My story, “Stone Creek Station,” has appeared in the anthology Beneath the Surface, edited by Timothy Deal. Published by Shroud Publishing. Buy it here.
And here’s the opening:
While cleaning out my office, I pulled the old Rand McNally atlas off the shelf and the book fell open to the two-page spread of the United States. I closed my eyes and made a blind stab at the map; when I looked down at the book, my finger had fallen in the middle of Oregon. The problem was that when I lifted my finger, there wasn’t a town there, just a mountain range and some lakes.
Still, I was determined to follow my method, so I turned to Oregon in the atlas, and located on the more detailed map the spot where my finger had fallen. There were a couple of small towns in the area, but one caught my eye: Stone Creek.
It was impulsive. It was insane. It wasn’t anything like me at all — always deliberate, always cautious. But that was the point. If you’re serious about starting over, you can’t trust yourself to make a clean break . . .