Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
It All Might Be Seasonable
For years and years, actually decades and decades, I kept saying that one day I would do a Bryant Street collection or two, and I just never got around to it.
Finally, in the winter of 2023, I decided it was time and told the fine folks at WMG Publishing I was going to do this. Stephanie Writt came up with the cool street-sign logo and I was off.
I thought it would be cool to have Bryant Street be a television series with four seasons of ten episodes each season. (For those of you who don't know, a short story usually has enough story for a single thirty-minute episode of anything on television.)
So I sent the idea of four seasons to Stephanie at WMG and back comes the four wonderful covers using seasons of the year. I was about to object when it dawned on me that four seasons of the year would be a lot easier to explain than four seasons of a television show.
And these would act as ten episodes of a season, but each season would start on the first day of the named season. A full year of Bryant Street.
So I started with the forty stories together and then put them into seasons.
Often a story is set in the title season. Or the story is dark like winter. Or hot like summer.
Or a character in the last days of their lives like winter, or fading like fall. In one way or another, all the stories fit into a season.
But think of them like ten episodes per run. The winter season run, the spring season run, and so on.
Sort of like ten episodes per season of a series like The Twilight Zone television series used to be. Every episode different, yet every episode set on Bryant Street.
Wrong Turn
Bryant Street, where things just never seem right, never work right, never exist as expected.
I created Bryant Street a long time ago when Stephen King said writers should write about what scares them. Subdivisions terrify me at a deep level, so I created Bryant Street.
I lived this story far too many times in subdivisions. Luckily escaped with my life each time, but only barely.
* * *
Patrick Cutler was lost.
That simple. He was lost in his own subdivision.
He eased his rented Ford coupe over to the edge of the curb and stopped. He kicked up the air-conditioning a touch to fight off not only the heat of the late-July day outside of Las Vegas, but also his sweating from worry.
How could he be lost? He had bought the house on Bryant Street six months ago, spent a month in it in February, then had gone north to his home in Portland.
But he had a three-day business conference down here and even though he hated the intense summer heat here, he figured he might as well stay at his own place.
But he had never noticed when he bought the place and lived here that every house in this massive subdivision looked almost identical. Especially in the shimmering waves of heat.
All the homes were desert brown stucco, tile roofs, desert low-water landscaping that all looked identical. All had two-car garages, all had windows covered in blinds, and all had large numbers on the side near the garage that seemed to make no sense at all. When he thought the numbers were going up, he would go around a shallow corner and suddenly they would be different numbers and heading down in count.
And the street signs in this subdivision seemed to be almost non-existent, as if the designers had wanted people to get lost. And no street was straight. All of them curved one way or another, moving up and over small ridgelines and then back into shallow valleys, all the while the streets changed names as it turned out, without warning.
Patrick hadn't given that any thought at all. He loved his home outside of Portland, but the last few winters had been too cold for him and since he liked Las Vegas and could work from anywhere, he had bought a second home here.
He had heard when he bought the place that this subdivision alone had over four thousand homes in it. One of the largest built in the Las Vegas area. He just never realized how massive an area four thousand homes covered.
So for the last thirty minutes he had been just driving, looking for any sign of his house. And now he wasn't even sure he could get out of the subdivision to even try to start over.