Bedtime stories for grown-ups.

Written to be read out loud, by one person to another, in the dark.

Most of us stopped being read to somewhere around the age of eight, and never quite stopped wanting it. Being read to is not the same as reading. You give up the pace. You give up choosing what happens next. Someone else is minding the story, which leaves you free to just lie there and receive it — a posture adults almost never get.

Sojourn makes stories for exactly that. Not children's stories, and not simplified ones. Stories pitched at the register of fairy tales, wonder and directness and a bit of mythic weather, carrying things you have to have lived a while to feel.

What a night is

A story runs three, five or seven nights. You read one night and you stop, the way a chapter used to end whether you were ready or not. Every night opens with the same six words, spoken aloud by whoever is reading: This happened, or it will. It puts the story outside of time. It is “once upon a time” for people old enough to know the old stories keep happening.

Underneath the reading there is a score. Each story has a bed composed for it and nothing else, room sound that earns its place or stays quiet, and small cues that arrive as the text reaches them. Now and then the story asks the reader to choose, and the following night bends to what they chose.

Read aloud, or narrated

Most nights, someone reads. That is the whole point of the thing, and everything in the app is built to get out of the way of it — the pages turn on a tap, the light drops as the night goes on, nothing pings. Some nights nobody can. Travel, illness, a week that got away from you. A narrator reads it instead, and the score plays the same either way.

Read one tonight

The Bird and the Deep is here in full: three nights, narrated, scored, free. There is no account to make and nothing to install. It works on a phone propped against a lamp, and it works rather better through a speaker.

Coming to iPhone soon.

Still wondering

Whether it works on your own, what happens when you miss a night, how the stories get written: the questions people actually ask.