On a gray morning in November of 1996, a brand new Caterpillar 330 excavator went over the edge of Miller’s Creek, and three men stood at the top of the […]
On a Saturday morning in April of 1969, at the Dawson County Equipment Auction in Lexington, Nebraska, a twenty-two-year-old farmer named Dale Perkins made what everyone agreed was the stupidest […]
I’ve been sitting on this story for a long time, trying to figure out where to even begin. My name is Marcus. I’m thirty-two, I own my own plumbing business, […]
The lawyer’s office sat at the edge of that small mountain town the way a forgotten book sits at the edge of a shelf: quiet, slightly dusty, and somehow still […]
The Second Envelope My mother said it clearly, in front of fourteen people, at the reading of my grandmother’s will. “You were always her least favorite.” She said it with […]
Prepared literary expansion of narrative source material My grandmother’s handwriting was small and careful, the cursive of a woman who had learned penmanship in an era when it was considered […]
The first time my father called me a thief, he did it the way he did everything else: standing tall, voice pitched for an audience, certain that the room belonged […]
Two Feet of Mine Outside Columbus, Ohio The first thing I noticed when I stepped into my backyard that Sunday was the shadow. Not the balcony itself, not the posts, […]
The Trail She Left The Army gives you three days of emergency leave when someone in your immediate family dies. Three days to fly home, bury them, and return to […]
The morning of my medical school graduation I sat in the front row of a stadium holding ten thousand people and looked at the four VIP seats to my left. […]