Fiction

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…

When Burns arrived in Kotzebue, they were shooting the dogs. He'd never been to Alaska before and it seemed without compromise. Weather had kept him in Nome for two days where he'd seen a saloon fire. He'd been across the street in a shop buying chocolate and bottled water, and the eerie frozen scene mesmerized…

The Bighorns float above the haze to the west of our ranch like marble palaces in a fairy tale. Until the woman came, we'd never been up in those mountains. My father kept us to work day after day, or else there was school, and, until the woman, he'd said he couldn't leave the ranch…