Morganfield worked the plow on Stovall's land. The Colonel was good to him. Colonel Stovall. He was real real good. Morganfield was smart in the ways of what was needed and what was not. He worked the plow, worked his palms black and his black fingers even blacker. That January the decade had turned from 1929 to 1930. The working men took to ( Read more... )

It was an Indian and he was coming in. He was coming in and there was no stopping him not no way no how. It was an Indian. A buck tall and brown with Satan’s fury at the righteous burning behind his blackstone eyes. A bloodlusting no account dirtfucking Sioux. It was an Indian.

Grimsrud crouched and watched with jaw and bowels tensed from inside ( Read more... )

 
Adam and Eve lived in the oldest house on the street, and had for at least all of my life. My parents warned me away from that end of the street, and though I never asked them, I always suspected that my parents, like the other kids in the neighborhood, didn't think they were real. Of course, my parents never threw rocks at Adam and Eve's house, ( Read more... )

Jody was a girl, bony but still breathing. Her brother was also named Jody and also bony, but no longer breathing. As the story goes, they were named for the horse that carried their mother, full of belly with boy and girl, from St. Louis to Tulsa before collapsing dead of exhaustion. Having no man in her life, their mother sold what little she ( Read more... )

It wasn't enough that Keith was in Mexico for the first time in his life, he had to act like a fucking jerk. It wasn't enough that Keith had the money to party, he had to stick it under everybody's nose like he was some Big Shot Ameri--can. It wasn't enough that he could have had any girl in the club but picked homely little Carlotta or whatever ( Read more... )

 
part I 
   part II
   part III 
   part IV 
   part V

part VI-
lay Lady lay, lay across my big brass bed...

I WOKE UP AND I COULD SEE. I wasn't in my apartment. It was a hotel. Or a motel. A hammer pounded in my head, but I could see. And I could hear. Cars outside; we were facing a road, so yes. It was a motel, by definition. We?

There she was, still ( Read more... )

 
Beer number nine. 
Go go go.

Beer number nine. 
Blues ain't nothing but a good man feeling bad. 
And you ain't made that up yourself---from a movie, it is. 
Blues ain't nothing but a good man feeling bad, thinking 
about the woman he once was with. 
Once was with, not yet with. 
Negligible difference in outcome. Go go go. 
Flake on a Flake-off. 
She don't ( Read more... )

 
Fancher sat in the office where was his job and stared at the twin computer screens in front of him, scanning the well-presented but sparsely informational website of the Yale School of Drama. From there he searched the website of the University of Chicago, then on to Northwestern, and finally a blanket and desperate Yahoo query that read, simply ( Read more... )

I've been thinking about writing song with that title. It's a funny thing to think about, not the song necessarily, but that there is a man out there whose wife has done impolite things with (and to) you, either before or quite possibly during their courtship. And he'll never know. Or if he does know, he'll never know who you are. Of course, thirty ( Read more... )

Gene's nights of drunken oblivion were all during the day. They had to be; he worked the third shift six days a week at a nearby institution. At first he didn't mind so much. It was sort of like inverted Bukowski, and Gene was just young enough and romantic enough and so thoroughly green enough to find that appealing. The years had gone by and not ( Read more... )