The two vaqueros rode out into the southern field as the sun decided it to be time to make its morning appearance. They traveled the low, sloping hills, over grass eaten down beneath the hooves of their conveyance by the cattle they moved between. Each bull, cow and calf bore the Cole brand, but the […]
He told his son he used to shoot sewer rats the size of small cats with his cousin’s .22 pistol from over there. The son raised his eyebrows, tired. Now they were standing in front of an abandoned building that used to be a bocce ball club. His dad told him he had his first […]
Candy told me she had never seen the ocean. She told me a lot of things that night. Her father was a truck driver from Wisconsin; his side line was knocking over drug stores with a ski mask and a snub nosed .38. Her mother was a hooker who used to turn $20 tricks on […]
The day Rickie found the empty limousine idling outside the hardware store, he knew he’d made it off the farm. Steal it. Sell it. No more slopping pigs. He drove the stretch black Hummer to a chop shop, but they weren’t buying. “BEAMERS, BENZ, AUDIS,” the fence said. “I can’t sell a fucking limo.” Driving […]
It wasn’t the kind of place we would normally go into. But we were out for an evening and neither one of was ready to call it a night. The truth of the matter was Trish and me weren’t getting along all that well. Dinner had been a little tense and neither one of us […]
You’re at the restaurant and you’ve been through the whole thing a hundred times and you’re ready to roll, but then Berg tells you he’s been thinking about it and doesn’t want you to use the gun after all. You think you must have misheard him because it’s way too fucking late to be changing […]
Although the larger room felt less stifling than the hallway, Seth still had to resist putting his hand to his face to deaden the scent of shit and unwashed dog. The thickness of the air in the warehouse reminded him of the temperature inversions that would trap car exhaust and the dusty stench from the […]
Two days after I found John at Kelson’s Ledges, his innards hanging out like a gutted pig, the horde swarmed. I was still in shock when his sister descended on the house, her husband and children in tow, packing the four-room house so tight that I wasn’t sure I’d be able to breathe much past […]
The dogs are stuck together, ass to ass, the much bigger bitch clearly upset and swinging her suitor against the oaks in a vicious pendulum. The male, a Boston terrier, yelps with each blow but this only seems to encourage his aggressor, a hundred-pound Doberman with ears like black horns. Wade’s sister-in-law Jeanne watches from […]
“Oh, it makes me so light,” she says. “I could near float up to God.” Her pant is rabbit fast into his shoulder, her fists small knobs of bone at his belly. That small-eared doctor had cautioned calm, so her thin-walled and protein-starved heart would not rupture, but Wyatt can’t stop. Two years he’d been […]
I’d rode iron out to Ed’s Drive-in in The ‘Goula because this was how I wasted my Saturdays to get away from the cats & brats—Sister’d had some hard luck, and a week’s stay was going on a month now, three screaming shits and a sack of hairballs along with her. Fuck familial duties. I […]
Hobbs burst into the one-room cabin, slammed the door behind him, and leaned back against it, his eyes closed and his chest heaving. “Apaches,” he said. “Other side of the river. At least a dozen.” Old Amos Bassett, who had already jumped to his feet, spit out half his biscuit and swallowed the rest whole. […]
