Fiction

1. Come back, little Sheeba. That's Uncle Jack thinking he's being smart, but I don't answer. I keep picking strawberries, my fingers red as the berries so I get mixed up thinking I'm seeing a ripe one to grab when it's only my own hand deep in the green leaves. Twenty quarts, twenty-one quarts. One…

Cal used to be president of their fraternity. But then he was in a car wreck. Cal and Hap and a group of boys from the fraternity house had been out to the bars, and they were on their way home. Afterward Hap often pictured Cal dipping his hand into a cooler of beer, letting…

It was just me and my brother Paul at the coops when Hondo come home with his new truck, ready to kill. He'd been down at Rose's, drinking hard, and as he lurched across the lawn I stepped out in front of him like a fool. You see, me and Paul, we're looking out for…

Lewis Houser and his thirteen-year-old son, Nathan, were hiding behind a toolshed in the tragic state of Missouri. They had been like that for over an hour-waiting-ready to salvage their lives and take what was theirs. "Ground rule number one," Lewis had told Nathan earlier, "is no talking, not even a single word, because the…

I saw my first ghost when I was nine years old, only I didn’t know it was a ghost at the time. This was on the Great Plains, in South Dakota, I think, on our way to the Black Hills. I was with my mother, my three-year-old sister, Lillie, and my new stepfather, Forrest Bender,…

Your television flickers. You're alone, your wife on a week-long visit to friends, so you watch the late news. Tonight is entirely about the Berlin Wall: the Germanies reunite, laughing and weeping Germans chip away at the Wall itself. One has a carpenter's hammer, another a sledge, another a crowbar. The sight pleases you; the…

It was one hundred and seven that June day. The swamp cooler on the roof had lowered the temperature down to the high nineties, and the walls and furniture were damp to the touch. I felt clammy and restless but there was nowhere to go except to the shopping center. My husband had flown to…

The first time Sam ever left her children behind to go away by herself, they were two and five. It was a long time ago. She went to a hot springs resort, where she met a very hairy man. Because the man had been there before, and Sam had not, he offered to take her…

When I crossed the border on foot at Scobey six months after the general amnesty, and two weeks after Dad passed on, no brass bands were playing-but it was a well-known fact that even the actual vets didn't get parades. It was a typical eastern Montana March day-wind that had took a running start at…