When Saturday rolled around, Taggart was up long before the sun. Unable to sleep because of the week’s stressors and his unabated agitation, Joe was in his Ford by 5:15, his truck aimed east, out of town. Once he escaped the suburbs by 6:00, he rumbled on coarse asphalt through Decker’s Pass and down...
Read more →Ernesto walked down in the shallow ravine next to the gravel road as the ancient pickup truck rattled slowly past. He had moved there when he saw the vehicle approaching, clearing a way for the truck to have full berth in the thin lane when it arrived. The ravine was a dry, leaf-speckled wrinkle...
Read more →When Ernesto finished his cigarette, he tossed the butt into the gravel and stomped it with his brown work boot, trying to crush the nub of ashes on the end flat. He lingered with the last drag of smoke in his mouth and looked east, past the near vineyard field, toward the pad of...
Read more →When the screen door slammed that morning at 9:30 after breakfast, Gladys P. did not know what a painful, uncomfortable day her day would become. Neither did her husband. It was just another weekend in their summer cabin in the pleasant, quiet community up on the hill in the central mountains. The lodgings were...
Read more →When Jesse had driven two miles east on State Road 7, he turned left onto the two track that zigged in gentle curves up Tanner’s Hill, and on into the cut between Tanner’s Hill and a swell of BLM land. He drove slow, looking about him and, in the mirror, back into the broad...
Read more →A week after Will’s accident, the entire town turned out for a pep rally parade down main street and a celebration of life service in the high school gym, put on by several of his old high school teammates, several teachers, and two of his old team mothers. They had insisted. There was a...
Read more →When Jesse was 20, he had met Colin in a shop course at the college. Colin was a year his younger, and he was the kid brother of Will Martin- the Will Martin, who had set several district records in track and football as a ball carrier when he was in high school. Will...
Read more →At about 4PM, Jesse decided it was time to go, so he locked up the cabin after he grabbed the cookie tin off of the table and his old denim jacket and his hat. A light rain pelted the soil on the walk down to the driveway and his pickup, and the smell of...
Read more →When Mortimer arrived at the coffee house, he looked a the tinted panes spanning the front of it, and noticed the wind had lifted all the hair on the right side of his head into a sort-of hands-up position. His hair was like that, surrendering to the elements at the drop of a raindrop...
Read more →It wasn’t surprising it ended like that. Arlen had always been intrigued by the unusual and the immense. Instead of pushing cars across the living room floor, as a child he would constantly practice leaping from the top of furniture. As a five-year old, he once came home basted in grease after he found...
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In 1351, a year after the Black Death finally let go of the village of Nérac and its surrounding estates in southwest France, a gentle young monk named Colinus went through the ravaged region and collected every orphan he could find, bringing them back to live by his brothers in Orphan Hall. In a...
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Transcription, Captain’s Log, USS Bozeman, NCC-1941 “Captain’s Log, Stardate 41114.4. We are running at warp 6 to rendezvous with the science vessel SS Brezhnev which has been routinely monitoring the collapse of a yellow midget star into a white dwarf. Unfortunately, our efforts to approach the craft and system have been marred by the...
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“What are you doing there, kid?” He is about nine and chunky, with a squarish head and sparse black curly hair. His brown-striped t-shirt has a quarter-sized ketchup spot near the center of his belly. He stiffens up quickly, as if the voice was from God. “Nothing. I’m doing nothing.” “You go on home....
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While I’ve scribbled in notebooks and on computer hard drives for years, there was really just one time that I made a concerted effort to really try “that writing thing” sort of seriously. It was a good experiment. When I was a junior in undergrad at UNM, I ended up taking a creative writing...
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