Small Towns
Places where everyone knows everyone, and therefore everyone knows what not to talk about. Weekly newspapers, church organists, grange suppers and the one road out of town.
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The Unmarked Stop
Ruth Halvorsen has played the organ at Trinity Lutheran for forty-eight years, mostly for funerals. When the restorer took the console apart, he found one drawknob that had been panelled over in 1958. It has no name engraved on it, and it doesn't make a sound. Not from the organ, anyway.
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The Maze
My family has cut a corn maze into the same eight acres every fall for thirty years. Every year, from the air, there's a path in it that none of us cut. My grandfather had one rule about it.
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The Festival Classic
Summoned by an ancient family tradition, a man arrives at the fog-shrouded seaport of Kingsport for the Yuletide festival.
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July Ice
On the night of July 11th the reservoir above our town in Montana froze solid, in the middle of a heat wave. Half the town walked out onto it. Under the ice, the lights of the old town were on.
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The Wind in the Rose-Bush Classic
A schoolteacher arrives in a small New England town to take in her orphaned niece, but her stepmother-in-law seems strangely reluctant to call the girl down.
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Route Fourteen
In 1988 I delivered the morning paper in Aberdeen, Washington. One house on my route had been empty for years, but it had a subscription going back to 1931, and every Friday there was an envelope of coins on the porch rail to pay for it.
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The Train Horn at 4:44
A thread from a small town's community forum. A few residents have started hearing a freight train's horn at 4:44 every morning. The town's rail line was torn up in 1979.
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The Hymn Board
A letter left in the sacristy of a small country church for the incoming pastor, by the man who has kept the building for forty-one years. He would like to explain about the numbers.
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Mrs. Amworth Classic
A cheerful widow moves to a quiet English village, wins everyone over with her bridge parties, and soon after a strange illness begins.
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Lost & Found
Selected listings from the Lost & Found column of a small-town weekly paper, collected by a reader who spent a summer going through its back issues on microfilm. Most of it is dogs and car keys.
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The Seven-Ten
When I was a girl in Cale, Nebraska, a pale blue sedan drove down Orchard Road every summer evening at ten past seven, full of waving people. We all waved back. Within the month, whoever had been in it moved away.
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The Minister's Black Veil Classic
One Sunday, the Reverend Hooper appears before his congregation wearing a black veil over his face, and never takes it off.
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Minutes, Regular Meeting
Excerpts from a year of homeowners' association minutes in an Arizona subdivision. The main items are pool hours, a dispute about a basketball hoop, and the house at the end of Mesquite Court, which is not on the plat.
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Luella Miller Classic
The villagers avoid the empty house where Luella Miller once lived, a delicate, helpless beauty whose friends and husbands all wasted away.
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The Picture in the House Classic
Caught in a storm on a back road in rural New England, a traveller takes shelter in a decrepit farmhouse whose ancient owner loves one particular book.
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The Pipe
Behind our elementary school there was a concrete drainage pipe you could crawl through, sixty feet from end to end. Kids who went all the way through came out a little different. Dougie Ferro came out left-handed.
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The Dunwich Horror Classic
In a decaying hill village of Massachusetts, a strange child grows unnaturally fast, and his family keeps buying more cattle.
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Covered Dish
Every September at the Grange hall harvest supper, there is one casserole on the long table that nobody brought, with a family's name on masking tape on the lid. I've been Grange secretary for twenty-two years. It's my job to deliver it.
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The Shadows on the Wall Classic
After a brother's death, three sisters notice a shadow on the study wall that no object in the room could possibly cast.
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A Note Below A
A standard piano has eighty-eight keys, and the lowest is an A. I've tuned pianos for twenty-six years. The old upright in the Halasz house in Dubuque has eighty-nine.
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The Colour Out of Space Classic
A surveyor west of Arkham hears of the "strange days" that followed when a meteorite fell on a lonely farm in 1882.