Harold Benton never put much faith in premonitions, signs, or “feelings.” His wife, Louise, however, treated them like the morning weather report, worth listening to if you didn’t want to get caught in the rain. That evening, while Harold was checking his shotgun and whistling for Rip, his old hound, Louise stood by the door…

Eddie wasn’t the kind of guy to make history. He was the kind of guy who made coffee nervous. Third-year math major, shirt untucked, hair fighting a losing battle with gravity, one of those bright students who understood everything except how to stop talking to himself out loud. It was a late afternoon in the…

Down in the valley, where the sorghum fields swayed under a harvest moon, folks gathered at Rusty’s Feed & Seed to chew over life’s troubles. Lately, the talk turned to the city folks pushing apps and algorithms, telling farmers how to plant and pray. Old Miss Eula, her hands knotted from years of quilting, sipped…

After writing a commentary on the shooting that happened today in Minneapolis, I had a FB friend take me to the woodshed, then unfriend me. Here’s the exchange. Matthew Brockmeyer: Rioter? Now protesters are labeled as rioters, that’s the First Amendment right to gather and protest out the window. Armed? There goes the Second Amendment.…

Let’s take a breath for a second, because the situation in Minnesota has officially gone off the rails, and predictably, everyone is yelling past each other instead of dealing with reality. An armed rioter is dead after an encounter with CBP agents, and within minutes, the narrative got locked in: a cold-blooded execution in broad…

In the valley, where the river ran lazily, and the oaks stood proud, Miss Hattie’s general store was the heart of town. Folks came for flour, nails, and gossip, but lately, they’d been hauling in catalogs, ordering gadgets and gewgaws nobody needed. Hattie, her braid as gray as storm clouds, shook her head. “Most folks…

If you’ve read anything written by an AI lately, or half the modern fiction online, you’ve probably encountered Recirculation Existential Dread, or as I like to call it, R.E.D. It’s that faint whiff of melancholy that floats through every supposedly “deep” story, like recycled air from a vent not cleaned since the Nixon administration. R.E.D.…

I come from what’s called the Jones Generation, a bridge generation that doesn’t quite fit in with the Baby Boomers, but isn’t young enough to understand the ones who live by their phones either. We were the ones who learned to write letters, then emails, then texts. Somewhere between the dial tone and the push…

I worked with a guy at the KR, a good hand named Blake. Like me, he’d been in the Marines before he traded boots for boots, combat ones for the kind with spurs. You could tell from the way he moved, steady, patient, scanning the horizon for something the rest of us hadn’t seen yet.…

I was halfway through changing the porch light when I noticed the flicker. Not the usual buzz-and-die kind of flicker you get from a tired bulb, but the sort that feels aware. The light steadied whenever I looked at it, then danced again as soon as I turned away. “Don’t start,” I muttered, tightening the…