History

In December 1943, on the assembly floors of the Food Machinery Corporation, a new model of amphibian tractor began rolling off the line. The engine had been moved forward, and where the back wall of the cargo space used to be, there was now a hinged steel ramp wide enough to drive a jeep up … Read more

The street light clicked on at the far end of the block, and without a word you were off the curb, leaving the game mid-play, running flat out for your own front door. Nobody checked a watch. Nobody had one. The rule was older than any of you and simpler than anything a parent ever … Read more

In January 897, workmen inside St. Peter’s Basilica pried open a stone sarcophagus, lifted out what remained of Pope Formosus, and carried him across Rome to stand trial. Formosus had been dead for nine months. His body was dressed in the full vestments of the papacy, propped upright on a throne in the council hall … Read more

They found the cabin at mid-morning, and the first thing Sheriff Cordell Hallcom noticed was that the porch was clean. No snow at all. Not a single flake, even though drifts along the north wall reached nearly to the roof. Something had been sweeping that porch. He wrote that sentence down later, exactly as he … Read more

The road commissioner drove the spade into the crown of the raised earth once, twice, throwing sod, a big man making a point for the frightened locals who would not set foot on the hill. On the third stroke, the spade rang. Not the dull thud of a rock, but a high, wrong note that … Read more

There is a kind of sign you used to see from the highway. The orange roof. The big striped pole spinning lazily over a parking lot. The friendly cartoon man waving from a flat sign on a corner you once knew by heart. They were everywhere, and then, very slowly, almost without anyone noticing, they … Read more

The X-ray was supposed to settle it. The doctors in the Peruvian hospital had looked at the five-year-old girl’s swollen belly, agreed it was a tumor, and ordered the test to confirm it. That was the medical textbook answer. There was no other possibility. The girl was five years old. Then the film came back, … Read more

By the late months of 1546, the smell reached a visitor three rooms before the king himself came into view. In the corridors of Whitehall Palace, courtiers recognized it at once: rotting flesh, infection, something deeply wrong inside a living body. The servants pretended not to notice. Everyone pretended. Inside his private chamber, Henry VIII … Read more

Springtime, 1340. A village called Tay in Rutland, small enough to walk end to end while a pot boiled, and inside its church the local priest stood with a bow in his hands, shooting arrows through the openings in the tower at the men who had come to arrest him. His name was Richard Folville. … Read more