Category: Fiction

MONTANA - 1947 When he hit McDonald Pass outside of Helena, Montana, where the two-lane blacktop curved and disappeared into mountains of pine and fir trees, Johnson had been on the road three days, his tires were sizzling, and he prayed ...

Bud Walrod had never seen anything like those disappearing junkers. Call it salvage, or call it “dismantling,” Bud had dealt with junk for 40 years and knew that nobody wants to hear about wrecked cars. Lately though, those heaps had been disappearing ...

Phone, says Austin. Phone, phone! She really was quite a woman for her time, Anne continues. Not every 19th-century woman marries a man twice her age and then shoots herself in the thigh to bail out of the marriage. You got ...

Nemo travelled on the boat for days. He remembered it was the smaller man, the one called Peccadillo, who with a bored and unsatisfied air of ennui, flicked his cheek with a sharpened fingernail, and slapped it just to make ...

She couldn’t take one more turn on the old rope swing Steve had put up when they first learned they were expecting. Like buying a football and a new tricycle, it meant there was a future, that there would be ...

Einstein wrote a riddle that only 2% of the population could solve, by his math. This should be even easier. No trick questions, just trickiness: Five dwellings sit west to east at the outermost fringe of the city. Each Home is ...

To Gabriel. He’s got five fingers. I thought all animals had a max of four. Ambistoma has five, and he extends them as though begging, reaching, as if he lacked something. But that’s just the way he looks. He is happy. ...

Marlene makes a sandwich spread out of bologna, mayonnaise, and sweet pickle relish using an enormous antique grinder that attaches to the side of a table. After thirty-nine years of marriage, she can never remember that Pete hates the spread. ...

The grate is beside the electricity pole outside our house, and the man is rattling a stick in the mucky water and leaves overflowing from the rain. He’s old, much older than the Old Man, and he’s got a huge ...