotch.

With Mike appeased with a drink, Rick appraised the crowd that had gathered at the Ramada lounge.

While the various personal dramas were continuing on the dance floor, the computer guy left his friend Mike and walked over to where the young woman in the white dress was sitting.

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As Crows Come is a collection of original stories of crime, mystery and suspense.

Murder at the Gas Pump

Coughlin, California has only had one murder. Bernard Winslow Schlafer (the Third) was a scion of one of the Central Valley’s richest and most important families. Yet, when the time came for him to assume responsibilities in the family businesses, he left Coughlin for Los Angeles where he eventually produced a sleazy reality game show entitled, “Seduction!”

Barnie S. (as he now prefers to be known) returned to his hometown to seek additional funding from his maternal grandmother for his television endeavor. On his way back to LA, he stops for gas and lottery tickets at the Log Cabin Liquor and Gas. While he is filling his car, a white sedan enters the parking lot. A man emerges and shoots Barnie S. with an AR-15.

The assassination took less than five seconds.

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Cherry Blossoms at Night

a biological warfare mystery thriller

Appaloosa Radio is pleased to offer a dramatization of the first chapter of Brandon Michaels’ forthcoming novel, Cherry Blossoms at Night — a biological warfare mystery thriller.

In 1945, the Japanese military ordered Operation PX, the release of biological weapons on civilians inside the United States in retaliation of the incendiary bombings of Tokyo. The designated targets were San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.  World War II ended in August of 1945, or did it?  This story captures the reality that an apocalyptic event can easily happen and for similar ill-conceived reasoning. COVID was just the beginning.

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The small business sat in an Austin strip mall between a pizza place and a nail salon, three doors down from a Japanese Sushi restaurant. On its red neon sign was the single word “reflexology.” The proprietor specialized in what he called “oriental foot massages,” stimulating the nerves, and improving a body’s health.

It was 5:45 in the evening, and in mid-December, it was already dark. The red neon “reflexology” sign was visible across the whole parking lot. None of the signs from the other businesses had yet switched on.

In the foot-massage client waiting area, the proprietor sat on one of the chairs, looking intently at his phone. After five or six minutes, he got up and walked outside. In front of the sushi restaurant was a bench where customers of the Japanese restaurant sat while they waited for their to-go orders. He sat on the bench and lit a cigarette.

He finished his cigarette, glanced at his phone, and then stood up.

Thirty seconds later, he lay on the sidewalk, dead. He fell face down. next to the red wooden bench in front of the sushi restaurant.

No one remembered hearing a shot.

Award-winning writer, Cle Curbo reads a selection from his “Seven Witches” fantasy.

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Spectral Dreams

An excerpt from the novel — WereWorlds

By Roberta “Bert” Davis

This story originally was published in the September 2013 Anthology – The Moving Finger Writes…  by the Sacramento Suburban Writers’ Club

A collection of original science fiction stories.

featuring –

O.ss.K A-a ar 44-070-256,  Lauren’s “EeKK//”

Imagine a time (in the not-too-distant future) when EeKK//s do all the work.

In this episode, Lauren joins a “General Strike” to protest a grave social injustice, and O.ss.K.ar 44-070-256 has to take swift action to prevent harm from coming to her.

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Listen to the ten stories in the series

A collection of extremely short stories — always less than five minutes listenting time

Valor

A collection of stories exemplifying courage, honor, duty, and sacrifice.

Appaloosa Radio Presents

Escape

Escape!

A work of fiction based on a true story

In four parts

Nearly 23,000 American soldiers were captured during the Battle of the Bulge. Among them were three G.I.s from Western Pennsylvania serving in the 422nd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division who were captured on December 19, 1944.

This work of fiction tells about their escape from the notorious Stalag IV-B P.O.W. prison and their eventual (and eventful!) return to the medical amenities of Camp Lucky Strike.

The events included in this part occurred northeast of Leipzig, near Sieben-Arm-Säule during early April 1945.

It is a work of historical fiction based on the actual experiences of Vernon J. Cumberland, Bruce Waldo, and Horace Catheay, to whom it is dedicated.

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 ~ Lotus ~

The Lotus Collection features stories contemplating lingering philosophical and ethical issues.

Moral Obligations

It had been days since either of them had eaten. They were the pioneers sent out by the colony to find the resources the colony needed to survive. They had crossed the vast emptiness and now were in the deep labyrinth where passage was slow.

The smaller one wasted their time talking about philosophical issues, particularly moral dilemmas.  “Did you know, “he pondered, “for the price of a special, iced coffee latte in an upscale coffee shop, you could pay for the cataract surgery for someone in the less developed world?”

“So?” said the older, larger one who was missing an eye from a long-ago fight.

“It is a moral dilemma. Buy a spiced, iced coffee latte or pay for an eye surgery.”

“What is the dilemma?” snarled the one with a single eye. “If you’ve got enough crust, buy whatever you want. It is your money.”

“Still, I think it is moral dilemma. What should we do?”

Not bothered with such nonsense, the larger one responded. “I think we need to find something to eat, soon, so we can do what we were sent to do.”

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After 47 years in her desert cocoon, avoiding human contact, Dr. Helen Goldman emerges to receive a prestigious award in theoretical mathematics. In her very anticipated acceptance talk, she reveals her own story.

She was a practicing clinical psychologist whose clients included many major television and movie celebrities. At a party, she was introduced to the drug LSD. “Ladies and gentlemen, I had never had a more passionate, a more pleasurable, a more satisfying experience than listening to Wagner’s operas while on LSD.”

The drug also unleashed her considerable (but previously unknown) talent in theoretical mathematics.

She left her comfortable Los Angeles lifestyle for a desert shanty where she was free to do only mathematics. To overcome the prejudices of the powerful “special elect” who control what ideas are to be published and shared, she resorted to deception and manipulation. “Had I not packaged my ideas as I did, they would probably never have been published.”

Her strategies worked. In the introduction to her award, the speaker calls her “an individual of extraordinary brilliance. A mind of unlimited capacity. A master mathematician.”

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The Facts,

Just the Facts

“He had done this hundreds of times while working on hundreds of cases. The grizzled, veteran, police detective sergeant checked his notepad for details, and then he turned to the eyewitness to confirm the facts. His job was to confirm the facts. “Just the facts,” as the fictional radio detective Sergeant Joe Friday did every week on the show, Dragnet.”

The police dectective believes that there are facts. Discoverable, evidence-based facts. Hard facts, as the detective sergeant would say. Facts. Not fictions.

Facts are as real as bullets, burglaries, bullies, and bastards.

Facts are discovered. Uncovered. Revealed. They are not made up. Not mere possibilities. Not speculation.

Put all the facts together and you have a whole picture. You know what happened. You know what really occurred. You have the facts.

Yet finding the facts is more obtuse than it seems. In truth, it may not even be possible. Determining which purported events occurred and which did not may ultimately prove fruitless.

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Bus Stop Collection

Contemporary urban stories.

Furious

D.R. Nichols has integrated rap and narrative fiction to tell of a “demon” driver and his red sportscar.

“You hate me //  You know you do //  You’d blast me with rockets // Machine gun me to utter annihilation // Demand the fates pelt down fierce brimstone // If you could //

If you could // Really // If I would // Let you catch me // Let you catch me // But you can’t // No, you can’t // No one //  Nobody // Can ever catch me. //

I’m uncatchable // I’m remarkable // I’m unbreakable // I’m unshakeable //  I’m unstable // The legendary // Terror of the road // Furious //  Infuriating  // Insulting

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Lies that salesmen tell.

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The morning fog had begun to lift around the pier, and the weekend tourists were starting to leave their hotel rooms for a day at the beach.

The one-armed guitar player opened his guitar case and carefully removed his Les Paul Deluxe 3 E X model from its well-padded home.

He began a soft jazz riff matching his mood and the weather.

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Go to the story series

Through Panes of Glass

Personal stories connecting times, people, and experiences.

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Rubber Stamps

By Jody Carnes-Hart

I have recently retired from my position as the Chief Technology Officer for a large, California State agency. It was my job to move an organization with 4,000 permanent employees from taking its phone messages on pink “while you were out” pads (if you remember those) to an integrated and tightly networked state-of-the-art voice-data-web-video assemblage of information systems. I saw a lot of technological change in my 32 years of professional service.

In my retirement, I have had time to muse about the philosophy of technology.  However, I am not interested in ruminating on potential technological changes in some future world. This will not be a work of science fiction.  (Sorry Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry fans!) Rather, it will be about a more mundane set of technologies, a set that impacted me very directly. It was a group of technologies that shaped my mother’s life.

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Scattered Feathers

A collection of personal memoirs.

How We Met, 1949

By Barbara Jodry

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Alligator

A Nell Trustmon story of frogotten ghost towns of the American West.

In rural mining communities like Boyce, Colorado, the arrival of the “Alligator Man” created a community-wide celebration. How could any of the Lithuanian miners continue to work in the deep, hard rock silver mine when there was a real, live alligator in town? Gotta see that!

Alligators were hardly rare in places like Florida or the bayous of Louisiana. And almost anyone who visited a zoo in one of the major eastern cities could see a tropical display featuring gators. But, here in the high western Rockies, the alligator was a very rare sight.

The alligator came courtesy of a showman and promoter named Claude Chantt who claimed to have a Ph.D. in reptile herpetology from a university that no one had ever heard of. “Professor” Chantt (as he preferred to be called) travelled among the mining towns of the West driving a 1917 Ford Truck, pulling a large, brightly painted metal tank filled with water and containing a 15 foot alligator. He charged patrons fifteen cents each to watch his “demonstrations” of the reptile’s cunning capabilities. Each “demonstration” ended with Professor Chantt climbing a tall metal ladder next to the alligator’s tank, and then holding out a long fishing pole with a hunk of chicken attached to it. He would encourage the animal to perform, and within a minute or two, the alligator would jump up out of the water ten feet or more and grab its meal from the end of the pole.

In the evenings, after the last feeding demonstration, local children would often slip beneath the canvas fence that the Professor had set up to block the view of the non-paying spectators, and in a mixture of awe and fear, watch the alligator.

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Missives

a ghost story

By M. L. Edson

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Stories of travel and adventure.

The Wagon Train

A modern adventure

By Tammy Andrews

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Cowboy Motel

Stories drawn from the American West.

There had been no food in the house for a week. No rice. No fish. No vegetables. The chickens had been killed last season. Even the chickens’ coarse feed was long gone.

Yesterday, Mother found some garbage scraps. Rancid. Smelly. Covered in creatures. She boiled it to make a soup. But not enough charcoal for the fire to heat it. Mother asked the children to eat it. They tried, but soon became sick.

Father had been a relatively wealthy man. In his business, he bought saddles and bridles from the Portuguese traders and re-sold them to the Chinese. His was a well-known business. Many customers came from far away to buy his leather goods. Finely tooled with excellent designs. A quality product for any many who rode a horse.

But Father no longer had money. His business was closed. He had been a man of distinction. A man who made his family proud. No.  He was a failure, one who could not feed even his own family.

It was not opium that did him in. No. He never touched the foul weed. He told his children that it was a tool of the demons. A way of draining one’s energy, strength, and character.

His undoing came, rather, from the “numbers room” next to the local opium den. It was, in fact, owned by the same conniving individual. The “numbers room” had a large wooden board with many numbers written on it. Each time a number was drawn, it would be covered by a colored token. Patrons bought strips of paper with numbers printed on it. If the numbers on your paper matched the ones covered by a colored token, you would win.

For years and years and years, Father would visit the “numbers room” and would be blessed with the special gift of luck. He seemed to have fortune in his sleeve. He would win almost every time. Then, one day, the dark forces conspired again. His good fortune turned to bad.

He returned to the “numbers room” the next day, but his misfortune continued. Then, the next day and the next and the next. Then, he had no money. He sold things, but luck never blessed him again.

Finally, he had to leave his lovely home and move to a hovel. He had no pride. He had no business. He had no money. He had no luck. He had no food.

Li Li was the youngest daughter and her father’s favorite. She was small. Yes. But very smart.

Father had nothing else to sell. His two older daughters were already betrothed. One would never sell sons, so Father could not sell his one son. That left only Li Li.

Thus, at age nine, Li Li was sold into slavery. Nearly all the money that Father received for her went to pay his previous gambling debts. The “numbers room” had men who ensured the debts were fully paid.

When most Americans think of slavery, they visualize enslaved Africans toiling on either a cotton or a sugar plantation of the South. Few think of the equally insidious enslavement of young Chinese girls as prostitutes working in the brothels of the West.

Nearly every western boomtown, whether it was a mining town like Virginia City or a cow town like Dodge City or a transportation hub like Denver, had at least one Chinese-owned and operated brothel. Many of these brothels were quite large, some having as many as fifty women working in them. Most operated close to Chinese-owned opium dens and gambling halls. Very few of the customers of these establishments were Chinese men. The “coulee” wages paid to Chinese men were not large enough to afford frequent visits to the oriental pleasure palaces.

This story is based, in part, on the memoirs of Mrs. Lilli Bardie, who came to the West as a sex slave, but eventually became (it is reported) the wealthiest woman in Idaho. She owned mines, an ore-hauling transport company, an ore stamping mill, various hotels and restaurants, and (probably) a string of brothels. Of course, since she was Chinese, she could own none of these in her own name. Her role had to remain hidden. All her properties and enterprises were legally controlled by her personal attorney.

Of all her properties, her favorite was her large ranch on the Salmon River. She asked to be buried there on a hill where she could hear the roar of the fast-moving river.

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A collection of audio stories emerging from the culture and the people of the American South.

A Perfectly Southern Gentleman

By every available indicator, his father was a true, quintessential southern gentleman, speaking six languages, analyzing the classical thinkers, and even singing opera. He rode horses at breakneck speed, always sitting ramrod straight with his backside welded into his saddle, and could shoot a 45 right through the center of an Ace of Spades at a hundred yards. His genial politeness and courtesy were his ever-present hallmarks. He would turn bright red with embarrassment when any of his Navy buddies told an off-color joke.

A perfectly Southern Gentleman.

“But never once, did he ever talk about what had happened at that North Carolina whorehouse in 1939. I never knew he had killed a man. I never knew that he was still listed as an “escapee” by the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, that for over a decade he was listed as one of North Carolina’s ‘most wanted’ criminals.”

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A collection of orginal poetry.

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The Carousel Story Collection

A collection of stories featuring the wonder and magic of childhood.

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The Ice Cream Scooper

Mr. Schimerhorn’s

Horse Apple Field

Mark Heckey

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Humor Me!

A collection of original stories with a sense of humor.

Bryson Kilmer shares an experience of a meeting of One Crazy Club. Humor.

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Broken Tree Tales

A collection of Nell Trustmon’s Western stories exploring now forgotten ghost towns and the personalities who lived there.

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Jonas Chartogaro, a retired government polygraph examiner, interviews spies of the 1940s and 1950s to uncover truth and to detect lies.

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The Edith M. Patch Collection

Edith Patch was  a consummate naturalist with the voice of a poet whose work resonates particularly well with the ethos of our own time.

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We share this story collection at the request of our long-time friend Lois Quenten who epitomized Edith Patch’s ethos.

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