2020-11-29 - The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories

Wickedness - Ron Hansen

A young Delaware girl rides a train to teach school in Nebraska in a late 1800s August. A frostbitten cadaver in a body bag is propped in the seat across the aisle.

A subzero blizzard hits unexpectedly like the wall of a dust storm and claims people in frozen death like a Mount Vesuvius of ice.

One victim was Sin Thomas, a boy who tried to take a young girl home from school. The girl survived, buried in a snow drift, the boy died not far away going for help. She recovered after a couple months and worked as a cashier at an implements company for 40 years before dying herself.

A schoolteacher is caught in the school house with 2 children who lived too far away to try to make it home. She tries to take them to her place but gets lost and winds up spending the night in a haystack where the children freeze to death and she loses her feet to frostbite.

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