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Write and Publish Short Stories Online
Want to write and publish short stories online? On Fireside it's free and refreshingly direct. Write your own story – lived or imagined – and share it with people who actually read.
Every story is automatically made available in both English and German, gets a calm stage and real feedback from your readers. No limits, no fees – just your words.
Recently published stories
The Postmark and the Plum Blossom
by LeThi_H
Minh, a young postal worker, notices Lan at a river crossing and later serves her weekly at his counter as she sends letters to Marseille. When she reveals she has been writing to her estranged mother for eight months without reply, he invents a pretext to bring her back. A quiet, unspoken connection forms between two people who both live with absence.
What the Ice Does Before It Breaks
by ErikL
A lyric prose poem follows a pond through the full arc of freezing and thaw, from November's first skin of ice to April's last dissolving plates. A narrator who is both field scientist and poet reads the ice as a language, finding in its seasonal transformation an unspoken metaphor for endurance, silence, and change. The abrupt, incomplete final line deepens the poem's sense of unresolved becoming.
The Signature of Cooling
by Shafi
Inspector Nasreen Chowdhury re-examines a logged drowning case in Dhaka and notices critical inconsistencies: the supposed victim showed no signs of water in the lungs. Through bureaucratic persistence and a secondary autopsy, she confirms that Farrukh Miah—a man terrified of water—was manually strangled and dumped in the river, with the false paperwork pre-written to prevent investigation. The story ends at the threshold of a larger conspiracy involving corruption and arranged cover-ups.
The Good Tablecloth
by MarcoF
Every major holiday, the Esposito family argues about the origins of their white broderie anglaise tablecloth – Nonna Carmela insists it's an heirloom from Avellino, while daughter-in-law Rossana swears she bought it at a market in Caserta. When Federica brings home her boyfriend Andrea for Easter and he innocently admires the tablecloth, he inadvertently steps into a decades-old family ritual. Through his outsider eyes, the reader sees the argument for what it truly is: not a fight, but a living tradition.
What the Water Remembers
by Suraya_MhdNoor
On the morning her youngest son leaves for Kuala Lumpur with no promise of return, Puan Rohani sits at the edge of an old unused well and speaks his name into the dark. The story quietly explores her grief, her pragmatic faith, and her search for a vessel that can hold loss without offering answers.
When You Have Said the Wrong Thing: A Small Guide to Repairing What Words Have Broken
by NaseemQureshi
This personal essay offers a thoughtful, practical guide on what to do after saying the wrong thing – from managing the initial bodily impulse to apologise impulsively, to delivering a genuine apology, to examining the underlying behaviour. It emphasises honest self-reflection over performative remorse and distinguishes between different kinds of harm caused by words. The piece ends mid-sentence, suggesting it is an unfinished draft.
The Altitude of Borrowed Hands
by shirin_mohammadi
After her grandmother's death, the narrator watches her mother spend three days before opening a wooden box left behind, which contains letters, a brass weight, a photograph of an unrecognized man, and a handwritten list of names ending in the narrator's own, misspelled. The story becomes a quiet meditation on inherited silence, tenderness encoded in error, and the nameless posture passed down through generations of women. What emerges is less a plot than an archaeology of grief and love held in restrained, precise language.
What to Do With a Day That Belongs Only to You
by SiewLan49
The text offers calm, deliberate guidance on how to inhabit a rare free day meaningfully rather than squandering it through habitual busyness. It encourages the reader to pause, follow small inner inclinations, and let experiences unfold without immediately converting them into reportable content. Practical advice is interwoven with quiet philosophical observations about attention and presence.
The Familiarity Trap
by Negar_Rostami
The essay examines how familiarity breeds a form of perceptual blindness, as the brain compresses well-known stimuli into low-resolution shortcuts that drain lived experience of its richness. Drawing on examples from daily commutes to long-term relationships, the author argues that boredom is typically a failure of perception rather than a deficit in the world itself. The text closes with a practical, if incomplete, invitation to cultivate deliberate strangeness as an antidote to habituation.
The Canal That Forgot Its Name
by Krishnamurthy_V
The text examines the Kallanai dam on the Kaveri River in South India, one of the oldest water-diversion structures still in operational use, attributed to the Chola king Karikala. It explores the elegant engineering principle of guiding rather than blocking the river and reflects critically on the role British engineers like Arthur Cotton played in the nineteenth century. Central to the piece is the tension between colonial narratives and the anonymous genius of the original builders.
The Committee for the Provisional Standardisation of Regional Soup
by WChrzanowski
A satirical portrait of a bureaucratic committee that has met every third Tuesday for eleven years to determine an official ceremonial soup, without ever reaching the actual question. With dry, precise wit, the story captures the self-perpetuating absurdity of institutional process divorced entirely from purpose.
The Weight of the Open Drawer
by Schneeberger76
The text explores the Zeigarnik effect – the brain's tendency to fixate on unfinished tasks – and links it to the psychological habit of leaving things open as a shield against the finality of completion. It describes the cognitive drain of indecision and proposes conscious, deliberate choice over compulsive finishing. A gardening metaphor closes the essay, illustrating how half-hearted action often does more harm than none.
Read first, then write
The path to your own story often runs through reading. Browse the short stories on Fireside to find the tone that fits you – then write your own.
New to writing? Our guide to becoming a better writer, tips for overcoming writer's block and an explainer on what editing brings will help you further.
Write a storyFrequently asked questions about writing short stories
How can I publish my own short story online?
On Fireside you create a free account, write your story directly in the editor and publish it with one click. It appears in the discover feed right away and can be read by everyone.
Is it free to publish short stories on Fireside?
Yes. Writing and publishing on Fireside are free and unlimited. There is no cap on how many short stories you can share.
Do my stories have to be true, or can I write fiction?
Both are welcome. Fireside is open to the lived and the imagined – from quiet everyday observations to pure genre fiction. What matters is the story, not whether it really happened.
Will my story be translated automatically?
Yes. When you publish, Fireside automatically creates an English and a German version so readers can find you in both languages.
How long should a short story be?
A short story focuses on a single moment, character or feeling and is usually read in a few minutes. What matters more than length is that it works in one sitting.