—Review of Contemporary Fiction

“Amazing. . . . As clear and confident as a carpenter’s silver hammer. . . . This Shepard is like a pitcher on a good outing, throwing nothing but strikes all nine innings. . . . If you want a bracing batch of stories, you can’t beat these.”

—West Side Spirit

“Glorious . . . infused with the best of [Shepard’s] award-winning abilities as a playwright, a writer with a golden ear for dialogue and the finesse of a surgeon.”

—The Boox Review

“Very intriguing. . . . Shepard . . . uses his mastery of dialogue and catchy openings to snare the reader’s attention.”

—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Jessica

People used to say that the blessed “would see heaven”; my wish would be to see the earth forever. —Peter Handke

The Remedy Man

THE REMEDY MAN

E.V. made no bones about it; he was not a horse whisperer by any stretch. He was a remedy man. He could fix bad horses, and when he fixed them they stayed fixed. That’s all he laid claim to. We had one that needed to be turned around real bad. A five-year-old my dad had claimed off the low end of the fair circuit out in Sonoma, running for $1,200 tags. He was good-looking enough with a powerful hip and gaskin but his mind was the size of a chickpea. The one intolerable habit he had was setting back hard against his lead shank when tied to anything solid. The day he dragged down half the side of our pole barn on top of himself was the day we called E.V. He showed up at our place a week late in his usual beat-up outfit: a ’54 Chevy half ton with Arizona plates and a one-horse trailer sporting bald tires and a flapping canvas top. He always parked his rig down on the flat bottom and hiked the steep gravel grade up to the house because he had no rearview mirrors to negotiate our hairpin turnaround. He didn’t come to our place that often because most of the “knuckleheads” Dad was able to deal with himself, but when E.V. did pay us a visit I always got excited about it.