Fiction - Stories, tales, anecdotes and more.
Nick Eldridge Stories
These are a few samples from my short story collection, Times Almost Forgotten. Nick Eldridge was a character I used in short stories for a long time, until eventually I put all of those stories together in a collection. I always liked writing stories from Nick's life; he evolved into a sort of a Renaissance Man of the new West, an outdoorsman, a writer, a quiet man of considerable strength. The tragedy of his life was always his solitude, but in the end of the published stories, I gave Nick a break from that. The short story Three Days of Snow is probably the best piece of short fiction I've ever written.
A Very Dark Night
A very short story, really just a few scenes of a dark night in an unfinished cabin on the Uncompaghre.
Three Days of Snow
Sometimes a second chance isn't what you had hoped it to be. In this story, Nick gets a second chance - of sorts - when he comes face to face with a lost piece of his past.
Bear at FortyMile
A story of an "unfavorable human-bear interaction" of a type that really does happen in the Alaskan bush.
An Evening in Town
Another very short story. An evening in town, a glass of beer, a light supper. The bar in the story is based on the completely wonderful Hooligan's Saloon in Soldotna.
Humor
The Van
The Van is based on an actual vehicle owned years ago by one of my oldest friends. Names have been changed to protect the... Well, let's just say I changed the names and leave it at that.
Legend of the Fall
If you can fall into, out of, on to, or off of something, I've done it. I don't think there is a body of water in northeast Iowa that I didn't fall into when I was a boy.
The Goat Tree
Sometimes a smelly situation can work out better than you expect.
The Worst Elk Hunt, Ever
Based on actual events. By 'based on' I mean, 'embellished to make it more entertaining,' but only a little.
Miscellaneous
Another Time, Another Place
Small towns in hard times often breed a particular kind of discontent in young men. Having been a young man in a small town in Iowa in the economic doldrums of the late Seventies, I know the feeling from personal experience. That led to this small vignette; a conversation, a glass of beer, a litany of dissatisfaction in a small, dusty town.
A Dark and Distant Place
This story was inspired by Bob Dylan's song I and I, from the album Infidels.
Song Sparrow
A disclaimer - personally, I do not believe in the concept of duality, which is the idea that there is some non-physical aspect of a person that survives after death. But the idea for this story seemed very poetic, and so I wrote it anyway - and the dimly revealed image of the main character's grandfather was particularly compelling to me, as it is based on my own grandfather.
Where You Are
A simple story, about how you don't always end up where you'd planned.