This month is dedicated to Texas short stories, many of which came from anthologies (Literary Houston, Lone Star Literature, and Unknown Texas primarily). Stay tuned next week for an interview with Brian Van Reet.
| “The Window” | Brian Van Reet | Staff Sergeant Fitzpatrick tried to hold the memory, his eyes moving from the menu to his fiancée, to a rusty freight passing through the outskirts of Marathon, dotted with trailer parks and cement factories, into the Chihuahuan Desert. |
| “Tower Six” | Brian Van Reet | He was a sharp man from West Texas with a thin mustache and fast-moving eyes. |
| “Chango” | Oscar Casares | The wind was blowing some, but it was a warm breeze that made him feel like he was sitting in a Laundromat waiting for his pants to dry. |
| “RG” | Oscar Casares | I wanted to believe the hammers were somehow sending messages all over the neighborhood. |
| “The Events Concerning a Nude Fold-Out Found in a Harlequin Romance” | Joe R. Lansdale | I was scared to death she’d fall in love with some cowboy with a cheek full of snuff and end up ironing Western shirts and wiping baby asses before she was old enough to vote. |
| “Cowboy” | Joe R. Lansdale | I got off the plane at Atlanta and caught the shuttle to what I thought was my hotel. |
| “Van Horn, Texas (Highway 10)” | Sam Shepard | All I want is dessert and she giggles as though the implication is that she’s the “dessert” and the chef picks up on this and decides I’m seriously demented road trash and starts asking me to leave. |
| ”When We Were Cool” | William J. Cobb | It was exciting in its own wierd way, to be out driving in the middle of a snowy night, looking for the quick kiss of painkillers. |
| “Wild Turkey” | Ray Isle | Nothing is more irritating to false nonchalance than real nonchalance. |
| ”Whitey” | Pamela Diamond | Men stopped taking care of women in 1979-in the winter. |
| “Catholicism at the end of the Century” | Peter La Salle | Though a waitress with “personality” means a successful waitress, a girl who can push more drinks and bag hefty tips for herself, said “personality” usually also means the stock flirty blather that seems to be the Gross National Product of this hip new city, the city that is the capital of this hip new Texas, the state that is the success story in this hip new America. |
| “The Sign from Luke XVIII” | LaVerne Harrell Clark | A way they have been taught without words by their ancestors: this idea of theirs that they must ever sense or only question silently what is really new to them; that they must talk endlessly about the little things and never ask openly for the answers to the big things, the things to which they are unaccustomed. |
| “Between Here and the Yellow Sea” | Nic Pizzolatto | At this time, I still work for Alamo Sewer Treatment in Port Arthur, and my days are spent driving backroads with a clipboard, noting phosphorous and ammonia levels in the watershed, making sure farmers aren’t spreading chicken shit over their fields. |