A woman and a man are stuck in their hotel room in Italy due to rain. The woman sees a cat, and decides she wants it.
Cat in the Rain
public domain stories
Sheener
A newsboy looks after a fading, alcoholic colleague, convinced that he sees true “class” in the man. He’s more right than he knows.
Gooseberries
The whole sky had been overcast with rainclouds from early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not come. Ivan Ivanovitch, the veterinary surgeon, and Burkin, the high-school teacher, were already tired from walking, and the fields seemed to them endless. Far ahead of them they could just see the windmills of the village of Mironositskoe; on the right stretched a row of hillocks which disappeared in the distance behind [Read More]
The Garden Party
And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine. As for the roses, you could not help feeling they understood that roses are the only flowers that impress people at [Read More]
Happy Rain Night
It was the eve of the annual synthi-rain and all Mars was settling down for the big sleep that always went with it. Everything was ready, reso-skins had been peeled off the pumps a week before. Uh huh, thought the lone attendant at the fuelport outside the city. You could tell everything was ready, even the traffic was thinning. Hadn’t been a ‘copter or anything in for fuel in the last ten minutes. Dean Evans’ story first appeared in the March 1954 edition of Planet Stories (retrieved via Project Gutenberg), although it might just as easily appeared in that month’s [Read More]
The Banks of the Sacramento
A young boy must rescue a couple trapped in a mining gondola 200 feet above the Sacramento River, and amidst a driving rainstorm.
Rídan the Devil
Rídan lived alone in a little hut on the borders of the big German plantation at Mulifenua, away down at the lee end of Upolu Island, and every one of his brown-skinned fellow-workers either hated or feared him, and smiled when Burton, the American overseer, would knock him down for being a ‘sulky brute.’ But no one of them cared to let Rídan see him smile. For to them he was a wizard, a devil, who could send death in the night to those he hated. And so when anyone died on the plantation he was blamed, and seemed to [Read More]
Soda-Water Sal
When the great engine which we called the Sky-Scraper came out of the Zanesville shops, she was rebuilt from pilot to tender. Our master-mechanic, Neighbor, had an idea, after her terrific collision, that she could not stand heavy main-line passenger runs, so he put her on the Acton cut-off. It was what railroad men call a jerk-water run, whatever that may be; a little jaunt of ten miles across the divide connecting the northern division with the Denver stem. It was just about like running a trolley, and the run was given to Dad Sinclair, for after that lift at [Read More]
The Cabman’s Story: The Mysteries of a London “Growler”
We had to take a “growler,” for the day looked rather threatening and we agreed that it would be a very bad way of beginning our holiday by getting wet, especially when Fanny was only just coming round from the whooping cough. Holidays were rather scarce with us, and when we took one we generally arranged some little treat, and went in for enjoying ourselves. On this occasion we were starting off from Hammersmith to the Alexandra Palace in all the dignity of a four-wheeler. What with the wife and her sister, and Tommy and Fanny and Jack, the inside [Read More]
Kew Gardens
From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath with [Read More]