Great Stories Well-Told Are Like Arrowheads

That is to say, they’re out there to be found, but you have to know where to look. At least in this metaphorical case the arrowheads are still being manufactured. 

The following is a case in point from a Facebook page called Green Text, which refers to the Reddit and chan board custom of posting in green text to indicate the text is either a story/anecdote, a quote, or a summation of another post. Normally colored text can and often does follow, sometimes to provide the punchline.

It’s a visual language unto itself, but easily acquired. My point is, you won’t find anything published by the Big Five publishing houses to match the chills in this story. Long ago, in a world far, far away, writers like Saki, O. Henry, and Guy de Maupassant specialized in tales like this. You could read them in regular little magazines devoted to such things; can you imagine that? 

Anyway, I can hear these once popular, now nearly forgotten masters cackling from beyond the grave as I get towards the end:

Probably the darkest Be Careful What You Wish For tale I’ve ever read. If there’s a darker one, I’m glad I forgot it.

I pray to God this is fiction. The hell of it is, it’s a hell of a world and we might not even be hearing the worst of it.

To end on a happy note, though, I trust those who have followed the links embedded in the author’s names have realized you can read their best works for free on the Internet. (These people are long dead; they don’t mind.) Of course, green text stories such as the above can be found browsing boards on Reddit, 4chan, or 8chan. They can be as crude as they are crudely formatted, punctuated, etc., but there is more life to many of these anonymously posted tales that you will find in any celebrity author-edited Best Short Stories of 20__ collections of stylized tedium.

For readers and writers alike, these are great days to be alive. Even as illiteracy and coarseness seem to be metastasizing across our culture, these may very well be the best of times. The Good Stuff is out there. You only have to look, read, and enjoy.