Story Singles

One chaperoned girl and two suitors. Yes, it was a disaster, and yes, it was all my fault.

... I could have run screaming off into the night, if only without leaving her alone with him.

Mountain soul that dances for the sheer joy of life.

I couldn't imagine him on a tractor, but could see in his eyes the reflection of the sun rising between a mule's ears...

Only 14 years old, it was a sleek 4-door in blue and white and rust, straddling a sizeable oil slick on a gravel sales lot. And the car's inabilitiy to move under its own power was, we trusted, only a temporary problem.

And these things we did in such a flurry of movement and laughter that visitors to our homes surely thought we'd just escaped from a locked ward.
Yet, it was in that opium den of Parker Brothers board play that I learned about life...

But this time, I have the superior field position. To beat me, he has to run around my leg, through the partially opened door...

In the confines of our tiny bathroom, Blaine sat there all thin-legged and bony, his white coveralls sagging like one of Dad's shirts on me. Time dissolved...

But then magic happened: They put away their scores and, with only the text of three poems before them, put the enormity of their musicianships on display...

What made paying customers quietly endure the unendurable, then applaud for it? The answer hit me like a cloudburst crosswind...

When I graduated high school, I could go to college or Vietnam. College gave a young man license to drink a beer with his father, but did not erect his posture, did not place confidence in his voice. My college had an ROTC program ...

The countryside sleeps as the Cummins rumbles, her headlights boring a hole into the darkness. A full moon pokes through and hides behind spotty clouds, silently silhouetting trees and crops, a rail fence snaking its way along...