As a child growing up in Colorado, I equated winter with gut-plunging snowbanks and crashing icicles, cold blue days and crystalline nights. Later, I moved to Arizona, and while winter in the Sonoran Desert wears its own brand of beauty, I missed skating on the rippled ice of a frozen mountain lake, the deep quiet […]
In spring we swell full with waters from upstream, brought down from broken mountains under the power of the nearer sun. Our pale ice-blanket weakens, then cracks, then splits into floes, then reintegrates into watery darkness. Warmed, we wake from sleep. At sunset our rocks trade the hooting calls of loons, drawn by the clarity […]
Adnela slipped the still-warm duck egg into her apron pocket and smiled. For the first time in weeks she would have something to eat besides thin porridge. On her hands and knees, she backed out of the coop, straw fouling her skirts.She was halfway across the poultry yard when something struck her in the back […]
An acre a year was all they asked. I agreed. Fifty acres was too much for William to work anyway, even with my help.The first year, William didn’t notice. I stood on the hill behind the house and surveyed the fields below. Cows, hay, alfalfa, corn, sweet potatoes. It looked the same as the day […]
The house sat a little back from the road, its leaning porch and sagging roof giving it a slump-shouldered look. In the front yard, the rusted shell of a pickup perched on blocks amid an ocean of weeds.Connor pulled his rented Acura off the road and studied the house for a while. Aside from a […]
You would think it’s hard when the villain’s henchmen strafe our house with photon lasers. Every Tuesday they saunter up next to our chicken coop, mustaches twitching in unison, and blast the house full of holes. They always seem surprised when no bodies are there to pile in a heap in the yard because we […]
With my thread, I write murderer. I write colonizer when I patch up the soldier’s clothes and I hope they wear it to their graves.Ma, you taught me threadwork charms on a kitchen smock, just like your mother taught you. On your lap, I learnt to embroider love onto my future husband’s shirt for when […]
Rural Fantasy might at first sound redundant. Aren’t many major fantasy stories set in rural places? The Hero’s Journey, for example, often begins with a farm boy or a hobbit in a pastoral setting. However, in its typical progression, the hero leaves their rural homeland to venture into the larger world in order to save […]
The cloudman arrived on the driest day of a dry year. Folk lifted their feet carefully as they walked, for the slightest scuffing sent tawny dust billowing into the air. They scarved their mouths against the floating grit and squinted their eyes against the seething sun, which hung in a vast baked-blue sky clear in […]
Ethel lassoes the twister but can’t break the beast. It whips her off the ground, carries her a hundred miles before spitting her up.Edgar, her brother, finds her hours later among a heap of splintered telephone poles and tattered cattle. He offers happy tears at first because she’s alive, stomping about, berating herself for letting […]