As I puzzled over the position of Karma, a bony waitress at a roadside café swept up all my change and explained how the Red River had washed the place away long ago, leaving a ghost town whose only crop now consists of farm folk germinating underground until midnight arrives and they burst beyond the Texas border in search of those dry counties where they can count on a truly Western sense of law and order.

Caleb Puckett’s latest prose collection, Market Street Exit, appeared in 2011. Though he now resides in Kansas, Puckett has lived in numerous places in Oklahoma over the years.