If you happen to be in Albuquerque any weeknight right after work, heading east on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and approaching the Broadway intersection to escape downtown, you might have a chance to experience it. Maybe you have experienced it. The experience seems peculiar to that intersection. It might be because the Jackson-Wink...
Read more →On the edge of town, near the fallow gulch, the tinkerer walked the row by night, a shadow amidst the moistness and moonbeams, seeking scrap and shard. His eyes strained to find the lost things, the broken items, the discarded debris, marred mementos from better days, from happier hearts, from livelier loves, from healthier...
Read more →When Clairabelle was born, her father, Joseph Merritt More, or “Hammer” as his gang called him, was drinking Schlitz with the boys down at the Regal Bowling Alley. He was bowling a 212 average entering his third game of the evening and he didn’t think once about his gal Sassy being pregnant, or in...
Read more →When first light reached over the hill and touched the far side of the lake, he pushed off in his little boat and rowed two-hundred feet out into the darkness. The water was calm. The night creatures chirped. The birds began solitary songs to greet the dawn. He could feel his breath crystalline in...
Read more →The soft hermit crabs have fabulous abs for clutching a shell to their guts One grows over time and repeatedly finds it needs a new shell for its butt It’s a dangerous place if the crab leaves its case for an extended amount of time Its body is meaty and its neighbors are greedy-...
Read more →He was thirty-one with yellowing teeth and yellowing finger tips and he did not have any tattoos on his forearms, but he did have some thin, stylish, expensive round glasses perched on his narrow nose, over a thin face and scrub-covered chin. His drab blonde hair was short and a tad bit oily, except...
Read more →When the morning rain was pushed out by the cresting sun and a curtain of humidity fell over the plain, he had gone out to see about trimming some bushes down. He was middle-aged and portly, too large, but his face was long and narrow under his brown thin-brimmed cap. His overalls held everything...
Read more →After the talk, after they had separated and she had left him out in front of the bar and she had walked away, heading to her car, all of the words said, he stood silent, stunned, shocked. That? That was how it was ending? After years together? That was what really happened, when he...
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...
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