Virginia City has never trusted history to stay put. Here, the past refuses the glass case and the velvet rope. It wanders the boardwalks, leans against railings, and sometimes pulls up a chair as company. For a long, good stretch of years, that history answered to the name Pierce Powell. If you walked C Street…

Dinner at my son’s apartment was uneventful. After we cleared the table, he looked at me with a grin that made him seem ten years younger. “Now that we’re done, Mom,” he said, “I have someone you should meet.” We returned to the living room. That’s when I saw the two small robots sitting on…

Yesterday, Mary received her First Communion. Today, she’ll end the lives of 4,026 of her friends and neighbors. They’ll never know it was her. They’ll never know it was a choice. They’ll call it Prefrontal Cortex Combustion, the spontaneous ignition of the Craniostatic Vertex Node inset in every citizen’s forehead. Officially, it happens when a…

Jack Merriman had camped near Lone Pine more times than he could count, enough to think of the Alabama Hills as his unofficial backyard. There was something about that stretch of the eastern Sierra Nevada that always pulled him back: the wide-open desert below, the granite towers reaching for the sky, and the kind of…

Earl wasn’t a man who rushed things. In fact, his wife, Betty, liked to say he moved through life like a turtle on vacation. Earl figured that was fine, since he’d never seen a turtle die from stress. One fine Saturday morning, he decided it was time to mow the yard, a task he’d been…

Now, I’ll admit right off the bat, I haven’t the foggiest notion why I did what I did. There I was, perched on my porch like a wise old owl with my morning coffee, minding my own business and feeling respectable. And then I heard it, our neighbor’s cat, a furball with more attitude than…

Sampson never liked the word hitman. Too clinical, too clean. It sounded like a profession, something you could list on a tax form. He preferred killer, as it had honesty and weight. The kind of word that didn’t need an explanation. He’d been at it twelve years, long enough to know the texture of dying,…

He told himself every morning that today would be different. No bottle, no bar, no slurred confessions to the same God he kept disappointing. But by dusk, he’d always find himself walking that slow crawl toward O’Malley’s, a little corner bar that smelled of old wood, sweat, and second chances. He wasn’t a terrible man,…

The man woke up to the sound of the neighbor’s dog vomiting in the hallway again. It was the kind of noise that made you question who really had it worse, the dog or him. The light from the window was thin and gray, the kind that didn’t promise much of a day ahead. He…

When he came home from his first appointment, Harold felt lighter than he had in months. “I think I’m going to get along well with her,” he told his wife, kicking off his shoes at the door. “She’s funny, in a strange sort of way.” His wife, Anne, smiled over her shoulder as she stirred…