Man With Two Lives: A Short Story

Joe R. Lansdale's rare short story “Man With Two Lives” is the latest addition to the BookVoice Pocket Stories series. Written around the same time as THE MAGIC WAGON, "Man With Two Lives" catches up with an Old West legend past his prime. This short story can also be found in BookVoice Publishing's re-release of THE MAGIC WAGON by Lansdale. More

Joe R. Lansdale's rare short story “Man With Two Lives” is the latest addition to the BookVoice Pocket Stories series. Written around the same time as THE MAGIC WAGON, "Man With Two Lives" catches up with an Old West legend past his prime.



An excerpt from "Man With Two Lives"

It was July the Fourth and Nacogdoches, the oldest town in Texas, was hung with banners declaring the holiday. The old man read them and continued walking. He was not in a festive mood at all. It was too hot and he was too old. He continued around the square toward the general store.

Yes, too hot and too old, but he kept going full steam ahead, for this was how he had always lived, and he knew no other way.

Sometimes, especially when it was hot he had noticed, he thought perhaps it would have been better had he really died in that saloon facedown on the card table; really been buried in a good hard box in that dark, rocky ground.

Certainly it would have been better than this. Less painful than this; wasting away of old age, being a man out of place and time, a nobody. Considering the fact that in his first life he had been very important made this all the worse.

Once he had carried a brace of revolvers, but now it was all he could do to carry himself down the street.