Draw Me
This story is excerpted from the novel What Came West by Josh Weil, available from Random House on June 2, 2026.
My parents chose her for a maid because she was a mute. Hoping that without a voice she might be half the presence of anyone else. Even less if she avoided me, as they surely instructed her to. By then they had long since become accustomed to my inability to withstand proximity to others.
Tantrums, they’d called them when I was young. Fits that would come over me, caused by something simple as a scent: bread rising on an afternoon of baking with my mother, and my father barging in reeking of his veterinary work, lighting a pipe. Or I …
Death to Hogs!
Hellish plague of feral hogs was unleashed by the Spanish conquistador de Soto
The population of Texas may soon be replaced by super-tough, super-intelligent feral hogs with vitals armored by plates of gristle and tusks that can reduce your innards to jelly.
Millions must die.
The year was 1539, and Hernando de Soto knew not the wrath he had already wrought upon the New World. The Spanish conquistador had sailed west to plunder and colonize the Americas; unknown to him, aboard his armada were the makings of an epidemic that would lay suffering upon the American Heartland for centuries to come. Not as the result of smallpox nor influenza, though the sailors were surely rife with those diseases. It was the domesticated Sus scrofa — otherwise known as the European boar, three hundred of which made the 1539 voyage with de Soto before he released them into the Texas wildlands with the hope that they would proliferate enough to provide sustenance for coming generations of conquistadors.
Over time, these once-domesticated boars sprouted sloping snouts, grew coarse hair and brutish tusks, and proliferated with exponential zeal throughout the woods and grasslands of …
Forgotten Cartoons from All Fifty States
Alabama — Southern Man – Hippie genius Neil Young is on a mission to assist the State of Alabama in becoming less racist. Instead of being welcomed with open arms, the helpful musician is scorned by Governor George Wallace and by the rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd, who write a scorching hot anthem telling Young to shove it, and identify a new species called “Southern Man” who doesn’t want Neil Young around anyhow. However, it is the Canadian hippie who is fated to enjoy the last laugh: After George Wallace is crippled from the waist down by an assassin’s bullet and Skynyrd band members Ronnie Van Zant and Steve Gaines are killed in a plane crash, Neil Young is the last guy left standing, and he and Southern Man become best friends.
Alaska — Arctic Jerry – Aging polar bear comedians sit on an iceberg and make jokes about nothing, in the …
