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i figured the tweet was about The Lotterry and everyone would go "Oh it's obviously a tweet about The Lottery" but nope.

Hmm, for short stories, it's probably "The Most Dangerous Game."

The themes are pretty disturbing if you stop to think about it, and even if you don't, there's a fair amount of violence.

The one that sticks with me is called "the cold equations", and it's about a pilot flying a ship through space and discovering he has a young girl stowing away on board. Since he only has enough fuel to get to his destination if the ship weighs a very specific amount, he has to decide whether or not to jettison the girl out the airlock. I remember liking it, but I've never forgotten how emotional it was to read.

The egg by Andy Weir

A Rose for Emily.

It was about some old lady hermit. She had some relationship with the town and after she died they went into her house. >!Emily had been sleeping next to the corpse of her dead husband for probably decades!<.

A separate peace was a book we got in highschool where a kid possibly has homosexual feelings for another and throws him out of a tree which shatters his leg and eventually kills him.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Flowers for Algernon, that was thought provoking but also way too heavy for a 7th grade English class.

There's a story called "Time Safari" that ends in a dude just straight up killing another dude. This was in a kid's literature book.

Also I think Casque of Amontillado is funny.

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. Someone did a great adaptation to film as well.

I remember a story about a dying woman who predicted that she would die when the last leaf of a plant outside her house falls. But the leaf actually did fall, and her friend put up a fake one there. The woman gets better but her friend dies because of pneumonia. This was from back when I was maybe 10-11yo and I remember it for some reason. I think the moral of the story is that willpower is strong, but idk about that ending.

The Veldt, by Ray Bradbury.

They didn't make everyone read it though, just us "gifted/advanced" kids. It was one of several short stories that were in a special program book that I had to read.

I still think those kids were brats.

Edit: just looked it up and this was supposed to be 9th grade English??? We fucking had to read that as 5th graders.

Edit 2: I need to stop thinking about this, they also made us read All Summer in a Day, Flowers for Algernon, and The Tell Tale Heart in that class

“The Yellow Wallpaper”

It was quite scarring for most of the kids in my 7th grade class.

Also I’ve only just now realized that wallpaper back then could have contained arsenic so going insane from being in contact with it constantly enough to stain your skin is a very real possibility.

Most of the stuff we read in class was fine, or we knew was going to be fucked up as it was Gifted and Talented class.

The book that fucked me at the time more than those was reading Maus. At like 12. And if I bring it up with mother, she'd say it was my fault for reading it, instead of, you know, maybe she should vet the book instead of going "oh cartoony of the holocaust, that's fine"

Holocaust was fine, every Hanukkah one of our 7 gifts works be a book, and you'd run out of noob holocaust books that relayed to judiasm real quick. But most were written for kids so.

Not Maus

A Modest Proposal was quite memorable

Mine is the one where the soldier returns from WWI completely desensitized to murder and fucked in the head.

He starts stabbing little girls, just like in the war. "Poor people" by Móricz if anyone is interested.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin is the one that came to mind for me.

Touching Spirit Bear

I vividly remember passage describing in great detail of the main character nearly and slowly dying on the island. he was covered with mosquitos and the book dives headfirst into describing in great detail of this guy chewing into a live mouse/rat and then swallowing it.

Top of mind for this subject: Flowers for Algernon.

Of Mice and Men might qualify, but weighs in at 100 pages. I'm not sure what the threshold is for "short."

On my own time in High-school, I read: I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream.

A retiring teacher at our school had his class read a story that lit a fire under a bunch of parents. It was The Star by Arthur C. Clarke

From high middle-high school timeframe, probably The Yellow Wallpaper, I just think about that one at least a few times a year. And I only read it the one time in school.

The less well known one I remember from elementary school was My Brother Sam is Dead. It's about a family during the American revolution, where the father just wants to stay out of all of it and live their lives, but the eldest son wants to join the revolution. The whole story is just the hardships the family has to go through after the son runs off with the only gun to fight and ends up dying, and how that affects the family and the youngest brother, who the story is told from the perspective of.

None of my friends remember My Brother Sam is Dead, but if I'm remembering right, the ending is kinda dark for a bunch of 3-5th graders.

Harrison Bergeron

We had to read a story in 10th grade about this family that's out on a road trip when their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. A car pulls up and the driver steps out to assist the family. However, the grandmother (who up to this point was doing nothing but bitch and whine about everything) recognizes the stranger as a wanted criminal she saw on TV and stupidly points this out to everybody. Which naturally results in the entire family being executed one-by-one because they're now witnesses.

A whole family erased, just because granny couldn't keep her fat mouth shut for 5 minutes.

There was a short story I read by one of the great Russian authors (name escapes me atm). A young man made a bet with a banker that he would spend 10 years in solitary confinement and be provided with any reading material he asked for. If he could endure it the whole 10 years, the banker would reward him with a handsome amount of money.

Fantastic story, thought about it pretty regularly throughout college.

If this rings any bells, I'd love to be reminded of the name!

Edit: Nvm, I found it! The Bet by Anton Chekhov

I still often think about "Flowers for Algernon."

My senior year in high school, my English teacher started the year by having us turn in a list of all of the books we had read. My list was much longer than most of my classmates. He then assigned us books to read and report on based on some criteria (hypothesis: books that would make us miserable). I got assigned two existentialist plays, "Waiting for Godot" and "No Exit." I think those plays did permanent damage to my psyche.

(Sidenote: a classmate who didn't read very much got assigned Virginia Wolff. She thought it very unfair that I only had to rea d couple of plays.)

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K Leguin

The one that stuck with me is The Cask of Amontillado.

1984 for me. This was back in the early 80's so the book was a bit of a deal at the time. So very very glad I was introduced to this book at such a young age. Disturbing, but a good preparation for the world I was going to be living in as an adult.

The Most Dangerous Game