The Old Blog in the Desert

I first met Sue Wagner between a stack of discounted biographies and a man arguing with a cookbook, which is about the right setting to meet a politician who preferred facts to fuss.

She was standing there in the Costco on Plumb Lane, fresh out of the lieutenant governor’s office and browsing history like she had a personal stake in it, which, as it turned out, she did. We struck up a conversation the way strangers do when both are pretending not to eavesdrop on the other’s thoughts. Before long, we had wandered from Nevada’s past to its politics, crossing that bridge only when she felt like it, which was often enough to keep things interesting and not so often as to make a nuisance of it.

Sue had a talent rare in public life: she could say something devastating in a tone gentle enough to make you thank her for it. It was a gift. If she had taken up dueling, she’d have apologized before firing and still hit the mark.

One day, she told me I ought to write my news articles in my own way, because someday they’d be history. I took that advice the way most men take good advice, politely, and not at all.

It took me years and a listen to her 2018 oral history to realize she was right. That was Sue: she had a habit of being correct ahead of schedule.

She liked history books then. I say “then” because life, being what it is, carried me off to Spanish Springs in 1998, and we lost touch. But for a time, we met among those tables of books like two conspirators in a quiet rebellion against ignorance.

She once told me a story about a comet crashing somewhere near Candalia, Nevada. I never did confirm whether the comet was real, but the way she told it, you didn’t feel cheated either way.

The news of her passing on March 17, 2026, found me just as I was about to go on the air and report on traffic, a subject that has never once improved by being reported on. My heart dropped clean through my shoes, and the rest of that broadcast went along without my full consent.

Now, if you only knew Sue from the book aisle, you might think she was a pleasant, sharp-witted reader with a fondness for Nevada history. That would be like calling the Sierra Nevada a “pile of rocks”, technically true, but criminally incomplete.

Sue Wagner was born January 6, 1940, in South Portland, Maine, into a Republican household where politics was not a hobby but a family duty. Her father chaired the state party, a fine way to teach a child that opinions should be firm and argued politely, skills she carried west when her family moved to Tucson in 1950.

She collected degrees the way some folks collect parking tickets, efficiently and without much complaint: political science from the University of Arizona in 1962, and a master’s in history from Northwestern in 1963. She even served as Assistant Dean of Women at Ohio State, which sounds like a job designed to keep the world from wobbling off its axis.

In 1964, she married Peter Wagner, an atmospheric physicist, a profession that suggests a man comfortable with both thin air and high stakes. They eventually settled in Reno in 1969, where he joined the Desert Research Institute, and she began her second career: improving everything she touched.

She raised two children, Kirk and Kristina, all the while finding time to reshape Reno’s civic life, working campaigns, chairing housing efforts, advising the mayor, and earning a spot among America’s “Ten Outstanding Young Women” in 1974.

Most folks would have stopped there for a rest. Sue ran for the Nevada Assembly instead.

She served from 1975 to 1980, then moved to the State Senate in 1981, where she became one of only two women in the chamber. That did not slow her down. She chaired the Judiciary, handled gaming legislation, no small matter in Nevada, and worked across party lines with a frequency that would make modern politicians reach for their smelling salts.

Colleagues say she passed more legislation than any lawmaker in Nevada history. If that sounds like bragging, it isn’t; it’s bookkeeping.

She funded domestic violence shelters, strengthened education, advanced environmental protections, created safeguards for children, required newborn screening, and helped establish the Nevada Commission on Ethics, an institution some might argue should be issued a search warrant.

In 1980, tragedy struck. Peter and three others died in a plane crash in the Sierra. She went on, as she always did, not loudly, but completely, later working with DRI, pushing environmental research forward.

Then came 1990, which tested her for structural integrity. While campaigning for lieutenant governor, she boarded a plane in Fallon that promptly forgot how to stay in the air.

The crash killed one passenger and severely injured others. Sue suffered a broken neck and back, a punctured lung, and enough broken ribs to make breathing a negotiated activity.

Most people would have retired to a chair and a long silence. Sue put on a neck brace, continued campaigning, and secured the election.

She became Nevada’s first woman elected lieutenant governor in 1991, serving under Democratic Gov. Bob Miller in a bipartisan arrangement that worked better than anyone expected and has been suspiciously rare ever since. She won with 54.57% of the vote, leaving her opponent and “None of These Candidates” to divide the remainder like crumbs after a good meal.

Her injuries lingered, limiting her physically but not politically. She even found time in 1993 to appear in a Kenny Rogers television movie, earning $485 for a single line—proof that she could accomplish in one sentence what most actors require a monologue to botch.

After leaving office, she taught at UNR, mentored future leaders, directed the Legislature’s intern program, and served on the Nevada Gaming Commission from 1997 to 2009, where she developed a reputation for independence and the occasional dissent—both signs of a functioning mind.

In 2014, she left the Republican Party, explaining it had grown too fond of extremes. She registered as non-partisan, which is often what happens when a person insists on thinking for themselves in a room full of teams.

Over the years, she collected honors, awards, and the respect of people who disagreed with her, a rarer currency than any medal.

When asked about her approach to public life, she said, “I do like everybody, because I do think we went through all of these difficult times together.”

It sounds simple. It is not.

So that is Sue Wagner as I knew her: a woman in a book aisle, a force in a legislature, a survivor of more than most, and a person who could deliver the truth so gently you almost missed how much it improved you.

I expect Nevada will go on without her, as places do. But it will do so with slightly less sense, a little less grace, and a noticeable shortage of people who can make you feel corrected and grateful at the same time.

With all the bad shit stacking up in the world, it gets harder to sit down and pretend I have something worth saying. The noise is constant now, screens screaming, people arguing with ghosts, wars replayed like reruns nobody asked for.

Every headline feels like an effing punch to the ribs, and after a point, you stop flinching. You get tired in a way sleep doesn’t touch.

Writing used to come easily when life still had some dirt under its fingernails. Back when mornings tasted like cheap coffee, and nights promised nothing but another drink and a woman who wouldn’t stay.

There was a rhythm to it. You lived first, then you wrote, and the words had sweat in them. Now I sit here staring at a blank page as if it owes me money.

It doesn’t. It’s just empty, like most things looked at these days.

The truth is, the life I lived isn’t waiting around the corner. It’s not hiding in some bar with bad lighting and worse decisions.

It’s gone, packed up, buried. Whatever fire was burning back then has cooled into ash, and ash doesn’t write poetry.

You can’t chase it, and you can’t recreate it without lying to yourself. I’ve tried, and the words come out stiff, dressed up like corpses pretending to dance.

People say you should write about the present, about what matters now. But what matters now feels plastic and loud and stripped of mystery.

Everyone’s performing, even when they’re miserable. Especially when they’re in misery.

Pain used to be private. Now it’s content.

Suffering with a caption and a filter. I don’t know how to write in a world that won’t shut up long enough to feel anything real.

There was a time when loneliness held weight. You carried it like a bad liver or a guilty conscience.

Now it’s just another statistic. Another app notification. Another reason to keep scrolling.

The old days were brutal, sure, but they were honest. You lost, you drank, you loved the wrong people, and you paid for it in cash and bruises.

No refunds. No edits.

I miss the mess and the mistakes. I miss waking up unsure if I’d ruined my life or just my weekend.

There was hope in that uncertainty. A crooked kind of hope, but it was alive.

Now everything feels decided before you even get up. The rules are getting rewritten by people who’ve never bled for anything.

So I sit here, wondering why I should bother writing at all. Maybe it’s just habit, the last vice I haven’t kicked.

Writing not because I believe in it, but because stopping would mean admitting it’s really over, that the days that fed these words are never coming back. And maybe that’s the point.

Maybe writing isn’t about chasing the life lost. Perhaps it’s about standing in the wreckage, holding a whiskey glass with a shaky hand, and saying, this is what’s left.

No hope, or answers. Just a few honest sentences scratched out before the lights go out for good.

 

Some folks reckon that heroes come from the right stuff, hard work, courage, and a bit of cleverness. Others find out the hard way that even the brightest stars can cast long, dark shadows.

The United Farm Workers, a union that had spent decades carrying one man’s name like a banner, found themselves staring down a shadow they hadn’t bargained on. This week, they announced they’d be skipping Cesar Chavez Day in 2026.

Not because Chavez had been a Communist, he admitted that in print, and nobody seemed to mind, but because some very troubling claims about his personal behavior had come to light. The sort of claims that made people in the union squirm and say, “Well now, that’s a heap different.”

Possible predatory pedophilia, though no one has come forward publicly to authenticate such events as happening.

That’s why they didn’t say they knew for certain, or that anyone had come forward with firsthand accounts. No, they just convinced themselves it was serious enough to merit attention, serious enough to set up a secret line where folks could speak up without fear.

Change came quickly, as it always does when a story sticks in people’s craw. Here in Northern Nevada, the Central Labor Council decided they’d rename their annual celebration.

What had once been a day of cheer and parades now carried a little more quiet thought, a little more reflection on what it means to follow a hero, or at least the idea of one.

And there it sits, like a lesson that nobody asked for but eventually learns: sometimes the man you admired is not the man you hoped he was, and the measure of a union, or a town, or a lifetime, is how you handle the shadow when it falls across the sunshine.

My brother Adam was seven when he started talking about his imaginary friend, the Green Man. He said the man was a magician and had a magic finger that could make things disappear.

When he told me this, I laughed it off. Imaginary friends weren’t unusual, except for the way Adam said his name. Not “my friend” or “my game.”

Always the Green Man, like he was talking about someone who already existed. One afternoon, he burst into my room, wild-eyed and shaking.

“I took his finger,” Adam said. “He’s really angry.”

I thought it was just another childish story, but he was so frightened, I let him sleep in my room for a few nights. He’d wake up sometimes in the dark, whispering, “He’s outside.”

I’d check the window, of course, but there was never anything there. Eventually, Adam stopped talking about it, and I thought maybe it was over.

Then, while I was doing dishes with our cousin Kathy, the least imaginative person I knew, she asked Adam, completely seriously, “Have you seen the Green Man lately?”

I froze.

Kathy went on to tell me, in the same flat tone she used when explaining math problems, that they’d both played with him. She said the Green Man could stretch his arms like smoke and slip through cracks in the walls.

My brother and cousin had been playing a game with him, and my brother had accidentally taken his finger. The way she said that made my skin crawl.

I asked how she could take it, and he just shrugged. “She found it,” she said. “He let her borrow it for a while.”

After that, Adam started drawing him. Hundreds of pictures.

Sometimes he looked human, wearing a long coat and hat, at other times he was just a shape, a red mist trailing into nothing. In some drawings, he had one hand held up, the other arm tapering off into blank space, as if she couldn’t finish it.

The last time he saw him or it, I suppose, was the night my parents brought in groceries. Adam and I were helping unload when he suddenly went still, his hand locking on my left forearm.

“He’s right there,” he whispered.

Across the street, under the big sycamore, stood something tall and still. The streetlight didn’t touch the thing, as the edges shimmered, like the thing in the movie ‘Predator.’ It was the color of rotting muscle, glistening and too bright against the night.

It didn’t move, but every instinct in my body screamed that it was watching us. Our parents didn’t see it.

They thought Adam was having a breakdown. They brought him to a priest.

The priest blessed the house, and after that, things quieted down. The drawings stopped, and Adam slept through the night again.

And life went on.

For years, I managed not to think about the Green Man. I convinced myself it was just a mix of childhood imagination and nerves.

But Adam came to visit once, bright, sarcastic, no longer afraid of the dark. We were sitting on the porch, the sun dipping low, when he said it.

“Do you think the Green Man still wants his finger back?”

I laughed, but he didn’t. Adam just stared out toward the trees, his expression unreadable. I wanted to tell him to stop joking, but then he said something else, almost under her breath, “He was trying to make a door.”

I asked her what he meant. Adam just shook his head.

“He said his finger could open it, but he needed a new one when it broke. That’s why he wanted mine.”

I told him to cut it out, but he didn’t smile. His eyes looked far away.

That night, after he went to bed, I went outside. The air felt thick, humid, and wrong. I caught myself looking at the treeline the way Adam had, expecting to see something between the branches.

And I did. Not the shape of a man, exactly, but a shimmer, like ooze seen through fractured glass.

For a moment, I thought I saw something else, too, the faint outline of a hand, reaching. I didn’t sleep much after that.

Two days later, I found one of Adam’s old drawings. It wasn’t one I recognized. The Green Man was standing next to a door made of crooked, interlocking fingers, and one of them was bright pink, like a child’s hand.

I called him to ask about it, but he didn’t pick up. His wife answered instead, his voice quiet.

“He’s been talking to him again,” she said. “He says he forgave him and just wants to finish the door.”

The line went dead before I could answer. I didn’t call back, and I wish I had because in January the following year, Adam died.

Now, sometimes at night, when the house settles and the air hums low, I think I hear something from the walls, a slow scraping sound, like someone trying to draw with a finger. I tell myself it’s just the pipes, but lately, I’ve been dreaming of red mist creeping through the cracks beneath the door.

And when I wake that morning, I usually find the faint imprint of a child’s right hand pressed into the wall, missing a pointer finger, that quickly fades.

I’ve stood in Eldorado Canyon with the sun baking the rock walls and the wind hissing through broken crags, and I can tell you the place doesn’t feel like Nevada. It feels like a place where rules don’t apply.

Forty miles from Las Vegas, tucked between Nelson and the Colorado River, Eldorado once boomed with ten times the people Las Vegas had, yet not a single lawman bothered to show up. When folks say the desert keeps its own counsel, this is what they mean.

Tony Werly owns the canyon now, restored the buildings, turning into the biggest gold mine into a daily tour. Millions in gold and silver came out of these hills, starting in the 1860s.

Fortune hunters poured in, and with them came the rest of the human debris, claim jumpers, bushwhackers, deserters, thieves. Pioche was the nearest law, two hundred miles away, and no sheriff was riding that far to investigate a corpse.

Murder could happen here and dissolve into the dust.

Of all the dangerous men who passed through, only one got his own historic marker. Queho.

Depending on who you believe, he committed half, or maybe two-thirds, of the murders laid at his feet. Some swear he was guilty of twenty-three killings, while others admit plenty of those were fear talking, a community needing a monster.

The last murder they pinned on him was in 1919, a woman named Maud Douglas. After that, Queho vanished.

Bounty hunters swarmed the canyons and caves along the Colorado River, lured by a $3,000 reward. Years passed, and people decided he must be dead.

He wasn’t. Not yet.

They found him in 1940, twenty-one years later, in a cave two thousand feet above the river. Two prospectors stumbled onto it, one of those accidents the desert seems to allow when it’s ready.

Inside were a few modest possessions and Queho himself, mummified by heat and time. He’d been dead maybe six months.

When they finally hauled his remains into the light, the stories didn’t stop; they multiplied. I’ve read the old descriptions: reddish hair still clinging to that mummified scalp, a jaw crowded with what witnesses swore was a double row of teeth.

Out here, those details rang an old bell. Folks remembered the Paiute tales and the Lovelock Cave finds, the red-haired giants said to have roamed Nevada long before any mine shaft or survey lines.

So some people wondered aloud if Queho wasn’t just a killer who slipped the law, but a remnant of something older, something that never quite belonged among ordinary men. It didn’t matter whether it was true, as believing it made him easier to fear and easier to turn into a legend instead of a man.

Photos of his remains ran all over the West, proof that the ghost had finally settled. And that should’ve been the end of it, but it wasn’t.

Instead, his bones went on tour, displayed at the Boulder City courthouse, bought and handed over to the Elks, and paraded down the street like a prop. The Elks paid the mortician, kept Queho for a while, moved him around, putting him up on display.

Later, someone stole his bones and artifacts from a case, vanished for years, then turned up tossed in the local dump like broken furniture. I don’t know which part of that bothers me more, the parade or the trash.

Maybe others felt the same. So did Roland Wiley, the former Clark County district attorney.

Wiley finally put an end to Queho’s wandering. He bought the remains and buried them on his ranch in Nye County, near Cathedral Canyon.

No sideshow, or gawking, just a grave and a concrete marker meant to withstand vandals. The inscription is simple, edged with something like respect: He survived alone.

That line sticks with me.

Queho had been walking these badlands since the 1880s, long before anyone put his name on a wanted poster. He was of mixed blood, club-footed, and unwanted in camps that barely wanted anyone.

Imagine growing up knowing you’d never quite belong, that every glance might turn hard if supplies went missing. By Queho’s thirties, blame followed him the way dust follows boots.

Nevada crowned him Public Enemy No. 1. They called him a mass murderer, and later a legend.

But legends forget the living. Up on those cliffs near Searchlight, he lived like a cornered animal, hiding tracks, stealing food, sleeping under stars that never cared who he was.

He learned the canyon the way other men learn streets. When the National Park Service later chose not to advertise the cave’s location, it wasn’t secrecy so much as caution.

The climb is brutal, nearly vertical in spots. People die chasing myths.

In 1958, a television show called Treasure located one of the prospectors who discovered the cave. By then, Queho was already more story than man.

Some folks still swear they hear a limp step echoing through the canyon at night. I don’t know about that, but I do know this: Queho never was caught, and he never stood trial.

And the way his remains got handled says more about us than it does about him. If you’d been hunted your whole life, labeled a monster, and chased into stone, wouldn’t you want to write your final chapter in your own hand?

Out there above the river, in a hidden cave, the desert finally let Queho rest. Alone.

The flower garden had not always been wild.

Once it had been orderly and bright, a place where roses stood in dignified rows, tulips kept their colors polished, and daisies chatted cheerfully in the sun.

Paths trimmed, soil turned, and weeds, when they appeared, were quietly removed.

The gardener had seen to that.

In the early years, the gardener walked the beds every day, sleeves rolled, hands in the dirt.

“Everything grows,” he used to say. “But not everything belongs everywhere.”

The flowers respected him for it.

When a stray weed appeared, he would pinch it from the soil and toss it over the fence.

The garden remained peaceful, not because weeds never came, but because someone cared enough to keep watch over the flower beds.

But time passed, and the gardener changed.

He built himself a comfortable chair on the porch overlooking the garden.

From there, he could see the colors without getting soil on his hands.

At first, he still walked down occasionally.

Then less often.

One afternoon, the Rose called up toward the porch.

“Gardener,” she said politely, “there are weeds growing near the fence.”

The gardener waved lazily.

“They’re small,” he replied. “And besides, the garden seems lively with them.”

The Tulips whispered among themselves.

“But weeds grow quickly,” one said.

The gardener shrugged.

“Growth is growth,” he said. “And besides, pulling weeds takes effort.”

What truly occupied him now were the visitors who came to the porch.

They praised the garden.

“What a magnificent place you oversee,” they told him.

The gardener liked hearing this.

Very much.

Soon, he discovered that visitors often brought gifts, coins, favors, small comforts, so long as he remained the gardener in name.

Actually, gardening, however, brought him nothing but dirt under the fingernails.

So he stopped.

Days passed.

Then one morning, a yellow head popped up between the marigolds.

“Good day!” said the newcomer brightly.

The Daisies turned.

“Well, hello there,” one said. “Who might you be?”

“Dandelion,” he said proudly. “I’ve come to enjoy this fine garden. Plenty of sunlight here.”

The Rose frowned.

“This is a cultivated bed.”

“Of course,” said the Dandelion pleasantly. “That’s what makes it so attractive.”

No gardener came to pull him out.

Soon another appeared.

Then ten.

Then a hundred.

They were cheerful fellows, always smiling.

“Wonderful soil you have here,” they would say.

“Room for everyone.”

“Plenty of sunshine to share.”

The flowers grew uneasy.

“Should someone tell the gardener?” asked a Tulip.

But when they looked toward the porch, he was busy speaking with admirers.

The weeds multiplied with impressive efficiency.

Bindweed arrived and began wrapping around stems.

“Just holding on,” he explained pleasantly.

Thistle came next, silent and stubborn.

Crabgrass followed, spreading low and wide like a green carpet.

The flowers began to struggle.

The Daisies lost their space first.

“I cannot breathe,” one whispered as weeds crowded her roots.

The Tulips bent sideways, starved for light.

“Surely the gardener will notice,” they said.

He noticed.

By the second summer, the weeds had grown thick.

The gardener saw this clearly from his porch.

At first, he had worried that the garden might become unmanageable.

But in time, he discovered something useful: the weeds admired him.

“Best gardener the garden has ever had!” the dandelions called.

“We have never grown so freely!” shouted the bindweed.

Visitors to the porch nodded approvingly.

“A thriving garden,” they said.

The gardener smiled and accepted their compliments.

He had not pulled a weed in months.

Among the flowers, there was unease.

“We are losing the beds,” said a Tulip.

“Something needs to be done,” said the Roses.

But the Daisies shook their heads nervously.

“The gardener knows what he is doing,” one said.

“Yes,” said another. “Surely he sees what we see.”

A few flowers tried to protest louder.

But the weeds laughed.

“Look how they complain,” said the dandelions. “They fear change.”

Soon, a phrase spread through the garden.

Any flower that complained about weeds got accused of phobia-this and phobic-that.

The gardener heard the arguments and found them convenient.

They required nothing from him.

Autumn came.

The Roses held on stubbornly, though the bindweed wrapped tightly around their stems.

One evening, the last Rose called toward the porch.

“Gardener,” she said weakly, “the garden is dying.”

The gardener leaned forward and studied the beds.

What he saw was a thick, noisy field of weeds praising his leadership.

Behind them, a few struggling flowers.

He sat back again.

“Everything grows,” he said calmly.

And the weeds cheered.

The following spring, the last flower failed to return.

The garden was now entirely weeds, bright dandelions, creeping grass, thistles, and vines.

They argued constantly about sunlight but agreed on one thing.

“This is the finest garden that has ever existed,” they said.

The gardener heard them from his porch and nodded politely.

The visitors nodded approvingly.

The gardener smiled and adjusted his chair.

Removing the weeds now would anger many voices and bring no reward to his work.

So he did nothing.

The weeds flourished.

At last, the garden was a thick wilderness of dandelions, thistles, and tangled vines arguing for sunlight.

One windy evening, a sparrow landed on the old fence and looked around.

“Was there not once a garden here?” he asked.

“There still is,” said a Dandelion proudly.

“But there were flowers,” the sparrow said.

“Yes,” replied the Dandelion.

“What happened to them?”

The weeds considered this question carefully.

Finally, it looked toward the porch, where the gardener still sat comfortably in his chair.

“No one kept the garden,” he said.

The gardener had not pulled a weed in months.

It was the easiest garden he had ever managed.

Some mornings start quietly, a quiet that settles in your bones before the sun finishes rising. That’s how it was the day a man nearly knocked the glass door off its hinges, walking into the gas station, grinning as he’d just spotted a long-lost friend.

“Hey there!” he shouted, waving both arms as if directing traffic. “Good to see you again!”

I turned around, receipt paper still dangling from the register, wondering if he was talking to someone behind me. But no—his eyes were fixed right on mine, shining with recognition.

Now, I’ve met a lot of people in my life. Some I remember by name, others by stories they’ve shared while waiting for coffee to finish brewing. But this man? His face rang about as many bells as a silent alarm.

Still, he came striding up to the counter, warm and open as sunshine. “You doing alright? Been thinking about you!”

I blinked, searching the wrinkles of my memory like pages in a book with half the words smudged out. Had I prayed for this guy?

He didn’t look troubled. Just deeply, sincerely glad to see me. And something about that tugged at me. I found myself smiling back before I could stop it.

“Well,” I said, stalling while my brain scrambled for context, “it’s good to see you too.”

He laughed, a loud, hearty sound that filled the whole room. “Knew you’d remember!” he said, which, of course, I didn’t. But he didn’t seem to notice. He launched right into talking about how his week had been long, how he finally got some good news from home, and how he’d been hoping he’d run into me again.

Now I was certain I’d never seen him before in my life.

But the more he talked, the more I felt something settle in the air between us—a kind of unexpected warmth. Like maybe the reason he came in so excited wasn’t that he remembered me, but because he needed someone to remember him. Someone to see him, acknowledge him, give him a moment of kindness. And maybe, without realizing it, he’d decided I was that person.

Eventually, he grabbed a coffee, paid for it with a crumpled five, and headed for the door. “Take care, alright?” he said, giving me one last smile. “You helped more than you know.”

Then he was gone—just like that.

I stood there for a moment after the bell above the door dinged, thinking about what he’d said and how I helped more than I knew. I couldn’t even place his face.

But maybe that wasn’t the point. Perhaps, sometimes, people don’t come into our lives so we can remember them; they return so they can remember the way they felt.

Maybe I had encouraged him once, in some small, passing way, or he needed a friendly moment and found one here. Either way, the encounter lingered with me all morning.

A few hours later, as the lunch rush started and the store filled with chatter and footsteps, I caught myself wondering how many lives we touch without realizing it. How many times does a simple greeting, a smile, a word of hope, leave an imprint that someone carries with them long after we’ve forgotten the exchange?

And now and then, someone comes back, grinning like they’ve known you their whole life, to remind you that kindness, even the kind you don’t remember giving, has a way of circling back around.

Now, when someone walks in all cheerful like that, instead of panicking and trying to place their face, I smile a little slower, a little deeper. Because maybe the memory isn’t mine to hold, but theirs to keep.

People keep asking me, “What’s up with Candace Owen’s attacking Erika Kirk?” While I don’t really care, to answer those caught up in the podcast soap opera, I am laying it all out as easily as I possibly can.

To address a problem like Candace Owens, the first step is recognizing that something is amiss and exploring what is wrong from a psychological rather than a political or ideological position.

Candace Owens has launched a campaign against Erica Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk and the new CEO of Turning Point USA. The effort centers around digging into Erica’s past and raising dark insinuations about her life and Charlie’s death.

Reactions have varied. Some say Candace has lost her mind, while others call her a fraud or a secret leftist undermining the conservative movement.

While these explanations may feel satisfying, they oversimplify the issue. What we might be witnessing here is more psychological than ideological.

Consider that Charlie Kirk was a highly successful figure who attracted admirers and complicated relationships. In political movements, friendships often form in intense environments, leading some to believe that certain relationships are fated.

When Charlie chose Erica as his wife, he made a significant decision. To outsiders, Erica appears to be an ideal partner, accomplished and devoted.

Yet the critical question is not who Erica is, but what she represents to those who expected a different outcome. Rejection and envy are powerful emotional forces.

When combined, they can linger for years. Adding to this complexity is death.

Grief often leads to seeking explanations and someone to blame. In this case, anger may have shifted to Erica Kirk, making her a target of resentment that is more about Charlie than about her.

Public disputes fueled by personal emotions rarely end well or quickly, and confronting them often amplifies their intensity. Sometimes, stepping aside and allowing the situation to resolve itself is the wisest approach.

Ultimately, while this spectacle may appear political, its roots lie in human emotions: wounded pride, unresolved grief, and the painful realization that our envisioned stories may not align with reality, and thus are purely psychological.

Lucas Hale had known fear in the usual ways a man learns it, flash floods roaring down a gulch without warning, the sudden buzz of a rattler too close to his heel, or the long, lonely nights when the wind could make a fellow think someone was calling his name from out in the dark.

But nothing in all his wandering across Nevada had readied him for the dread that settled on him along the frozen rim of Lake Lamoille. Once the old reverberatory furnace caught and the fire inside the boat roared to life, once the smoke climbed in heavy, black ropes and the heat bowed the ice beneath it, Lucas found himself edging back.

Something in him, instinct, grief, a kind of old-fashioned respect for the dead, kept pushing him away from that burning container until he stood near the far bank, boots slipping on the glass-hard ice. He didn’t know how long he stayed there.

Time stretched thin. His breath came in uneven bursts, small white puffs torn away by the cold wind.

The wind itself prowled around him, tugging at his coat like a hand with too much familiarity. Far off, the wild dogs howled, sharp, mournful notes that made Lucas start like a greenhorn his first night out. The silences between those howls were worse, hollow and wide, as though the whole basin held its breath.

He pulled his arms tight around him and watched the blaze. The flames inside the furnace leapt and twisted, throwing long strokes of orange across the snow-covered bowl of land. Somewhere in that flame-wrapped hulk lay Andy Mercer.

Lucas felt his knees give way, and he dropped in the snow without quite meaning to. He steadied himself with a hand on the frozen crust, as if he could brace against the weight gathering in his chest.

“How long have I been here?” he wondered, but the night kept its silence.

Little by little, the fire eased into a steadier burn, as the sky above began to change with it. Darkness thinned in places, and faint pricks of light showed through. They wavered at first, shy as camp lanterns in a distant line, then brightened until the whole Nevada sky looked like someone had spilled a box of silver dust across it.

As the cold deepened and the fire settled to a sullen glow, the stars began to quiver. Not truly moving, but the frozen air made them seem to sway, each one a small lantern hung from an unseen string.

When Lucas finally found his voice, it scraped out thin and rough.

“Alright,” he told himself, “a man can only sit scared so long.”

He forced himself upright. His legs trembled under him, and his stomach tightened like a cinched rope.

Everything in him warned against going back to that smoldering wreck in the dark. But a promise is a promise, and now that the worst of the fire had passed, he needed to know the truth, for Andy’s sake, and for his own.

“I’ll just take a look,” he muttered, trying to put iron in his tone. “Reckon he’s cooked. Time I checked.”

He started across the ice, each step crunching in the hush. Warmth pressed against him as he neared the furnace, still fierce, still dangerous, but no longer enough to broil a man’s skin.

At the warped hatch, he stopped. Smoke curled out in lazy threads. The sand around it was blackened and split, and the wind whispered through the pines like it carried secrets.

He let his hand hover over the door, gathering himself. Then, drawing a steady breath, he closed his fingers around the heated handle and hauled it open.

Lucas Hale had seen strange things in lonely country, but nothing that prepared him for the glow rolling off that old furnace. After hours of burning, it should’ve been dying down to embers and ash. Instead, heat poured from the rust-bitten hulk in slow, steady pulses, like the breath of some great animal sleeping in the dark.

Behind him, the Nevada night lay cold and thin, the kind of cold that cuts straight through a man’s coat and keeps on going. The stars, sharp a moment ago, now looked smeared, as though something had dragged a thumb across the sky and blurred them.

Lucas eased a hand against the warped metal door and swallowed hard.

When he pulled it open, the heat struck him like a hammer. But the inside wasn’t what it should’ve been. The timbers, the ash, none of it was there. The dark bent in strange ways, pulling inward as if the furnace were not a furnace at all, but a throat waiting to swallow.

The air shimmered like tar on a griddle.

Then the shadows rolled back.

And Lucas saw Andy Mercer.

Only it wasn’t Andy, not the friend he’d hauled out of that frozen country, not the man whose voice had broken with fear when the cold got its claws into him. This Andy sat calm as a preacher on Sunday, right in the heart of a fire hot enough to melt iron.

The flames didn’t burn him. They curled around him like they belonged to him.

He looked whole. Alive. Smiling.

And that smile was wrong. Too bright. Too wide. A smile that traveled far beyond the face that wore it.

“Close the door, Lucas,” he said softly. Smooth voice. Slick as warm oil. “Don’t let the cold in.”

Lucas stood there, rooted in place, heart thundering like hoofbeats on hardpack.

“Andy?” he managed.

The figure tilted its head, and the shadows bent with it, shaping his face into something leaner, hollower, stretched in ways a face shouldn’t stretch. His eyes weren’t the tired blue Lucas knew. They burned like coals dug from deep in the earth, old coals, hungry ones.

“It’s fine in here,” he said. “For the first time since Mississippi, I’m warm.”

The smile grew, slow and easy, though there was nothing easy about it.

Lucas felt the heat swell around him, pulling him closer like a hand on the back of his neck. Beneath his boots, the desert cracked, not from his weight, but from something moving beneath the frozen crust.

The sand rippled once, like skin. Lucas stepped back.

Cold hit him instantly, sharp, clawing, mean. The wind came howling across Lake Lamoille, shaking the furnace and spinning loose snow into quick, frantic spirals. Behind him, the thing wearing Andy’s shape chuckled.

“You look troubled, Lucas,” it said, voice deepening, splitting into layered tones that made Lucas’s bones feel hollow. “Did you not promise me warmth? Fire? Freedom from that cold that chewed at me until I had nothing left?”

Lucas forced the words out. “I saw you die.”

“Oh, I died.” The creature lifted its hands and let the fire slide between its fingers like molten silk. “You carried me across miles that hunger for the living. You delivered me well.”

Lucas staggered back again. Above, the stars twisted slowly, drawing patterns no man should look at, circles and spirals that made his eyes ache.

“What are you?” he whispered.

The smile widened. Teeth gleamed, not human now, catching the firelight with a red sheen. Its shadow stretched, growing into a long shape with cloven hooves.

“What I always was,” he murmured. “What you never cared to see. What waits beneath ice and memory.”

The flames surged, rising tall behind him, outlining a horned shape vast enough to make the human form seem like a disguise.

Lucas dropped to one knee. The wind stole his breath. Even the stars seemed to lean closer, as if the whole sky wanted a better look.

“Close the door,” the creature said gently. “I don’t want the cold getting in.”

Lucas slammed the door shut.

The moment it sealed, the wind died. The stars steadied. And across the ice, silence rolled outward, deep, final, swallowing every sound, even the beat of Lucas Hale’s heart.

Inside the furnace, something shifted.