Western Stories

PART 1 Nobody warned her that humiliation had a smell. It was sawdust and cheap tobacco and the particular sourness of men who had decided, before the bidding even started, that they would not raise their hands. Clara Weston stood on the back of a flatbed wagon in Crale’s Crossing, Colorado, and breathed all of…

PART 1 The day Lena Voss turned twenty-three, she found out her father had been gambling with land he did not own. Not their land. Not precisely. The land was hers, technically — had been hers since her grandmother Hilde died six years ago and left the east creek strip to Lena in a will…

PART 1 The first thing Mae Sutton noticed about Dillon Marsh was that he did not look at her the way men usually did when they were deciding something. Most men looked at Mae in one of three ways: with dismissal, with the particular hunger that was really just another form of dismissal, or with…

PART 1 Vera Cole found out her father had sold her the same way she found out most things in Hanson’s Creek, Wyoming — from Clara Biddle, who ran the dry goods counter, knew everything that had ever happened within forty miles, and had an unfortunate habit of delivering news as if its receiver ought…

PART 1 Nora Holt understood exactly what she was the night the saloon owner offered to keep her on. She was standing behind the counter of the Dry Hollow Saloon in Caldwell, Kansas, cutting bread for the supper crowd, when Wade Priestly leaned against the doorframe and said it. “You know you could stay on…

PART 1 The sign appeared on a Monday. Someone had nailed it to the post outside the dressmaker’s shop on Main Street in Cold Fork, Wyoming, at some point between Saturday evening and Monday dawn, which meant whoever did it had either very bad insomnia or very good contempt for the cover of darkness. Ruth…

“Wait… You Expect Me to Do WHAT?” The Mail-Order Bride Froze—But the Mountain Man Desperately Needed Her Help PART 1 The stage driver dropped Willa Marsh in the mud at the Clearwater crossing on a Tuesday, which was, she later thought, the correct day for the worst decision of her life. Not the decision to…

PART 1 The advertisement said no fools and hard work, but it did not say lonely, which was the most honest thing about it. Edna Crane read it twice at the post office window in Harlow Creek, Montana, then folded it into her coat pocket beside fourteen dollars, a letter she would not answer, and…

PART 1 The baby was not crying when Jesse Crane found her. That was the thing that kept him awake after, long after the sheriff left and the caseworker arrived and the rain stopped and started again over the Wyoming foothills. Not the finding itself, and not the note — though the note had done…

PART 1 Grace Alderman found out about the debt the same way she found out about most hard things — through her daughter’s eyes. Clara was twelve, which was old enough to understand ledger numbers and young enough to let what they meant show on her face before she could stop it. She had gone…