Open Stories — Short Fiction by Hank Redding

A man whose life has been shaped by work and distance returns home after one season too many. What he finds is not anger or betrayal, but the quiet consequence of endurance mistaken for love—and the cost of arriving ready when there is nothing left to fix.

Set in the rural West of the 1970s, Unclaimed Ground traces a brief season before consequence arrived—when rules had not yet learned their names, and meaning was measured only by presence. Told in quiet retrospect, the story examines youth, restraint, and the spaces where expectation loosened just enough to let something real exist, briefly, and without ownership.

After a woman vanishes during a brutal prairie winter, the man who takes the adjoining claim learns that endurance is not pursuit. Waiting Is the Work is a quiet Western about patience as labor, land that does not answer, and the discipline of knowing when not to follow.

In 1878 West Texas, a ranch survives conditions that should have broken it. When a quiet stranger takes work and the land begins to adjust, the people who keep the place standing are forced to reckon with how endurance is maintained—and what it costs. West of Holding is a novel-length story about land, labor, and the unseen weight required to keep things from falling apart.