James Foster Reed: Stories

A story in the Modern Olympus Universe
A woman takes her infant son to a river. She wades into cold, moving water. What she does takes seconds. The protection it gives him will last a lifetime.

A small town laughs at the first automobile as a noisy nuisance, but over a decade the joke slowly reverses itself: blacksmiths, bankers, farmers, doctors, and even the town’s fiercest horse loyalists discover that the motorcar is not a passing toy, but the future arriving muddy, loud, useful, and inevitable.

When an ordinary office worker develops a bizarre condition that causes her to wake up in the middle of an orgasm, the real challenge isn’t the mystery of her body - it’s discovering who in her life can actually handle the truth.

In a regime where nothing is seen and nothing is forgotten, the leader’s sister exercises power from within the palace. Composed in public, exacting in private, she moves through a system where control is absolute and every silence carries meaning.

A story in the Modern Olympus Universe
A man trades a secret about Zeus for water, outsmarts Death, talks his way out of the underworld on a technicality, and lives long enough to watch the city he built drink from the spring he bargained for. When Hermes comes for him, unhurried, he goes without a fight. In Tartarus, he accepts his punishment.

For nine years, Snake Island’s timber rattlesnakes have been a conservation success. Then animals begin dying, sightings spread, and rats pour from Calder’s abandoned mill. Everyone knows the snakes are safely isolated offshore. Everyone may be wrong. As spring turns to summer, a struggling Massachusetts town faces an ecological disaster born from good intentions, bad assumptions, and a species protected by law.

A romantic dinner, a charming entomologist, and one very enthusiastic off-menu dish. Technically Edible is a comedy of manners about the distance between good intentions and good judgment. Measured, in this case, in legs.

Her name is Twix. It's the one she picked. She pulls espresso, keeps the tip jar exactly one hand's width from the edge, notices what everyone's hands are doing, and does not explain herself. It's a good life. She chose it. The rest is her business, and she is very good at keeping what's hers.