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A rancher claims he killed his Chinese worker over a simple task, but a local witness tells another story.
Alone in a deserted mining camp, Hiram Beeson waits each night for a visitor from beneath his floor.
A retired lieutenant spends a sweltering day condemning the town’s idle natives while his own hours slip away.
A Russian landowner’s casual nationalism turns a meal with his dependent French companion into an ordeal of insult and control.
A young officer visits an unconventional distillery owner to collect a debt and finds his principles tested by her unsettling charm.
A bitter coffin maker counts every human experience as a financial loss until illness at home forces a different reckoning.
A hunted mutant slips past Pluto’s quarantine and finds a dead scientist, a false disaster, and a doorway to a world remembered only in nightmares.
A young Norman soldier asks his parents to judge the Black woman he hopes to marry on her character rather than her skin.
At a desolate tarn, a boatman shows a traveler the blood-red cross marking where the Wandering Jew supposedly died.
An old colonial officer recalls a seven-man punitive expedition whose celebrated success depended on ruthless deception and force.
A Paris officer recognizes a former colonial soldier whose chaotic courage and appetite once shaped life inside a blockaded town.
An abused laborer in a roaring power station begins to worship the largest dynamo as a god capable of judging his brutal supervisor.
A homesick poet follows an eighteenth-century stranger through hidden New York streets to a house erased from modern maps.
A child is blamed when a treasured porcelain figure vanishes from a plantation home.
A young mother at a Louisiana plantation sees her husband's love vanish as rumors spread about their baby.
A planter's challenge to a segregated school sends its teacher to New Orleans, where their conflict follows her.
An enslaved young woman refuses the marriage her mistress has chosen and falls in love with another man.
Sent to work for a Louisiana family, a young Indigenous woman longs for the woods but grows attached to their baby.
On her way to Mass, a girl stays with an elderly neighbor whom no one else can tend.
A traveling journalist arrives in supposedly uneventful Nashville and discovers that its quiet streets conceal tangled loyalties and danger.
A proud former Confederate officer is offended when an actor turns his old-fashioned manners and clothes into a theatrical sensation.
A Terran boy visits his alien friends on the day their people finally begin winning back a century of conquered worlds.
A prejudiced anthropologist and his assistant discover that an alien village possesses a rare medicine with extraordinary healing powers.
23 stories
