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…

In the Hollow, where the cottonwoods whispered secrets to the wind, folks gathered at Mabel’s Diner to jaw over coffee and cornbread. The conversation that autumn evening was intense, as a federal mandate required every farmer to install expensive, complicated irrigation systems that were unnecessary for the small plots in the Hollow. Ol’ man Tucker,…

It wasn’t that he hid from hygiene; he didn’t chase it down either. Somewhere between apathy and endurance lived a small idea he called “frugalness.” It made him proud, in a way that was both pathetic and heroic. He wore his blue jeans for thirty-five days straight, and each morning when he pulled them on,…