Short Stories
I love short stories – reading and writing. I’ve earned a few awards and had a few published. Since my first novel THE LITTLE AMBULANCE WAR OF WINCHESTER COUNTY with Catalyst Press, I have chosen to write a story a month and publish to a mailing list of 9000 folks. I presently (2026) run this on Substack and while happy for paid subscriptions, I give them to readers with the hope that you buy books, audiobooks and help me sell more books by talking about them and enjoying them with friends in a book group.
Come find more at TrowbridgeDispatch.IamAiken.com
AND! Yes, this is also a podcast.
About the Stories
Having spent 34 years (ok, nearly 4 decades) in public safety and public service, I write stories about the every day heroes who respond to the calls people make for help. My stories will make you laugh, you might offer me a tear, and hopefully, you appreciate the neighbors who decided to help others.
When stories are submitted to contests, they are withheld from general distribution until their anthology is released. I normally have 2-4 stories grinding through some hidden mill…
The Short Stories ARE sponsored by
2026 Stories
Stories written by I.M. Aiken in 2026
The Valley
…The paradox of the widespread loneliness crisis is that we each stare into a human-manifested suite of technology we have mislabeled as The Web. I question which is worse: the sense of modern digital isolation or the profound acknowledgement that we humans are but one. We, naturally, form a web. What we do unto ourselves affects all. I walked the valley of death learning that the valley is neither remote, nor hidden, but ever present. It isn’t just the death that pains me but the human behavior in the teeth of tragedy.
I am a node in a mycelial-like species. Invisible and fragile hyphae communicate between us all. I am one. Silent tears return unbidden.
August 2026
It Matters
…You, now, own this too. When we send Americans into harm’s way, may we do it with honor. If our fallen fail to come home, may we remember them correctly, and completely. Instead of sharing the plaque from Iraq with silly Stanley and his googly eyes, let me present a more meaningful plaque the family sent to me, after Roland was awarded the Defense of Freedom medal from our nation.
We need to promise ourselves that we will count correctly, honor oaths, spell names correctly, and align images with people.
July 2026
Echoes of a Lincoln Song
Ancient roads etch the landscape of the Harrington property. Stonewalls bound acres once planted. The ruins of a house rest quietly in the brambles. In the brief walk from my childhood home through the marsh, over a well-worn esker and down to these ancient roads, I would seek treasures. Treasures included the rusted carcass of an automobile from the 1920s, fresh water springs, footprints of raccoon and pheasant tail feathers….
JuNE 2026
Kahlil’s Wall
Winner of 2026 Next Generation Short Story Award in the “Inspirational Category”. Access withheld until after publication of anthology
May 2026
Stacy from M.E. (Middle East)
Learning to sit still in a dining facility during a mortar or rocket attack takes (1) resignation; (2) some stupidity; (3) the ability to curb nature’s urge to flee. I once watched mortar and rocket attacks using the childhood technique of counting the interval between flash and bang to gauge the distance between the lights just-over-there and my own ass. I would have loved a bunker. The lesson came as: “If no place is safe, then you do not run toward safety.”
May 2026
Cardboard Undies, Endless Wars, & Tides of History
I.M. Aiken spent 2006 as member of a military unit in Iraq as a government civilian. She has a new novel releasing this summer/fall that incorporate her journal entries and ties them to ancestral stories of a soldier during the Reconstruction Period that followed the American Civil War. This story is a revised chapter from that upcoming novel. Links to current events will pop for you. This journal entry is from precisely 20 years ago this month, the author (me) seems to pleading for a description of the end game. Not different from March of 2026. And actually, not too different from 1898 and 1871 America, either, a theme in the upcoming novel. Note that in fictionalizing the journals, the roll of the storyteller morphed from the author to a fictional soldier, and made it a letter home.
March 2026
If you Can, You Must
A five am 911 call means: woke up dead or super sick. Whatever lays ahead, this morning offers the frigid beauty of a Vermont morning. Peeing, prepping before rushing into deep cold, I admire the monster-sized full moon approaching the horizon. I am again awed by the sparkling cascade of clear-sky snow that floats on days like these.
March 2026
2025 Stories
Stories written and recorded in 2025
When Medics Fall
Aiken, a long time medic and first responder fell from a roof then got air lifted, spent 11 days in the hospital and just the right number of surgeries…
November 2025
The Night the Plane Crashed
911 calls are both random and consistent. If the tones drop anytime between 0530 to 0800, you anticipate a long, slow, difficult call with little to do. It is the classic time for families to discover that Granny or Gump woke up dead. Nights and evenings: car wrecks. Wintertime: house fires. Springtime: chasing phantom barn fires while Vermonters boil sap.
September 2025
Murmuration
The sublime moment of feeling part of a team
In a town this small, saying “that address is familiar” feels stupid. We’ve only got 70 miles of roads and a few hundred year-round residents. Paved road, steepish drive on the north side, opening to a small clearing that contains a beige double-wide home. Three steps up to the door centered on the building. I don’t know why, but the lady of the house fusses at me each time I show up. She’ll need a name because this story is about her, or it is about me, you’ll figure it out, I suppose, and tell me. We’ll call her Terri, a nice benign name…
August 2025
Three Faces of Raven
A fun short story about working in Alaska at the intersection of cultures and history
I’m tired of traveling. I might blame the weather, but instead I’ll blame my boss. My boss is a passive aggressive, screaming, immature, crisis-creating, Seventh-day Adventist, vegetarian asshole. It is the “asshole” bit that matters the most, not his diets. We spent last Friday in Kodiak together. I got to listen to him misrepresent the capabilities of technology, misrepresent the scope of the mission, then I got to sit in his rental car while he drove around the island like a NYC cabby. All starting and stopping—break, gas—break, gas….
August 2025
The Joker
A story told by Alex Flynn, the main character from Little Ambulance Wars
As I told you, this Boston kid was raised by a cop from Ireland. I studied Russian in school during the early 1980s. Not sure of the wisdom given I spent the nineties in dark spaces: windowless buildings in regions of the planet that were dark, or light, or hovered in forever dusk.
July 2025
Three Faces of Raven
A fun short story about working in Alaska at the intersection of cultures and history
I’m tired of traveling. I might blame the weather, but instead I’ll blame my boss. My boss is a passive aggressive, screaming, immature, crisis-creating, Seventh-day Adventist, vegetarian asshole. It is the “asshole” bit that matters the most, not his diets. We spent last Friday in Kodiak together. I got to listen to him misrepresent the capabilities of technology, misrepresent the scope of the mission, then I got to sit in his rental car while he drove around the island like a NYC cabby. All starting and stopping—break, gas—break, gas….
July 2025
First CorN
Laughter and butter dripping from chins as Vermont EMTs/Paramedics create an impromptu festival around the first sweet corn of the season.
My bruddahs at the Leeds Vermont ambulance station celebrate First Corn. Infectious enthusiasm. The ersatz holy-day emerges from the back of A-2 where that crew pencil-whips the daily checklist.
“I’m gwanna eat so much corn, I’ll shit kernels ’til Thursday.”
From his partner, “The butter and salt will drip down my chin.”
With my checklist for A-1 in my hand I sing an old song my mother taught me:
June 2025
The Curious
A funny and disgusting story of EMTs self-guided anatomy lab
We’re all curious, right?
We want to do better, understand more, and help people live better lives in the minutes we have been our swaddling clothes and our death shrouds.
June 2025
Rubber Duckies
A humorous take on EMTs being creepy-ish
A baby burping on mommy’s shoulder, and a flying hat.
Buster Keaton doing any gag, and a Van Dyke prat,
And little yellow rubber ducky with a sailor’s cap,
These are some of the funniest things.
A yellow rubber duck is always funny.
A clam’s squirt is always funny.
And some positions that dead bodies put themselves in are sometimes funny.
MAY 2025
The Firefighter’s Statue
A New Year’s Eve House Fire in Sub-zero temps…
I give Sam a push. She ignores the tones from my radio. She has ignored the multiple alerts telling us that someone dialed 9-1-1.
“Wanna come?” She doesn’t, I know that. She sleeps and fights my efforts. Wills.
Three-alarm fire west of Langford.
“They’ve toned for an ambulance to the scene three times.”
April 2025
WHen Johnny Goes Marching Away
A striking look at what happens when cops leave an area
“Is” is. “Is” remains distinct from “should be,” “could be,” “was,” and “shall be.”
With that bleak thought, I then sit down in the Trowbridge Elementary School’s principal’s office. I’ve been here before, but that is another story. He has a round table with two chairs. Thankfully, adult chairs. Meaning the lieutenant and I each take a chair, a chair usually occupied by a parent who came in here for a meeting with the principal.
April 2025
Cooking Bacon with Propane
Sometimes is doesn’t go entirely wrong
“Are you with the fire department?” the guy with the chainsaw asks.
“No.” I answer while walking to the recently buried propane tank. I lift a plastic cover then switch the gas to the house off. The tank had been buried next to the stand-alone garage with buried copper pipe running to the house and the small generator that was hidden below busy aspens.
“Can you show me the leak?”
“Right up here. I wrapped a red plastic bag around it.”
April 2025
My Promise
You are my reader. You are gold to me. I will never share or sell your information. I will share only short stories and major announcements such as new publications, awards, etc.