A gust of wind doesn’t suddenly bang a door open. A clock doesn’t chime. The phone doesn’t ring. Yet in the next instant the stillness breaks as if it is crystal.

Autumn has come to northeast Montana. The vapor of one’s breath, the clarity of the stars, the smell of wood smoke, the stones underfoot that even a full day of sunlight won’t warm- these all...

Long past the moment when her neck begins to stiffen and ache, she continues to stare into the darkness, even though none of the human secrets she needs to know are to be found in...

A four-year-old has so little past, and he remembers almost none of it, neither the father he once had nor the house where he once lived. But he can feel the absences – and feel...

The limitless, lowering sky, the long stretches of motionless empty prairie, the silence, complete right down to the absence of birdsong — who knows what decides a man to leave most of his words unspoken?

When night comes on in a room lit by kerosene, any flicker of the flame can give the sense that darkness is about to triumph.

With so much unknown in this life, how little it takes for a face, a grove of trees, an outcropping of stone to become familiar.