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But when Mister Hadj started in on them cowboy songs—well, as sure as I’m standing here, when that man got to crooning a tune he made the earth itself cry. This ain’t just me tale-telling, you hear? I seen tears fall from big red rocks when the old man hummed. Heard stones weep as they parted before him. So when Mister Hadj said that a stone in the road told him where to find Parson Lucifer, I didn’t doubt it.

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Read “Mister Hadj’s Sunset Ride” by Saladin Ahmed, in Issue #43

© Story content copyright 2010 Saladin Ahmed
Audio recording released under a Creative Commons License

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Saladin Ahmed’s first novel, Throne of the Crescent Moon, featuring the same characters as his story “Where Virtue Lives” in Beneath Ceaseless Skies #15, was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Crawford, Gemmell, and British Fantasy Awards and won the Locus Award for Best First Novel. He was nominated twice for the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction/Fantasy Writer for his short stories, which have appeared in Year’s Best Science Fiction and have been translated into a half-dozen languages. He has also written nonfiction for NPR Books, Salon, and The Escapist. He holds an MFA in poetry from Brooklyn College, an MA in English from Rutgers, and lives near Detroit with his wife and twin children.

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