Tag: American West

All Stories, General Fiction

A Thousand Vultures by Christopher Ananias

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The sun is sunny—not thoroughly unpleasant—but not a sun for picnics with Mary Lou down on the Potomac. Mary Lou is dead and buried by some Godless creek in Kansas. Her cross will rot away. A weak hastily made thing of silver birch branches and binder twine. In a year, a month, a week? She will have no marker unless I can find it again. Find her under the creeks torrents of land-grabbing muddy currents and sulking floods. Find her under the black silt and plants rotting white and stinking. Carp flopping on her grave. Then the water washes over again- recedes- and pulls the entire bank and her into it. Best to leave the past in the past.

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All Stories, General Fiction

The Grass Jesus Walked On by Elizabeth Bruce

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“One dollar,” young Earl C. Calder said and looked at the farmer before him transfixed on the small the blue vial Earl held in his hand.

Earl didn’t blink in the mid-day sun, all 110 pounds of himself holding steady next to Ida. The vial of elixir they had emptied the night before still floated through him, but he didn’t flinch, not Madam Wilma T.’s son, born in a brothel and groomed for greatness.

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All Stories, General Fiction

Last Look by Tom Sheehan

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typewriter

Shots had been fired in Black Limb, a town in the Dakota territory, a bank teller and a bystander wounded, the thief caught in the middle of the robbery, knocked down by, of all things, a woman sheriff with a badge worn on a most prominent chest, dark and beautiful eyes seemingly full of pity and something else the unsuccessful robber managed to draw from her, him the handsome dog, handsome robber George Crown brought to his dusty knees by a woman sheriff, a knock-out sheriff.

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