Traditional Short Stories of Mary Scriver
The Joy Boy
Prairie Mary
He had no idea at all how he’d gotten to be so old. Maybe he just lucked out. It sure wasn’t skill or good looks. He’d never expected to see the backside of forty and here he was over fifty, kinda reaching for sixty. Of course, he had no home, no family, no one to miss him if he did die, so probably it was Fate playing her nasty little games with people’s lives.
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SHIELA MOIRA MAY O'HARA
Mary Scriver
Sheila Moira May O’Hara stood in her saloon with her hands on her hips, stood there right under the painting of a very pink and voluptuous nude. Probably some people thought it was her, but it was not. It was her mother. But it was an understandable mistake since the background looked quite a bit like her saloon, which she had carefully modeled after that of her mother, who had been dead these many years. Sheila Moira May O’Hara was no spring chicken but she was in much better shape than her mother had ever been.
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La Femme Rouge
Mary Scriver
There was a buffalo carcass on the prairie. Small piles of internal
organs, appearing to have been sorted, lay alongside in the grass.
No sign of a person. Then the carcass began to rock slightly and out
crawled a small Indian woman. She was red from head to toe, but her
grin when she saw him was white as bone. Francois thought he’d seen
everything but as he sat there on his horse -- which was as braced as
he was -- he was staring like a transfixed prairie chicken. “La
femme rouge!” he exclaimed.
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The Winter That Killed Horses
Mary Scriver
The winter had been long, harsh and cold beyond memory. Snow was deep; the wind did not blow to clear the ridges so horses could get at the grass. Instead there were occasional hard bright days that made an ice crust on top so the horses’ fetlocks left red on the snow. The man pulled off the thick cottonwood bark higher than his horse could reach, throwing it down for fodder. There was no meat in the lodge. The cached dry meat was exhausted early -- a rawhide bundle of it had accidentally fallen off the horse when crossing water so that it was spoiled, turned moldy instead of drying again.
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Yellow Coat
Mary Scriver
At first the horseback Indian thought that the patch of yellow on the prairie was just flowers, but it wasn’t quite the right season for that size and color of flowers, so he went a little closer in order to investigate -- though not close enough for the patch to be dangerous. It was some kind of garment. Sprawled. No sign of a person. Had it been discarded? Was it a trap?
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Contemporary Short Stories of Mary Scriver
WILLOW CREEK
Mary Scriver
“You got any hooks?” asked Tad Pinfeathers.
“I think I got three. You got any line?” said Elmer Arrow Hits.
“Lotsa line. And I saved a really good fishing pole I cut last time. Let’s go down to Willow Creek.”
The creek meandered through the town, wandering under a bridge and into a culvert before coming out on the other side of the east boundary. It was a wet year with lots of late snow and the grass and brush were thick and tall. July poured down on the boys’ ball caps and t-shirts as they crashed along, heading for the part of the creek beyond where people had dumped in old tires and bedsprings. They caught grasshoppers as they went, giving their heads a good squeeze to make them behave and stuffing them into a plastic bag that had been waving from a bush.
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Aunt Tildy
Mary Scriver
The little village of Twenty Mile is about twenty miles from McKinley, or it used to be before McKinley grew out that way. Twenty miles was about as far as a team and wagon can travel in a day, at least comfortably, so there was a little mercantile store there, not much more than a provisioner but also a post office, more by evolution than by design. The post office is gone now. Caused a major fuss when it was closed because people hate to lose evidence of their pasts even when they’re over and done with.
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