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…

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…