The minimum thermometer read thirty-one below. Lyle Brandvold had his headlamp clamped in his teeth so he could write the…
“Is your bay supposed to be loose?” Bev Okerlund asked it before Nora Haskell had finished saying hello. Nora was…
The sound came out of the bog just as Ruth Halvorsen bent for the last cluster of cranberries she meant…
At twenty past six on the eleventh morning of the cold snap, Walt Kessler carried a coffee can of oats…
The cold that morning was the kind that made the snowmachine’s engine sound thin, as if the air didn’t have…
The answering machine on Aunt Mags’s kitchen counter held twenty-three messages. Jo Pruitt played every one of them with a…
The old mare stood with her nose over the water tub and didn’t drink. Marcy Keller noticed that because noticing…
Deb Halloran had been handing an apple across the Quale mailbox to the same old dun mare for fourteen months.…
The boxes were the last thing. By the end of the week a county van would come up the snowed-in…
The county had zip-tied a laminated notice to the gate of the Gaines lot, and the wind coming off the…
The Ambrose mailbox was built like a bread oven and painted the same rust red as the company trucks. Nell…
Sleet blew across the Ashby working pens in long gray sheets. Nora Hulett stood braced on the catwalk above the…