MEET OUR GUEST EDITORS FOR ISSUE 223
APRIL-JUNE 2022

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from April 1-June 30

NOTE: Submissions for Issue 223, are open from October 1 through November 30, 2021. Prime Number Magazine has guest editors for each issue, to keep things fresh and interesting. If your story or poem is not selected during this submissions cycle, feel free to resubmit the same work to the guest editor for the next issue. Submissions are open the first two months of each quarter. Thank you for reading and for sending your work to Prime Number Magazine!

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Originally from Belfast, now living with his family in Hickory North Carolina, Adrian Rice is an established poet on both sides of the Atlantic. Muck Island is housed in The Tate Gallery, and The Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The Mason’s Tongue was shortlisted for the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Literary Prize, and was nominated for the Irish Times Prize for Poetry. Hickory Station was nominated for the Roanoke-Chowan Award for Poetry, and a poem from Hickory Station, “Breath,” was a Pushcart Prize nomination, and a (London) Guardian “Poem of the Week.”  Rice also plays with The Belfast Boys, an Irish Traditional duo, whose album, Songs For Crying Out Loud, regularly airs across the Carolinas. He is a Lecturer in First Year Seminar at Appalachian State University, where he is also working on his doctoral dissertation, “Education in Poetry: Learning through Poems.”

1: 1953

From miles around they came to bear witness.  What they witnessed were six men, three sheriff’s deputies, the coroner and two of his assistants, striding across the furrows of Lester Fiscus’ seven acre field, over the hillock in the middle, down to the tree line below and back again in a pattern laid out by the sheriff for the purpose of covering every square inch of the field.  Each man carried a bag, and each man stopped every so often to bend and pluck an object from the earth with his gloved hand, and drop it into the bag.  Their harvest was bones, human bones.  Each man also wore his handkerchief over his face, to ward off the stench of the freshly fertilized field, an offensive odor stronger than any they could recall, and no man there was a stranger to fertilized fields.  Some of the witnesses, the nearly two dozen men, women and children who’d gathered to watch in somber silence, wore similar coverings over their faces, many fanning the air before their noses, trying to banish the malodorous air.  On the upper corner of the field, toward where the weather-beaten barn and house sat in sullen disrepair, Sheriff Foulkrod stood at a wary distance beside Lester Fiscus, both men in a wary stance, feet planted solidly in the soil, arms crossed over their chests, service revolver protruding at Foulkrod’s hip.  Neither man’s face was covered.  Tillie Craven, one of the watchers, was not surprised that neither man would hide behind a hankie, thereby showing weakness.  She noticed how handsome Lester Fiscus was, at least at a distance far enough to remove from consideration his oft-broken nose, teeth and scowl.

The sheriff, it was generally acknowledged, had it in for Lester Fiscus.  He’d been driving by Fiscus’ isolated farm in his cruiser the day before—a near daily part of his patrol, keeping tabs on Fiscus—when he’d noticed peculiar white objects glinting in the low sun across the field, and had stopped for a closer look.  It soon became apparent the objects were pieces of bone, and the sheriff had persisted, hoping against hope, finally hitting the jackpot: a piece that looked for all the world to belong to the eye socket of a human skull.  Word had quickly spread.

Tillie Craven had more than a passing interest in the bones, but less of an interest, it occurred to her as she looked down the road at the other spectators, than the McCrackens, whom she spotted off to themselves close to where the sheriff stood near Lester Fiscus.  Luke McCracken put his arm around his wife, Ethel, but she shrugged it off, staring intently at the men harvesting the bones.  It was a chilly October afternoon beneath a sky so plain and gray it promised nothing.  Just over three years before, the McCrackens’ two youngest daughters, Mary Lou and Katie, had wandered into the woods and vanished.  Luke and Ethel were wondering, Tillie reckoned, just how big were the bones being plucked from the field.

Tillie made her way over to offer what comfort she could.  She was a small woman, built like a twig, and the McCrackens never saw her coming till she was there.  “How you folks doing?” she said.  Luke and Ethel nodded in unison, regarding her as they might somebody’s nosing dog.  Luke asked her who was minding the store, though they all knew it would be Chester, Tillie’s husband, proprietor and owner of the Coolbrook General Store, who always minded it when Tillie was out gallivanting about.

“Hey, Sheriff,” called Tillie, offering comfort, “how big are them bones?”

An audible gasp from the McCrackens, as watchers up and down the road turned toward Tillie, a tide of shaking faces.

“I know,” called the sheriff.  “I know, Tillie.”

~ ~ ~

Everybody knew Tillie.  Before she married Chester Craven she was Tillie Dinger, the preacher’s daughter, a high-spirited, immodest girl, too high-spirited and immodest in the minds of many.  Her reputation was made at the age of eleven some thirty-five years before, when she’d been exposed as the miscreant who’d poked out the knothole in a plank behind the boys’ outhouse and charged the other fourth and fifth grade girls of Coolbrook Township School a penny a peek to see what the boys peed with.  Unfortunately, the knothole being near the bottom of the plank, Ron Fenstemaker had heard the giggles, spotted the source, and peed in Mary Lou Lemon’s eye.  Tillie’s father, the preacher at Coolbrook Baptist Church, had endured the ensuing scandals, all those that followed, aware that the good Lord was testing his faith, much as He’d tested Job’s.  Tillie’s knees to this day were calloused and calcified from hours of enforced prayer on the hard plank floor of her room.

Chester had always been there.  The Coolbrook General Store was only a few doors down the road—literally down, as the village was on the side of a hill—from the house near the church where Tillie lived, and Chester had a place in her earliest memories, helping his parents at the store whenever Tillie came in with her mother for a loaf of bread, or by herself for penny candy, on the days when she’d managed to liberate a penny from her father’s pocket.  To this day, the squeaking of a screen door opening, the slap of it slamming shut, reminded her of the store’s big front door in summer, the sweating of an icy pop bottle, the saltiness of sweaty skin, and the eyes of Chester following her around the store.  His eyes were big and gray behind his spectacles, and they always seemed to be on her, and not, he would assure her later, to see what she might be stealing.  It was because, he was to confess, he simply couldn’t keep his eyes off her.  Even after the influenza had taken both his parents and he found himself proprietor of the steady little store on his own at the age of eighteen, even then, at his most tried and harried, he’d always had eyes for Tillie.  And it was that, maybe—for Tillie never really understood the reason—because he was the only man who ever purely adored her, who ever heaped his attention upon her for any benign reason, the man who was always there like the sun in the morning, maybe that was the reason she’d married him.  For they had precious little else in common.  And, after Chester’s first heart attack, precious little less.

It was Tillie then who was left to heft the big bags of feed and flour, for, despite her diminutive size, she was strong and wiry, and it was Tillie who was left to climb the ladder to clean and stock the high shelves, for, against all expectations, she waged an obsessive war with soap and water against any and all manner of filth.  And it was Tillie who was left to her own devices when it came to needs of a physical nature.  The days of her being his little Tilliedinger faded away.  The days of her whispering in his ear, I got a Craven, with a lick to his lobe and a free-roaming fondle, were gone as well.

Lester Fiscus would not be not the first.  Chester’s heart attack notwithstanding, Lester Fiscus still was not the first.

~ ~ ~

The bones were not those of the McCracken girls.  The coroner, a gassy old man by the name of Snyder, pieced the puzzle back together the best he could and came up with an adult male, albeit an adult male with lots of pieces still missing.  Tillie suspected as much.  She suspected too that after three years, the news would be cold comfort to Luke and Ethel, for Luke and Ethel wanted to know where their missing daughters were, wanted to bury them and put them to rest, and the fact that their deaths had not yet been confirmed would serve only to prolong the agony.  Tillie suspected as well that there was, nevertheless, a link between the girls and the bones in the field, although she suspected that revelation too would be of little comfort to the McCrackens.

What did Lester Fiscus know about the bones?

What did Tillie know about Lester Fiscus? 

He stopped at the general store infrequently, and he always seemed, in Tillie’s eye, to be drunk, a certain glassiness to his glowering eyes, a certain easy slur to the few words he ever uttered.  Tillie was not offended.  What did offend her though was his habit of only pricing items in the store, never buying.  The axe.  She remembered the fine Swedish axe, the way the blade of it glinted the same as Lester’s eye when he touched it with the tips of his gnarly, dirty fingers.  But he wasn’t buying.

There was also the Dewdrop Inn on Weedville Road where Tillie often went to dance to Hank Williams songs on the juke box (without Chester, whose dancing days were done), but she’d seen Lester Fiscus there only once or twice, and she couldn’t remember the last time.  She didn’t want to wait for another chance meeting.

When she drove by his place next day, the field was muddy and trampled, and his battered old pickup was in front of his house.  By the door to the barn sat his Ford tractor, his Wain-Roy backhoe attached.  Many a local farmer hired him, distasteful though most of them found it, to remove a stump, dig a ditch, excavate for a foundation.  She wondered what else the backhoe might be good for.  She suspected she knew.  Finding nobody home, she wasn’t surprised.  She’d heard the sheriff had brought Lester in for questioning by the state police in an effort to solve the mystery of the bones, and seldom were those interrogations less than a day or two in length.

Next day it was raining and he came to the door when she pounded upon it, her Hudson steaming in the yard.

“What can I do for you, Tillie?”

“You can tell me where them bones came from.”

“I’ll tell you same as what I told the coppers—I ain’t got no idea.”

“I ain’t buying that,” she said.

Rain battered the tin roof of the porch.  A cow’s low from the barn sounded like a moan.  Lester was none too clean, oily patches on his overalls, a faint whiff of manure.  But he was solid, his stance suggesting hard muscle.  He set his square, unshaven jaw and his glassy eyes underwent a shift, faltering from her face down the front of her dress, the moment Tillie was waiting to see.  She didn’t have an extra ounce on her, but the ounces she did have were right where they were supposed to be.  “You got a bathtub in this place?” she asked Lester Fiscus.

~ ~ ~

Not far from Craven’s store, at the top of the hill where the village ended and the road to Hartsgrove rounded a bend and leveled out, sat the Coolbrook Township School, a squat, green-shingled box of a building with a broad face of mullioned windows, and a sign, Coolbrook Twp, in large letters over the wide front doors.  For over sixty years the place had been the hub of the lives of the youth of the township, and this was the first year those youths were able to avail themselves of indoor plumbing.  After it had been installed in the late spring, the outhouses, scene of Tillie’s first great dare, had been demolished, the holes filled in.  When Tillie drove by, it was dark, still drizzling, and she couldn’t make out the site beyond the rise in the middle of the schoolyard where the outhouses once had stood.

It was after closing, faint light coming from the store windows, scarcely enough to cast a shadow across the porch.  The porch light was off, though the front door was still unlocked, a low jangle of bells when she opened it.  Inside, she stood for a moment, taking in the dim interior, the worn and scarred countertop and the ancient cash register, the sly glinting of goods and stores stacked to the tin ceiling, the soft clicking of the clock, the quiet hum of the Coca-Cola cooler.  Looking up, she thought she detected a speck of blood, but realized it was too dark, the ceiling all but invisible.  It had to be her imagination, because of the bones.  She found Chester in the back storeroom, asleep in the little chair among the crowded shelves, his head resting against one of the bolts of cotton fabric standing upright against the wall, the bolt of blue cloth with dark butterflies imprinted.  Tillie had removed it from display three years before, after she’d sold the last yard to Ethel McCracken to make sundresses for her girls.  Mary Lou McCracken, according to her family, had been wearing that very sundress when she’d vanished.  How Chester had aged since his heart attack, turning paunchy and pasty, his hair turning thinner and whiter.  A gleam of saliva leaked from his lips, his glasses askew on his face.  He didn’t stir when Tillie came near.  She touched his cheek with the back of her hand, the fragile warmth.  Chester woke, a cloud of confusion vacating his gray eyes as Tillie’s face came into focus.

“What are you sleeping here for?  Why ain’t you up in bed?”

“I was trying to redd up some back here.  Just set down a minute to rest.”

“You oughtn’t to be overdoing it, Chester.  You know that.”

“Redding up ain’t exactly chopping wood.  I gotta still be able to do something.”

“I don’t want nothing to happen to you.”

Chester stood, stiffly, steadying himself with a hand to a shelf by a stack of canned peaches.  He put an arm around Tillie, pulling her close.  “Where you been?”

“Over and had a talk with Lester Fiscus,” she said.  “Wondering about them bones.”

He released her, making his way toward the stairs.  “What about the bones?”

“You heard they weren’t the McCracken girls, didn’t you?”

“Yep.”  He started up, slowly.  “Those girls’ll never be seen again.  Why do you care so much about the bones?”

“Don’t you care?  Ain’t you curious?”  She hesitated at the bottom, watching him go up step by step, a rising sack of flour.

The sack of flour shrugged.  He turned, gripping the handrail, looking down at Tillie still on the bottom.  “A little bit, I suppose.”

“Sheriff thinks the bones might belong to Marlin Fiscus.”  She started up behind him.

“Marlin Fiscus?  Lester’s brother?”

“That’s what the sheriff’s saying.”  Or so Lester Fiscus had told her.  At one time she’d known Marlin Fiscus better than Lester, as Marlin was older, closer to Tillie’s age, and she remembered him from their school days, though she hadn’t seen much of him since.  No one had.  Tillie, and, she suspected, about everyone else, had taken Lester at his word when he’d said that Marlin had left in a huff, headed out west to find his fortune there, after their father had left the farm to Lester.  The sheriff, it turned out, had his doubts, suspicions caused foremost by Lester’s penchant for solving disputes with his fists, or other violent means, as evidenced by the many complaints sworn against him by this neighbor and that, this bar patron and that.  Then there was the matter of Lester’s total disregard of the law, of authority in general, at least as far as the sheriff was concerned, having arrested him more than once for poaching deer, moonshining whiskey, availing himself of this item or that without benefit of proper payment.  The sheriff even insinuated, or so Lester had told Tillie, that the circumstances surrounding the passing of old George Fiscus, the father, hadn’t been all that clear-cut either.

It did little to satisfy Tillie’s curiosity.  She didn’t want to know what the sheriff suspected, she wanted to know what Lester Fiscus knew.  She wanted to know if indeed the bones were those of Marlin, if indeed Lester Fiscus was a man who could murder, for Tillie was intrigued by the possibility of that capability in any other living creature.  She wanted to know everything there was to know about Lester Fiscus.  That would require more work.

Chester sagged into the bed.  Tillie lay down beside him.  “He’s no good,” he said.

“Who?”  She nestled close to her husband.  “Lester Fiscus?”

“Lester Fiscus.  An ornery, dangerous man.  God knows what he’s done, or could do.”

“Oh, I know.  Poor Lester.”  Then she said, “Do you happen to recollect who they got to tear down the outhouses up at the school?”

Chester scratched his chin, took off his glasses and looked at her.  “I’d give a month’s worth of gumballs,” he said, “to know what’s going on in that Mexican jumping bean mind of yours.”

Gumballs and jumping beans hit her square on the funny bone and she laughed, the full-throated, belly-bouncing Tilliedinger laugh, which always triggered the same response in him, and he laughed too, the pair of them laughing toward the ceiling of the dark little bedroom, rolling and slapping the sheets, and squeezing each other’s hands, until Chester had to stop, his laughter gone to coughing, his skin to ashen gray.

~ ~ ~

Two nights later the spotlight from Lester’s pickup thrust a solid beam of pristine white light into the black of the woods, Tillie imagining it to be the saber of the Lord probing the blackness of her soul.  The beam alighted on a bewildered doe, which froze in all its innocence.  Lester aimed his thirty-ought-six, violence ensued, a spurt of black blood, and the doe crumbled to the forest floor.  Lester let out a whoop.  Tillie watched him trot across the field toward the spot at the edge of the woods where the doe had dropped, the woods that were vast and deep, the shadows of which seemed to be reaching out to seize Lester and swallow him whole.  She saw her heartbeat quivering down the beam of light.  He returned, dragging the doe, his skin white as bones in the light.  She knelt beside him, beside the doe, in the dirt by the road, and when he plunged his knife into the belly of the animal, she saw, clear as day, the puff of white vapor rushing out.

“You see that?” she said.  “The ghost of the thing—why, it flew straight up.”

“What?” he said.  “The steam?  The guts is hot, that’s all.”  She wasn’t convinced.  She shook her head.  “You’re a preacher’s kid all right,” he said.  He left the guts in a heap by the side of the road, threw the carcass in the bed of the truck.  “Let’s get on out of here,” he said, “before the law shows up.”

Tillie was thrilled.  They set out on the isolated dirt road through the endless forest north of Hartsgrove, and when she noticed the glow of light behind them, probably the headlights of another car or truck, quite possibly, in Lester’s mind, the headlights of the law, he gunned his Ford.  They tore furiously down the road, Tillie jouncing wildly, nearly bumping her head on the ceiling of the cab, and looking back she saw the light still there, brighter if anything over the carcass bouncing in back, and Lester went even faster.  Reaching down, he turned off his headlights.  At first she couldn’t see a thing, racing headlong into blackness, trying to tame the panic bucking inside her, expecting at any moment to burst through to oblivion, until finally, somehow, the road, the ditches, the woods began to ease out of the night, scarcely more than a suggestion, an idea, and Lester sped on, unperturbed, bouncing blindly, off the dirt road onto a trail, little more than a logging trail, then onto a path, then onto nothing.  The lights behind them were long lost.  They might have been lost as well, in the heart of the forest, a woods so vast and trackless that Tillie felt less than a speck of dirt, a tiny, pulsing speck of dirt.

In the bed of the truck her blood kept racing even as the pickup was still and steaming and ticking, its heart still racing as well, the woods watching, listening.  Lester’s animal grunts, the squeals of other creatures.  The smell of the doe’s blood was like the scent of clover in the spring, the dead flesh still warm, a source of comfort against the chill night air.

~ ~ ~

How Tillie went about her business:  She got Lester Fiscus in a delicate position, a position in which, in her experience, men were prone to tell the truth, because, in that position, men’s thoughts were focused such that the creation of a lie was beyond their capability at the time.  He told her he didn’t know where the bones had come from.  He told her he didn’t stand guard over his manure pile and that anyone might have come by when he was out in his fields driving his clattering, rackety tractor and could have put anything they wanted in that pile.  A good way to dispose of a body.  Or, for all he knew, some hobo could have fallen asleep trying to keep warm and sunk to the bottom and rotted there for a year or two—he hadn’t done much fertilizing for a while, not until this fall—and yes, the beaters on his manure spreader had seemed a little bulky and clunky, but he’d thought it was just from rust and neglect and disuse, not from the shredding of bones.  He knew nothing about the origin of the bones, he professed, and Tillie came around to believing him.  Then she let him finish.

~ ~ ~

When Tillie stepped out of the store to greet Shingledecker’s Bakery truck, the early afternoon sun had broken through and she looked up to see the white clouds flocking like sheep in a blue pasture, thinking of God the shepherd, as she often did.  Everywhere, dead leaves were dropping from trees.  Old man Radaker was driving by in his battered Chevy pickup, up the hill toward the church, which put her in mind of the time she and Martha Long decided to break Tillie’s dog, Luther, of chasing cars.  They’d been led to believe that throwing a bucketful of water on the offending pup was good for that purpose, and so they’d had Martha’s daddy drive them by in the bed of his pickup, and when Luther commenced chasing, Tillie was to throw the water on him, not accounting for the bump and the lurch that caused her to fling the water on Martha instead.  Funny at the time, or so Tillie had believed, gales of laughter in the wind, though looking back, much of the humor was lost after Martha had not spoken to her in any meaningful way since then.  Tillie didn’t have many female friends.

Back inside the store, she caught Chester up on the ladder, stacking cans of Spam.  “Get down from there, mister,” she said.  “You trying to kill yourself?”

“Jesus, Tillie, just let me be.”  He looked down, too gray for her liking, too damp and clammy, his glasses fogging.  “I gotta mind the store.”

“That’s why you got me here, Chester.”

“You ain’t always here.  Lots of times you ain’t here.”

“Well, cans of Spam can wait till I am.”  She didn’t account for the rhyme until she saw the look on Chester’s face staring down, his cheeks starting to lift his glasses, the chuckle already working its way up from his belly, and they both laughed, a bit too hard, the laughter of one feeding off the other as it always did.  He clung to the ladder, Tillie taking him by the knee and hugging, then tugging, coaxing him down.

When he started coughing, she led him by the hand to the rocker behind the counter.  “You sit there.  You wait for customers.  You let me take care of everything else.”  She climbed the ladder to deal with the cans of Spam while he watched from his chair, his hanky in his hand to wipe his face.  “Chester,” she said, scolding, “this here shelf’s filthy.”  He watched her, shook his head.

No one came in for a while.  Early afternoons were generally slow.  She got the cans down from the shelf, got herself a bucket of hot water, swished in her Spic and Span, then climbed back up to scrub the shelf.  Chester’s eyes had closed, the gentle rocking of the chair had quit, and he appeared to be napping.  Time was, not that long ago, he never napped.  Cleaning the shelves with soap and water, as she often did, always put her in mind of Curly Smathers, not a pleasant image by any means, so she scrubbed all the harder, trying to scrub that bald and vicious man out of her mind as well.  The Smatherses, a mean, rough, dirty tribe, nasty hillbillies all, were about extinct now.  She didn’t know of another still walking the earth.  Not long after Curly’s last visitation, she’d heard that his old man, Vern, had been found dead in his bed, his throat cut, as near as they could tell.  His body had been there for months, not much more than bones by the time he was discovered.  It was the talk of the township.  All this was right around the time the McCracken girls had vanished.

“Do you love him, Tillie?”

Chester’s voice startled the brush right out of her hand, splashing with a clatter to the floor.  Descending the ladder to fetch it, she looked over at him, his eyes still closed.  “What are you talking about?  Do I love who?”

Her husband’s eyes remained shut, though the chair gave a gentle rock.

Truth was, the question baffled her.  Tillie had always been in love; Tillie had never been in love.  “You ain’t talking about Lester Fiscus, are you?  That’s just plain dumb.  You asking me if I’m in love with Lester Fiscus?”  Chester didn’t answer.  The rocking chair quietly squawked.  She said, “I told you I was just curious about them bones.  I told you I was just getting acquainted with him to find out what he knows about them bones.”  She knew she was talking too much.  She climbed the ladder, brush in hand, commenced her scrubbing again.  “Besides, I only danced with him once or twice.  A body’s got to have somebody to dance with.”  The last was quieter, almost to herself.

Life will not hand you joy, Tillie knew that.  Life will not cut a big slice of happiness and hand it over to you and say, here, this is for you—go ahead, enjoy it.  You had to go out and dig and search and scour and find it for yourself, happiness, and then you had to grab it with both hands and live it.  She was afraid Chester didn’t possess this knowledge.  And even if he were to learn it now, it was probably too late.

She scrubbed hard.  She worked up a good sweat.  Chester’s chair had stopped again.  He appeared, again, to be napping.  Annoyed, Tillie scrubbed till the splinters gave way.  Not a customer came in to save her.  She paused at the top of the ladder, her muscles tingling, glowing, and she looked around the store in the quiet.  The Coca-Cola cooler hummed loudly—louder than usual—by the front window, the only sound but for the soft ticking of the clock, the windows bright with afternoon sun casting shadows through the store, glinting off the top of the cooler and the floorboards below.  Goods in cans and stacks and heaps, baskets and barrels, food stuffs mostly, sustenance, life.  She felt secure, fortunate, grateful, bored and restless.

Out of the quiet again came Chester’s voice.  “You ever had a broken heart, Tillie?”

She sighed.  Once again she was unequipped to answer the question.  “Yes,” she said, and resumed her scrubbing.  “When Luther—you remember Luther, my dog—got hit by that car.  That purt near broke my heart.”

Chester didn’t open his eyes.  He never stirred, not until Meryl Fenstemaker came in to buy a new broom for his wife, Betty, when the bells on the door gave a tired, happy jangle.

~ ~ ~

The Dewdrop Inn was cutting edge, the first building in the vicinity to find itself sheathed in wide swaths of aluminum.  The white siding gave the place, a two-story, featureless affair, a sterile, tinny look alongside the well-traveled road.  Inside, however, it was dark and plain as ever, a long, unembellished bar, a floor of worn and darkened boards, an eclectic collection of cheap tables and chairs that had been in place for years.  Cluttering the walls, beer signs of every variety, some plugged in and glowing bright.  Business had always been good.  There weren’t many watering holes along the twelve-mile stretch of road between Hartsgrove and Weedville, and the place served as an oasis in the wooded, rural countryside.

The juke box in a back corner was loud and garish with neon reds and blues.  Lester Fiscus dropped in a nickel and played “Your Cheatin’ Heart.”

Tillie cocked her head and said, “You ain’t funny, you know.”

“Ain’t I?” he said with a cocky grin.

“Shut up and dance,” she said.

# # #

Dennis McFadden grew up in Brookville, a small town in western Pennsylvania very much like the fictional Hartsgrove of Jimtown Road. A graduate of Allegheny College and a retired project manager for the state of New York, he lives and writes in a cedar-shingled cottage called Summerhill in the woods of upstate New York. His stories have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Missouri Review, New England Review, The Sewanee Review, Crazyhorse, The Antioch Review, Prairie Fire, The Massachusetts Review, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and The Best American Mystery Stories. His first short story collection, Hart’s Grove, was published by Colgate University Press in 2010. In 2018 he was awarded a Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony.