Author: john.mitchell

…bringing that line back. Nobody was bringing it back. It’s been de-energized since 2008 and there’s not a transformer left on it. I found him on the third pole, on …

THE DEAD SPUR Read More

…bringing that line back. Nobody was bringing it back. It’s been de-energized since 2008 and there’s not a transformer left on it. I found him on the third pole, on …

THE DEAD SPUR Read More

…Mama passed Tuesday. Be easy. It was my mother’s hand. I have thirty-nine years of grocery lists and permission slips to compare it against, and I’d have known it upside …

TELLING THE BEES Read More

…somebody cough. I’m not proud of what I did next, which was stand up too fast and say hello into an empty house in a voice I didn’t recognize.He came …

THE CLEAN SHELF Read More

…saw that she was about my age. Not a ghost. Not a story. A woman of forty-six in a wool coat with her ears gone red, standing in twenty below …

THE TWELFTH Read More

…they were all in there. Every card from 1994, in one small box, and not one of them opened. Sealed envelopes, forty-some, the flaps still down. Mine was in the …

THE YEAR NOBODY WROTE Read More

…he already knew what was down there. Prewitt is seventy-nine. He stood in that ditch with the flake of white paint in his palm and he told me the ground …

SIXTY FEET DOWN Read More

…he was telling her about the year. Not raving. Not the way you’d think. He was sitting there with his boots on and his hands on his knees, giving a …

THE LAST THURSDAY Read More

…he’s been dead since 2004. I stood in that field holding a mare’s foot and doing arithmetic that wouldn’t come out. Then I went home and got the old ledgers …

THE WAY MY DADDY TURNED THEM Read More

I’ve read water meters for the town of Ellsworth for twenty-two years. Four hundred and eleven accounts, same route, same houses, same people. I know which homes have dogs before …

I Read Water Meters for 22 Years — Then One House Started Using Eleven Gallons a Day Read More