Nuthatches circled invisibly overhead, scattering shadows over the rider’s hands. They blended with the deep amethyst silhouettes of birch tips and pine, tracing the arch of her thumb and forefinger, leaving vanishing stains over the rein leather which lay tight in her grasp.

The firs had hushed their branches. The bracken at their curved roots stilled their wind-dancing as her horse’s ho...

Moonlight fell heavily on my bedroom wall. Blue and white —— like the porch light over the kitchen step at home as it went pouring through the door screen, with little dark rectangles cut out of it where the screen was patched.

Andy had made holes in the door with his Red Ryder once. He had scarcely missed Latitia as she stood drying dishes.

I imagined cicadas and cricket song, crackl...

They had the effect of sirens on our pack horses; clouds that twisted into indigo tipped hills, flattened to matte sky, then slid into cloud again. At a pace like sand in an hourglass, so that you never caught the moment of change— even if you thought you had been watching for it.

The ponies were ever pulling taught on the reins, ever challenging the creeping shapeshifters to form a crag tha...

“I think I just met the happiest person in the world,” Jovie remarked, as she laid a bundle of thirsty Queen Anne’s Lace in the kitchen sink.

Martin made some small reply from the next room. _The Herald _lay open over his lap and his tea sat undrank — a clenched bottom lip meant he was drowning in thought.

Jovie didn’t wait for him to raise his head to continue, and spoke too softly to...