Short fiction every week and serial novel "A Town Called Nowhere"

Laura looked out over what was left of the Town of Grantham. Smoldering buildings. Bodies scattered across the street. She realized that this was the reality. This was the natural state. There would be no rescue. Not by Virgil nor anyone else. She felt an urge to lay down with the dead and be at peace. Then she looked back to her children, asleep in each other's arms, huddled against the wall of Saloon #3. She resolved to go in search of hope even if she no longer believed in it. She walked...

The town burned through the night and when the glow of dawn finally overpowered the glow of the embers, the townspeople who were still alive collapsed to the Earth from weariness. Exhaustion granted a temporary reprieve from the crush of defeat. Half of the town had burned. The north side was spared only by the direction of the wind and the unusual width of the main street. The Morning Star mine works, the Morning Star Saloon, The First Baptist Church, the Miller General store and countless...

Virgil had sat in the Nothing with the Shaman for an amount of time he could not identify. He asked, "I saw you dead. How is any of this possible?” “It would be more polite if you asked me a question I could answer,” said Shaman, running his colorless fingers through the colorless grass on which they sat. “I am what you see, but I am not what you see. Your mind makes sense of it with the symbols it has.” Virgil stared at him in mute confusion. The old Shaman that was No One tried again....

Dance crawled until he passed out. He couldn’t say how long he slept, but he was brought back to consciousness by the peaceful sound of his horse cropping grass close to his head. At this he spasmed in fear, rolled onto his back and crab-walked backwards, scrambling for his pistol. His horse looked at him evenly, knowing him for the fool that he was. When Dance realized his situation, he replaced his half–unholstered pistol and said a prayer of gratitude. Then he started looking for his...

As Sheriff John Dance rode down to the river, Miguel, the Stagecoach agent, came up beside him. Dance gave him a skeptical look, and didn’t have time to get to the question before Miguel said, “I have responsibilities…” Fair enough thought Dance. He cast an eye over Miguel’s horse and rig. It was packed light and well, and Miguel sat his horse easy. He looked like he knew what doing. Probably more than Dance did. Dance was no frontier hand or Indian fighter by nature. But the misadventures...

Dr. Krupp was terrified. In all his years of selling snake oil throughout the frontier — a figure he often exaggerated, but in truth amounted to no more than three years — he had seen many remarkable things but never had he seen Dr. Bartoleermere the Second’s Magic Elixir actually work. But it had happened. He had seen the little girl’s wound heal! And Dr. Krupp had no idea what to do next. As townspeople rushed about, frantic with news of the attack, Dr. Krupp walked in a circle in the...

Virgil sat for two days while the strange grass around him died in the heat. At night he slept on the ground and in the daytime he sat once again. At some point, he remembered not when, he unhitched the horses from the wagon and hobbled them. When he drank the last of the water from his canteen they had crowded close, pitiful with dehydration. It was only his sympathy for the horses that got him up and moving again. Where the well had once been in the town of Grantham, he found the barest...

As the Sheriff and Pete walked back through town, they could all but smell the fear. Gone was the carelessness of rough men when they weren’t working. Wide eyes peeped out from behind dirty curtains. The piano player in the Occidental Saloon was going at it hammer and tongs, sounding more strained than celebratory. The noisiest place in town was Saloon #3 and that wasn’t a good sign. If Dance didn’t know better he’d say this town felt like it had a showdown comin’. Maybe? Who the hell...

For a long time, nobody said anything. They just stood on the bank of the strange new river with the wounded as if the whispering of the water would explain what had happened. All in all, Dance thought, it could have been a whole lot worse and it probably would be before the end. Pete asked, “You want to get up a posse and go after them, Sheriff?” Dance shook his head. “Let’s figure out what we’d be raiding into before we go a-raidin’. Besides, if that boat went upriver, it will come back...

Squatting on the bank of the river, Archie offered one word of description for the wooden ship that was bearing down upon the Town of Grantham, “Trireme.” Sheriff Dance paid no attention to Archie. His eyes were locked on an imposing figure at the rail, who was looking down on the town and the people frolicking in the water. Even at a distance Dance could see that this man was not smiling. In the shallows, Mack stared at the ship in wonder. On the bank, his sister turned a cartwheel in the...

Chapter 10 — Ethan Burdock To the Northwest of Grantham was the Bar-D ranch, owned by Ethan Burdock. Burdock had carved a 28,000-acre ranch out of Indian territory long before anyone had thought to look for silver in this rough land. More than five thousand head of Longhorn cattle toughed it out across his range which stretched far north of the main house. Ethan had done well enough for himself that his house was made of stout logs instead of mud, a luxury in this dry land. But after he...

Just catching up? Here’s the story so far in ebook and audiobook format If you’re already on board, take a minute to leave a review on Part I on Amazon. — Sheriff John Dance hadn’t slept much. When the night started, they didn’t have any customers, so he sat outside on the porch waiting for the heat to die down. About eleven he took a quick turn around the town. There were few drunks, but everything was quiet enough. Those goddamn cowboys from Burdock’s place weren’t in town, so nobody was...

The Apache rode until sunset. Then they rode until sunrise. They felt the wind through their hair and the horses pounding the earth, but all they heard was *the song*. In the beginning, they had thought Goyaate had sung the song and they had only kept pace with it. Then they opened their throats and came to believe that they too sang the song. But after many hours, when exhaustion had stripped away all illusion, they realized that the song was singing all of them, and they were carried by...

The saloon was a shoddy-looking two story box of building, made from unfinished boards that had not fared well in the desert sun. Above the awning was a sign, painted directly on the wood that read, “Morning Star Saloon. Jethro Earp, Proprietor.” Jethro was happy to tell all the patrons that he was related to the famous law man and saloon-keeper with whom he shared a last name, but in point of fact, Earp was not his real last name. Nor was Jethro his real first name. But other than that, he...

Virgil got into Bisbee late in the afternoon. Outside of Fetterman’s a drunk cowboy was staggering around the street running his mouth at passer-bys. He was young, dumb and mostly harmless, with spurs set low so they would jingle to announce his swagger. From time to time, his friends would hand him a liquor bottle and egg him on to greater stupidity. Virgil didn’t like him, mostly because he was jealous of carefree youth. He was sure whatever ranch or cattle drive this cowboy had been on...

I wrote this essay 12 years ago. And there are a lot of things that I used to believe that I don’t believe anymore. But the substance of this essay has become more and more true for me with each passing year. Longhand has become the most productive way for me to write. And in the increasing noise and hysteria of our digital age, it has become, for me, a blessing. Once again I find myself about 50,000 words into a substantial work. And now more than ever, I feel that my best drafts are...

Archie rode uphill through the town, towards the elegant, yet out-of-place Victorian house on the hill. When those in the street and on the porches gawked at his unusual appearance he took pleasure in tipping his pith helmet to them. He passed the Morning Star Saloon on his right, and tucked in behind it, found the mine. Convenient for the miners, thought Archie. And if he knew the breed, he doubted they would have any pay left over after drinking. The mine entrance was sunk into an unusual...

Somewhere, out there, a story is searching for you. It fumbles, faceless through the dark. Unknowable, unformed. Newt pads for hands, it whispers questions in the dreams of people you know. Is this nascent thing a love story, a family drama, a gritty crime thriller? It doesn't know yet, so how can we? At this point, it is not much more than a stubborn collection of related longings. Unless you are very sensitive (or very wise) you probably don't believe that this ur-story is real because...

The Swing Station was a pile of mud bricks with a thatched roof on the east side of the Mule Mountains. The windows had no glass, only torn curtains that would flutter in their mud sockets on the rare occasions that there was a breeze. But there was no breeze today, and the Bisbee-Grantham station baked in the sun. Give it another hundred years of days like, thought Miguel, and the Bisbee-Grantham station would turn into a proper brick building. The only things that separated the building...

Inspiration… that son-of-a-b***h I’m having a problem with inspiration right now. He’s been ducking me. I mean we have this regular arrangement. He shows up and Inspiration, that son-of-a-b***h, has been ducking me. I know what happened. He got all cracked out on the ideas he was supposed to bring me and now he’s embarrassed. So he ran away. He’s jittering around Times Square circa 1976 clutching a Bendix brake drum in his left hand, trying to pawn it off on tourists as a novelty...

He called them with the same magic that brings the fog in the morning or a thunderstorm on a hot summer afternoon. They came from the reservation. They came from hiding places deep in canyons or high in mountains. They came because he was the War Chief. and before they passed from the world, they wanted to go on one last raid. They were the moisture in the earth or the charge in the sky before a storm. They came because they wanted to be released. At Fort Sill, he was forced to live in a...

The summer was immense. It was so hot that the mud dried in the blasted cracks in the yard as all the crops died. Across the range, cattle moaned as they cropped the dried grass and pawed at the creek bed for water. And still, the sun hammered the earth. Each day they would scan the sky for clouds, and each day this sky was as pure and blue as a tropical ocean. They were drowning in sunshine. Each day the kids would pump water from the well and take a bucket to the garden, trying to save as...

(Previously: Chapter 1 - A Man Goes on A Journey) The Journal of Archimedes Croryton, July 23rd, 1888 I have been informed that my train has just crossed into Texas and the terrain has already become wilder than I could ever have imagined. The emptiness of these spaces is immense. It seems scarcely possible to me that men could lead their lives here. Not merely from want of sustenance and water, the scope of the landscape itself crushes a man with his own insignificance. In England each...