Short Story | Cold Storage

A short story writing contest submission.

I have a spot for night people.

Graveyard shift servers. Line cooks. Nurses. The one person running a place at 2 a.m. while the rest of the world pretends to be asleep. Folks who know exactly how loud a humming freezer sounds when the dining room is empty and the coffee burnt an hour ago.

So I wrote a story for them. It’s called “Cold Storage,” it lives over on Reedsy, and I would love for you to go read it there. Here is the spoiler-free version of what you are walking into:

Nina works the graveyard shift at a small diner. There is a storm outside, a walk-in freezer in the back, and something she has been avoiding for a long time. One night, the power flickers, the clock stops behaving, and the quiet she has been hiding inside finally gives out on her.

Nothing with tentacles shows up. Nobody starts chanting in Latin. No one reads from a cursed book they found in the basement. This is not that kind of horror.

This is the kind where the building is ordinary. The job is ordinary. The people are ordinary. And the thing that will not leave you alone is the memory you keep trying not to replay.

“Cold Storage” is about what happens when you can’t distract yourself with work anymore. When the shift slows down, the storm rolls in, and you run out of places to stand in the diner that are not next to the one door you do not want to touch.

I wanted to write about guilt that has overstayed its lease. The strange loyalty we feel to the places where something went wrong. How it feels to be the one who stayed, long after the moment everyone else moved past on paper.

If you have ever stood in the back of a workplace and thought, “If I open that door, I will have to think about everything I am not thinking about,” then you are exactly who I had in mind. From a craft side, it is a pretty tight little piece. There is one location, one long night, a very small cast, and a lot of conversation where what is not being said weighs as much as what is.

No twists spoiled here. You find out what you find out in the order Nina does.

But Harvey! Why are you posting this on Reedsy? Why not just post it all here?

Reedsy runs weekly short story contests. Readers can like and comment on stories, and that activity helps those pieces travel farther across the site. If a story gets some traction, it’s more likely to be seen by people who have no idea who I am, which is exactly the point.

So if you could read “Cold Storage” on Reedsy, you are doing two things at once:

1. Getting a complete, standalone short story about a night shift that does not involve a single chainsaw.
2. Helping me signal to the Reedsy algorithm that this story is worth recommending to strangers who like their horror quiet and a little too honest.

If you are willing, I’d love if you would click over to the story on Reedsy and read it all the way through. If it lands for you, hit the little 👍and drop a quick comment. Your comment does not have to be a full review. “Oof,” “This hit hard,” or “I have worked this shift” are all perfectly valid responses.

Here is the link: https://reedsy.com/short-story/0mnm0f/

I will keep using this site to talk about the writing itself: process, themes, the weird little choices that go into turning a walk-in freezer into a pressure cooker. But if you want to actually experience the story, Reedsy is where it lives. The first draft of the story was twice as long as this one, but the contest limits the length of entries, so I had to cut it back. Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll polish the full story and publish it somewhere.

Go spend a night at Della’s Diner with Nina. Listen to the storm. Listen to the freezer. Listen to the one conversation she has been avoiding.

I’ll be here when you get back.

Author’s Note

I have always been fascinated by the things we live with quietly. The mistakes we replay. The doors we avoid. The way a single night can follow us for years. “Cold Storage” started as a simple “what if” and became a story about the weight of memory and the hollow ache of forgiveness. If you felt something in the quiet between lines, then I am glad it found you.

Photo: Longhorn Mechanical