Though Penny hadn’t used it in weeks, the skillet was crusted with meat. As she scrubbed, yellow bits of sponge tumbled into the water. When she glanced to the window over the sink, a gasp tore from her chest as she met the eye of a buck. He was in profile, so close that a […]
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 […]
Twelve-year-old Tibby Wallace takes the winter with him when he dies, but it’s an act of rage. Summer scrapes through the valley overnight. Pollens convulse, lakes flood. Hundreds of snowshoe hares wear their December-whites in the sudden verdure; easy prey for owls, foxes, Mazzie Mako’s feral cats. Soft, torn bodies everywhere. Tibby evokes eight-foot-tall stalks […]
Judge Davis’s voice boomed in the dry heat. “Billy Crabtree, I sentence you to death by hanging for eleven counts of train robbery and three counts of murder. Do you have any last words?” Billy’s horse stirred in the dirt under the oak tree. His hands were tied and he couldn’t turn his neck. “Judge? […]
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 […]
Like many Americans, I grew up watching Westerns. To be more specific, my dad grew up watching Westerns, and when cable television and VHS came into our home in the 1980’s, it was often Westerns that my dad (and us kids) would watch. Nearly a third of movies created in Hollywood’s 20th century “golden era” […]