Western Stories

PART 1 The men outside the Criterion Saloon in Copper Fall, Colorado, were experts at a specific art: the evaluation of eastern women in unsuitable clothing. They had developed this expertise over years of watching hopeful arrivals discover the difference between reading about the mountains and living in them. They ranked women by the category…

PART 1 The betting pool at Garrett’s Hardware in Sable Fork, Montana Territory, had been running since Tuesday. By Thursday afternoon, when Della Vance finally heard about it from the youngest of the Marsh boys, who had the grace to look embarrassed but not enough grace to have stayed quiet, the pot had apparently grown…

PART 1 The horses were what told him. Not the storm — the storm had been speaking all morning in the particular vocabulary of a January blizzard in the Wind River Range, which involved wind velocity, reduced visibility, the specific cold that moved through buffalo hide like it was planning to stay. Jonas Webb had…

PART 1 The flour was gone on a Wednesday. Not depleted — gone. Ruth Hadley lifted the tin, shook it over the mixing bowl, and got a small puff of white that settled on the wood like the suggestion of flour, like the memory of flour, like flour’s apology for no longer being there. She…

PART 1 The beans scattered across the porch boards before Lena Cole understood she was falling. Her right knee caught the step edge. Her palm struck the wood. The breath came out of her in a sound she did not make by choice, the kind of sound a body produced when it ran out of…

PART 1 Clara Voss had learned to stand in a specific way. Left foot slightly forward. Weight distributed to the outside edge of the right heel. Hands braced against the counter at the angle that kept the pressure off the lower spine. She had discovered this configuration on the fourth day, by accident, during a…

PART 1 The bucket hit the alley before Nora did. She heard it come — the wet, heavy sound of a man who had decided something and was communicating it with a bucket, which was the specific vocabulary of men like Silas Omali, who found directness wasteful and preferred the message delivered by objects before…

PART 1 The last door in Millhaven, Oregon Territory, closed on Iris Sutton in April, which was particularly cruel because April in Millhaven had always smelled of pine and thaw and the specific possibility of things starting over. Things were not starting over. She stood on the main street with her hands in her pockets…

PART 1 Celeste Dunmore had been sold twice before she turned twenty-three. The first time, her father had called it a betrothal. Her stepmother Vivienne had arranged it over tea in the west parlor while Celeste sat in the room adjacent and listened to the sound of her future being finalized without her presence or…

PART 1 Nora Vane had never once baked bread she was allowed to keep. Twenty-three years in her father’s shop, and every loaf belonged to the shop, which belonged to the debt, which belonged to men whose names rotated but whose intentions did not. She knew this the way she knew her own hands —…