The annual community barn dance was the highlight of summer in Ferndale. For one night, the Portuguese Hall was transformed into a dance hall with strings of colored lights, a makeshift stage for the local band, and a wooden floor cleared for dancing. At fourteen, I’d been attending for years, but this summer felt different.…

It’s reported to me, with great urgency and several capital letters, that we are witnessing the death of accountability in real time. It is alarming news, though I must say death has been quite busy lately and may need to schedule it like the rest of us. The complaint runs thus: nobody is responsible anymore,…

I have long suspected that government departments do not speak to one another except by accident, and when they do, it is only to contradict each other with great enthusiasm. Take, for instance, the noble Department of Agriculture. It rises each morning, stretches itself with patriotic vigor, and sets about the fine work of feeding…

Just bring me the goddamned bottle and a glass that doesn’t leak. I ain’t here for conversation, therapy, salvation, or any of the other overpriced snake-oil comforts folks sell. I came here for whiskey and enough of it to cauterize memory. Make it quick. I plan to sit right here in the dark corner of…

The Huey’s cabin vibrated with the familiar thrum of rotors slicing through humid air. Inside, twelve of us from 1st Battalion, 8th Marines sat shoulder to shoulder, our bodies encased in gear that felt heavier with every minute. I was still new to the Fleet, and this was my first real field exercise. My hands…

There are few creatures on Earth stranger than a man who willingly invites heartbreak into his house, feeds it twice a day, and then refers to it as “a good boy.” Yet civilization is crowded with such lunatics. Entire neighborhoods are full of respectable citizens who will complain bitterly about taxes, Congress, inflation, and the…

By ten o’clock on a Saturday night, the whole edge of Spark had begun to vibrate with that particular kind of neon despair that only shopping centers and casinos can manufacture. The air smelled of fryer grease, stale beer, hot brake pads, and somebody’s cheap cherry vape juice leaking into the atmosphere like a chemical…

The downfall of civilization rarely arrives with trumpets. More often, it limps through the front door half blind, completely deaf, and smelling faintly of old carpet. The catastrophe began yesterday when I brought home a three-pound rescue dog from the streets, a creature assembled by Nature during what must have been a particularly distracted afternoon.…

At thirteen, my best friend and I became convinced we’d discovered the last truly wild place on earth. It was a small canyon tucked away behind a series of outcrops, making it invisible from the service road. The only way in was through a narrow crack in the rock face that you’d miss if you…

By the time anyone reached Lemmon Valley, the wind had already made up its mind. It came off the flats in long. dirty sighs, pushing dust across the road and rattling the dry weeds like a crowd of gamblers counting their last silver dollars. Northern Nevada has a way of looking abandoned even while people…