He picked up the pencil, abandoned for nearly a month, and in the quiet of the hovel, a shelter he had found only a week before, wrote down the last chapter of a story lost in the fiery blast of two weeks ago. Jack Serling opened his eyes to darkness, the suffocating pressure of a…

He stood there, looking stupid as a steer in a slaughterhouse, which made sense, considering he’d been drinking all day. The younger man, half-Asian by his look, stood poised to fight, his stance taut and ready. But no matter what he did, the older man didn’t respond, just swayed back and forth like a tumbleweed…

Ah, well now, let me tell you, I’ve met some curious folks in my time, but this here story I’ve laid down—it’s got the kind of peculiar characters and hijinks that could set a barroom to howling with laughter or fists flying, depending on who’s paying attention. I won’t embellish too much, but let’s dress…

Virginia City seemed like a lark—a diversion on the way to Reno where Wraith, a doom metal band with a devoted but niche following, would play a gig in some dingy venue. Yet, as their rust-bitten van rolled into the town, that time had forgotten, and streets welcomed with an unsettling stillness that hummed just…

The town of Klamath hadn’t changed much in decades. The old hardware store still squeaked underfoot, and the diner on Main Street served coffee so thick it practically poured itself. But the air had grown thinner somehow–a thinness you can’t see but feel—a suffocating absence. It started with an innocuous post. Ellen Harper, a retired…

Quickly, I stepped off the back of my horse, my belly grumbling from too many beans at breakfast and that extra cup of coffee I probably shouldn’t have had. Couldn’t be helped now. I found a low stone wall, perfect to shield my pride from prying eyes. I dropped my reins, trusting my old horse…

She was at the bar, leaning in like she was about to reveal the secret of life to the bartender when all she wanted was to announce that we’d ditched our bar seats for a table in the restaurant—a stunt people pull when they haven’t seen each other in, oh, thirty minutes and want to…

The valley smelled of iron and sagebrush. The first raven arrived at dawn, its black wings silent against the empty sky. By noon, they blotted out the sun. Eve was the first to notice, though she didn’t say anything. A geologist by trade, she’d come to the reservation to study unusual magnetic fluctuations in the…

Old Vegas is a shrine to the deranged, a gaudy cathedral of chaos where dreams slither through the gutter in neon technicolor. I touched down on Fremont Street for a few days of disjointed reverie, drawn by the glow of lights that don’t sleep, lights that lure fools, the dangerously curious, into a world that…

Things are just that–things. You can have them, lose them, break them, burn them. In the grand scheme of the cosmos, they don’t mean much. They are the trinkets of a distracted species, the bobbles, the widgets that keep us entertained while the universe unfolds in its vast, indifferent splendor. Memories, though, they are different.…