David Rodeback’s Fiction

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In Which I Read My Fiction Aloud for World Read Aloud Day 2025

Posted on by David Rodeback

Today is World Read Aloud Day — or WRAD, because the world needs more acronyms. Is this the first you’re hearing of it?

The website says “15th annual,” but I first encountered WRAD only last year. I was not in time to do anything about it, except to make a note to do something about it this year.

A nonprofit called LitWorld created WRAD “to celebrate the power of reading aloud to create community and amplify new stories, and to advocate for literacy as a foundational human right.” Worthy causes all. Their website, LitWorld.org, has an activity packet, a social media kit, a web form to report your own activities, and many other resources, including links to – you guessed it – people reading aloud.

LitWorld and WRAD mostly focus on reading aloud to children, and we could make a long list of the benefits of doing that. But just between you and me, good things happen to youth and adults too, when we read aloud or are read to. I submitted a column to a local newspaper this week on that very topic. (I’ll link to it here if and when it’s published.)

To me, the obvious thing to do for WRAD is (ahem) to read aloud. So I got up early to read into a good microphone Monday morning before work, did some light editing after work, and now it’s just under 20 minutes of audio, with me reading three pieces of my own fiction aloud.

Here’s the file. It contains:

  • “Marie,” a very short, award-winning story about a seventh-grade boy who likes a girl. It’s flash fiction, about 1,000 words.
  • “I Dreamed You Died Thursday Night,” another piece of flash fiction, unpublished so far except here, in which a man’s dream one Thursday night leads to paranoia when he’s awake.
  • The (short) prologue and (short) first chapter of The Dad Who Stayed, a novella with a child’s-eye-view of growing up in a progressive university town in the early 1970s. It’s published in my 2023 Silver Quill Award-winning collection, The Dad Who Stayed and Other Stories.

Enjoy! I hope your WRAD is (I can’t believe I’m about to write this) rad.

(Can reading aloud can make you — give you? — w rizz? Don’t answer that.)

Image credit: ChatGPT4

From the Author

David Rodeback

Thanks for reading!

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And if you’re interested in my published fiction, check out my two published collections at 60 East Press.

David Rodeback - published fiction books
Christmas, David Rodeback's Fiction, Free Short Stories - Unpublished

Abolishing Christmas (a short story)

Posted on by David Rodeback

Isaac turned the corner in the airport terminal and smiled warmly through his exhaustion. “Councilman Hirsch,” said the homemade sign in big block letters. The man holding the sign was Evan Jackson, his fellow city councilman. Evan’s welcoming, ironic grin said he was glad to see his friend but also enjoyed the gag of treating him like a VIP.

“Shalom, my friend,” said Evan without irony.

“Shalom,” Isaac said. They briefly embraced. “Thanks for picking me up.”

“My pleasure. How was your flight?”

“The second seemed as long as the first, though obviously it wasn’t.” Tel Aviv to JFK was hours longer than JFK to Salt Lake City. “How’s Dani?”

“My better half sends her greetings,” said Evan, “but she’s helping a different friend today.”

“Our loss.” Dani and Isaac’s own wife, Tovi, had been dear friends – but Tovi had been in the grave nearly a year.

Tovi, he thought. Toviel. God is good. He was just starting to believe that again – and though he had not always seen it, it had been the perfect name for her.

“How was your pilgrimage?” Evan asked as they waited by the baggage carousel.

“When I am there, I feel holiness. When I leave, some of it seems to come with me.”

“As it should,” said Evan.

“Yes, and I’d like to prolong it this time, if I can. I thought of you, by the way. The shofar was impressive, and I know your fondness for trumpets. And another reason.”

“What was that?”

“You call it the Holy Land too,” Isaac said. “Next year you and Dani should join me.”

“Let’s do it.” Evan’s sudden smile faded. “Forgive my asking, but how was it, you know, without … ?

“Holiness and loneliness are not incompatible. I managed to enjoy one despite the other. Perhaps it helped that I missed last year, because of her passing, and the year before too.”

“Because of her illness,” his friend said softly.

“Yes. Thanks for the card you gave me as I left. I rather enjoy having gentile friends who know better than to wish a Jew ‘happy Yom Kippur.’” He smiled sadly. “Happiness is not the point.”

“Holiness is more the point, as I understand it,” said Evan, “and I wish I could help you prolong it, but we need to have a serious chat with you this afternoon.”

“You said Dani didn’t come.”

“She didn’t. Vern’s waiting in the truck.”

“An unexpected turnout,” Isaac said. “It’s council business, then.” Vern Fellows chaired the Helaman City Council.

David Rodeback's Fiction, Free Short Stories - Published

There Might Be Another Way (a short story)

Posted on by David Rodeback

Pia had slept as late as she dared on a Sunday. She slipped into a pew halfway up the right side of the chapel just as the bishop stepped to the pulpit to begin the weekly sacrament meeting. She’d looked almost human in the mirror before leaving home, which was pretty good, considering.

She listened conscientiously to the announcements, which had little to do with her, then sang the opening hymn, “Jehovah, Lord of Heaven and Earth,” with as much of her usual fervor as she could muster. Her focus drifted during the brief invocation by one of her neighbors. It drifted further during some quick items of congregation business. But she managed to keep trying, at least, to ponder the Savior and his sacrifice, as the deacons passed the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper to the congregation. Everyone at church called the bread and water simply “the sacrament,” but in the privacy of her own thoughts she preferred the more solemn and evocative phrase.

The bishop announced the first speakers, a girl of about fourteen and an old man she’d seen on Sundays but didn’t know, and she drifted away again. She flipped to the Notes app on her smart phone, where she’d composed a sort of letter in the wee, desperate hours—a letter full of things she could never say or send to Doug, her back fence neighbor.

She saw him in his usual place, across the chapel, sitting alone, one row further back, in a heather gray suit (her favorite) and a gorgeous green necktie. She tried to envision him sitting with a wife, when he had one, but she didn’t know him then, and she’d never seen his ex.

She should have entered the chapel from the other side, even if it took half a minute longer to get to the other door. She could have asked to share his pew. He’d have agreed, of course, and she’d have been no more distracted than now. She should have left for church a minute earlier.

Doug’s posture was attentive, but she recognized the expression of a man who was somewhere else. He often looked like that, though not when he was teaching the adult Sunday school class or chatting with her afterward, and usually not in their occasional conversations over their common fence.

What she’d written overnight, as if to him, was unthinkable, but she couldn’t resist reading it again.

David Rodeback's Fiction, Free Short Stories - Published

Her Voice (a short story)

Posted on by David Rodeback

There’s nothing like the sound of a mom reading to her children, when they’re your children too. It’s the exact opposite of their nightmares, the universal antidote to whatever imagined horrors the darkness may conceal. It works on me too, easing me away from today’s and tomorrow’s cares. And everything sounds better in Ann’s British accent.

“The Tale of Peter Rabbit, by Beatrix Potter. Read by Mum, for Jake and Amber.

“Once upon a time, there were four little Rabbits, and their names were . . .”

Jake and Amber are still young enough to enjoy snuggling in our bed for their bedtime stories, and they’re small enough to fit there between Ann and me. I’m in my pajamas because my bedtime is early too; I have to be on station by 5:00 a.m., almost an hour away. On work nights I hardly ever hear the end of the first story. I love falling asleep to Ann’s voice.

When it’s not a work night, I’m there for stories anyway. I love staying awake to her voice.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, half-awake for a fleeting moment, I’ll put my arm around the warm body beside me, and she’ll snuggle against me in her sleep and purr. At 3:45 a.m., when it’s time for me to get up, I try not to wake her, but she drowsily welcomes and sometimes returns a hug and kiss before falling back into sleep for a couple more hours.

I shower, dress, and pause for a moment in each child’s doorway, gazing happily on small, quietly slumbering forms in the pale white glow of the moon. Then it’s off to work.

That’s how things are for me at home, how they’re supposed to be. I’m not content with everything in my life, and I don’t always love a routine, but I love this one.

That is, I loved it until the storm came.

David Rodeback's Fiction, Free Short Stories - Unpublished

I Already Did (a short story)

Posted on by David Rodeback

Erin tried gently to pull me off the trail. It curved to the right; she wanted to go left. “Let’s go this way, Gary.”

The heavy overcast made it dark for late morning, but I’d have seen another path if it were really there.

We appeared to have the wilderness to ourselves for miles around, including the trail into the parched foothills, to what I thought was our destination. We’d hidden my scooter just in case, so no one would see it from the road, the trail, or the little parking lot.

“This is a perfectly good gravel path,” I said. “We’ll be less likely to meet snakes and other deadly things, if we stay on it.”

She smiled patiently. “Why is that?”

“Because things with claws, fangs, or big teeth know the humans use this path, so they probably avoid it. Unless there’s a bear waiting to steal our picnic basket.”

“I’m not sure it works that way.” She stared at the path, and her face darkened. “I don’t like this path. Too violent.”

I cocked my head and stared at her. “Too violent?”

“Look at all the little gravel,” she said. “You think it got that way on its own?”

“Got what way?” I rumbled. I loved her, weird thoughts and all, but today I was in no mood for crazy.

“All broken up, with sharp corners and rough edges. Imagine the violence required to turn ordinary rocks into this, so they can make a path out of it.”

I’d once heard a rock crusher at fairly close range. The sound was horrific, but it wasn’t from rocks screaming in agony or in fear of a painful death. You had to live to die.

“Besides, this path doesn’t go where we’re going,” she added, almost as an afterthought.

“Okay.”

We set off across the reddish ground, through the grayish sagebrush, toward a gap in the brownish foothills.

David Rodeback's Fiction, Free Short Stories - Unpublished

Wildfire (a short story)

Posted on by David Rodeback

Getting to Maylee’s going-away party at all was a thing. My cousin Jaxson and I took a state highway into the country and turned onto a small road, then a smaller road, then one that rattled my teeth and wasn’t even paved. I didn’t complain. Jaxson was a nice guy, but he’d just call me a city girl again.

Just past a farmhouse and a dark cluster of outbuildings, we turned onto a trail around the edge of a field. We were eight miles from town, he said. It felt like fifty.

The bumps on the trail were bigger but fewer than on the road. Jaxson drove cautiously, except where a leaking irrigation line had flooded the trail. We sailed through that swamp at reckless speed, so we wouldn’t get stuck.

“I love doing that,” he said.

I considered prying my white-knuckled hands from the center armrest and the handle above my door. Maybe not yet.

The trail cut away from the field, and the headlights probed an unearthly scene – broken, jagged, black lava, with scattered, stunted brush and forlorn tufts of grass that wasn’t green.

Jackrabbits scampered across our path, then a fatter, lumbering thing. A groundhog, maybe. I didn’t ask.

Miles later, or maybe a hundred yards, another field opened before us, nestled among the lava. It looked like grass – green, this time – but he guessed it was wheat or barley. The headlights didn’t reach across it.

We parked with other muddy vehicles in a sort of grassy cove, with no lava but no grain planted either. We’d walk along the edge of the field, he said, to another cove with a fire and some old logs for seating. He’d been here before.

Thick clouds hid the stars, and there was no moon. Darkness was never this black in the city.

David Rodeback's Fiction, Free Short Stories - Unpublished

Open Windows (a very short story)

Posted on by David Rodeback

I’m with my critique group in someone’s back yard. They’ve read a draft of my latest short story this week, and it’s time for critiques. They won’t be cruel. They’ll praise what they like but pull no punches. I need them not pulling punches. We’re trying to become better writers.

Tonight, though, maybe I need to feel safe more than I need to improve. What they don’t know, and I won’t tell them, is that this story isn’t purely fiction. It’s about a part of my past I don’t talk about.

Until now.

Coincidentally, I also have fresh messages to call both my parents. The timing is troubling. We weren’t due to speak again for another two months, on my birthday.

In our group Peter (historical thrillers) is the sensitive one. He goes first, from across the table. Tonight I’d rather he went last. He’s our Balm of Gilead.

“Jeri, this is fiction, right? And the female MC isn’t you?”

By rule, authors just listen to the critiques, but we’re not strict. “It’s fiction,” I say. “She’s not me.”

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David Rodeback's Fiction, Free Short Stories - Unpublished

Not Here (a short story)

Posted on by David Rodeback

Dublin, c. 2055

Grandpa’s antique accordion wheezed gently. Its bellows breathed the cool, damp Irish air for the first reedy notes of my song. Grandpa was long dead, but his polished instrument came alive in my hands, as always. It had been safely in its case during my transit between the fishing boat and the shore, so it was untouched by the salt spray that had touched everything else.

I played a tune that had haunted me from the moment I first heard him play it at his home, after a service at his Russian Orthodox cathedral in London. That was back when London – part of London – was still a vibrant, multiethnic showpiece.

The city wasn’t like that anymore. It had decayed into lukewarm tribal warfare, like the rest of the Pan-European Alliance for Peace and Social Justice. A hundred factions chose their allies and fought their enemies with laws, protests, barricades, and often weapons. Alliances shifted and shifted again, and the conflict continued.

“In church this song for only voices, unaccompanied,” Grandpa explained in his thick Russian accent. I had tried for years to master that accent, with its rich, long vowels, but I couldn’t. In truth I spoke poorly in words, accented or otherwise. Everything music was to me, words were not.