The Telegram That Shouldn't Exist – An Original Short Story

Dark — An Original Short Story by Don McDonald

This is the season finale of New Tales Told. I wrote this one because of a fact I couldn't put down. The universe is expanding, and it isn't going to stop, and the stars are burning the only fuel there is. The bright ones go first. The small, dim, stubborn ones last the longest, trillions of years, and then, someday, the last of them goes out, and there is no morning after it. The lights simply go off, for good. I kept thinking about that final star, and about who, or what, might still be there to see it go. Not the science of it, really, but the loneliness of it. The last witness in a universe with nothing left to witness. That question became a watcher, and a long vigil, and this story.\ It's called Dark. I'm glad you're here for it. > ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

Man or Monster — An Original Civil War Short Story by Don McDonald

In August 1864, thirty thousand Union prisoners were dying behind a wall of felled pine in southern Georgia. The man in command was a Swiss-born captain with a ruined arm, a sick wife back home, and a daughter whose portrait he kept on his writing table. His name was Henry Wirz, and a year later he would be the only man executed for war crimes after the Civil War. "Man or Monster" follows him through a single day. The morning report. The short rations. The chain. The deadline. The letters to a Richmond that never wrote back. No verdict, no villain's speech, just one man doing his duty inside a horror he could name but could not stop, and the question the title leaves with you. From the world of Don McDonald's novel The Line Uncrossed. The book is available at Amazon.com, BN.com, and others booksellers or you can get a special ebook bundle that includes this and two other Civil War stories at donmcdonald.com > ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Pen — An Original Civil War Short Story by Don McDonald

Henry Pollard has always had a dangerous relationship with words. In 1861 Indianapolis, while the country rushes headlong toward war, Henry would prefer to remain where he is: alive, sarcastic, and safely distant from glory. But a simple errand on behalf of a worried mother places him at a recruiting table outside the statehouse, where one ordinary moment begins quietly rearranging the rest of his life. The Pen is an original short story set in the world of The Line Uncrossed, a literary Civil War novel about family, memory, survival, and the irreversible weight of seemingly small decisions. Told with wit, warmth, and the hindsight of years, it offers a deeply human glimpse into the young men who marched toward war before they understood what war truly was. The Line Uncrossed [https://www.donmcdonald.com/home-1-1-1], available May 22, 2026 at Amazon.com [https://www.amazon.com/Line-Uncrossed-Novel-Civil-Soldier-ebook/dp/B0GY5RZNHF/ref=sr_1_1?crid=19IBNNBI8RLZS&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.tgjSr2-VP-iHCv7t0IuRks-meSf-C4lIAbWlq1iSq0M74J_HCohH4UusWNzMvW5_INWEUYwbzHBJl--nILMeGk_QFgWvW0b_ihvdslms3ks.XLTV4wbWI-u4a55SP3akSa2o-d4UQC0LGjzfVWwQ8T8&dib_tag=se&keywords=the+line+uncrossed&qid=1778343483&sprefix=the+line+uncrossed%2Caps%2C196&sr=8-1], BN.com [https://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/The%20Line%20Uncrossed], and a host of other book and e-book services. Podcast listeners can get an early access to The Line Uncrossed e-book offer with bonus stories, including this one, at donmcdonald.com [https://open.acast.com/donmcdonald.com] > ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Crevice — An Original Short Story by Don McDonald

In April, 2026, an American F-15E Strike Eagle went down over western Iran. The weapons officer ejected into the Zagros Mountains and was eventually recovered, in an operation whose full scope remains classified, but which is understood to have involved the destruction of hundreds of millions of dollars in American aircraft on the ground rather than risk leaving them, or him, behind. The Crevice is a work of fiction built on the bones of that event. The names are invented. The mountain is invented. The man wedged into the rock is invented. But the cost was real. The promise that brought the helicopters in was real. And the men who flew through the dark to keep that promise, the special operators and aircrews who do this work in places most of us will never know about, for people whose names they will never learn, they are real, and they are the reason the story ends the way it does. > ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.

The Telegram That Shouldn't Exist – An Original Short Story

During the Civil War, the military's telegraph network was run by civilians. Teenagers, some of them. Elias Murrow was nineteen, careful, and precise. He trusted the procedure because the procedure had never failed him. Then two messages arrived that couldn't both be real, and he did exactly what he was trained to do. > ---------------------------------------- Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy [https://acast.com/privacy] for more information.