The world is cruel to gentle boys. I knew from the moment I met Richie Taylor that he didn’t belong in East Texas. He came to us not long after the school year had started, before the first football game and after we’d traded our memories of summer for dreams…

I dumped a shovel of dirt over the body. The corpse in question, a dead rat, stared at me with a glazed eye before I covered it with a quart of potting soil. Miracle Grow, guaranteed for beautiful blooms. I hope nothing sprouts from this planting. The rat expired less…

And other creeping horrors — I learned the other day that Pothos is also called Devil’s Ivy. The poisonous nature of its leaves inspires that name, surely undeserved. Pothos are very hard to kill. I can testify to their hardiness. During the lock down days of Covid, I abandoned a pot of ivy. Left to…

The last train travels fast — He opened his eyes to a world gone red. Somewhere nearby a woman sobbed, her keening cries almost drowned out by the chug and clack of a locomotive. The man, forty-two-year-old Roy Ellis, sat up and wiped the blood from his face. Gingerly, he probed the wound on his scalp…

Trouble in the garden — The bunnies were cute until they began dining on my asparagus. Squirrels raided the bird feeders but they were cute and their antics fun to watch so we forgave them. A creek borders our back yard, making us a way station for all sorts of wild life. We’ve had raccoons…

Sometimes they never leave — The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. I was twelve years old that year, in 1972, the year Nixon went to China and his buddies broke into the Watergate hotel. Billie Jean King beat Bobbie Riggs at tennis…

The taste of memory — I come from generations of gardeners. When we moved into our house last year, it was too late in the summer for planting. I vowed an early start in the next season. This year, however, brought mostly failed experiments with container gardening. My tomatoes grew weary in the dry heat…

When a gift is a warning — If Mina had knelt at any other gravestone, she would have missed the locket. She was working on restoring the moss-covered tombstone of Adeline Coombs. The locket lay wedged in the grass at the base of the monument, its gold chain glinting in the late afternoon sun. She eased it…

Our pain makes us who we are — I couldn’t put it off any longer. I would have to tell him the truth. That morning, while my android assistant, Arnie, ran through his usual cleaning routine, he found the dog toy under the bed. I thought he’d make the connection. Instead, his carefully composed face stayed in the…