The wind is cold, sharp, and blowing steadily from the east at five knots. The clouds are thick but airy, blotting the sky in patches. The temperature hangs at a chill 37 degrees. Cole Kugel squints into the noonday sun and smiles. He is anxious, excited. He has waited a…

Gertrudes “Raul” Cabral leans against the cold counter of his Chevy lonchera, shaking off the sleep. He was here until eleven o’clock last night, sweeping bits of cheese from the floor, wiping the grill, washing pans, hosing rubber mats, counting cash, locking the doors. Now, as the first school buses…

Storme Aerison sits stiffly in the courtroom, his hands cuffed behind his back and his dyed blond hair woven into a ponytail, black roots showing, sideburns growing. He smiles beneath the fluorescent lights. This hearing in Colorado Springs is a long way from the sparkling waters and flashing cameras of…

They have seen so much already — the destruction of their homes, the deaths of their friends and families, deserts littered with human bones — and now, as they arrive at Denver International Airport, the three young men from southern Sudan must confront a contraption called an “elevator.” They stand…

Unit 151 stands on the northeastern edge of the Loveland Self Storage lot, on the south end of town, near a concrete drainage ditch and a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The unit is about the size of a one-car garage, ten feet by twenty feet, with cinderblock walls,…

He’d dressed for the surgery in a dark-blue bow tie, light gray blazer and white-striped shirt, hair perfectly combed, stethoscope dangling from his neck. When the video crew signaled, Akrit Pran Jaswal — sitting behind a desk cluttered with anatomy textbooks, parents hovering nearby — gazed into the camera and…

Linda Silverman began with the vocabulary, working from the high end of the IQ test, using words so obscure that even she, with a Ph.D., would have trouble with them. And yet the six-year-old boy sitting across from her defined most of them correctly. “What do you do?” Silverman joked…

Two years ago, Russell Johnson ventured into a meadow in Cherry Creek State Park and was swallowed by one of Colorado’s worst weeds: leafy spurge. “It was everywhere,” he says. “Waist high.” The other day, Johnson, an Arapahoe County weed specialist, returned to the same spot. This time the weed…

Tim Seastedt is at war. His enemy is a drifter, voracious and cruel, striking fast and furiously. By 1997, it had already ravaged more than three million acres of rangeland in the West and fought off assaults by ravenous goats, chemical agents and flamethrowers. Then Seastedt arrived on the scene,…

Sure, Michelangelo was a really, really good sculptor, Francisco Sotomayer says, but what made him special was the ‘Wow’ factor. “It’s a very simple rule. You look at the pyramids, and they make you say ‘Wow!’ You look at the accomplishments of Rome, and they make you say ‘Wow!’ You…

Steve Marshburn Sr. was hit by a thunderbolt in 1969 — while working indoors at a bank. The lightning flashed from ten miles away, struck a drive-through teller window, entered the bank building through an ungrounded speaker and shot into his spine. Since then, Marshburn has suffered myriad ailments, including…

In the first hours after Jude Friend was struck by lightning, at a moment when she did not know whether she would live or die, she crawled to an opening in her tent and gazed at the morning sky. “What a beautiful sunrise,” she thought. Twenty-one years later, the image…

Garry Rudd never saw the flash. He never felt the heat of three suns upon his body or the million volts of electricity humming through his veins, but he remembers the blackness, the chill and the dreams. He is lying beside an irrigation ditch, and his family is looking for…

They’re the good girls, the inseparable sisters who separate only to sit quietly in their middle school classrooms, completing assignments without complaint, smiling shyly, working diligently while others chatter and tease. Esperanza and Estephania Chavez: the quiet ones. Until you get to know them. Then they bubble up like a…

For most of their lives, they had only each other. Constance Rolon was orphaned at age fifteen. She married, then lost her husband in World War II. Another man abandoned her while she was carrying his child. After Paul was born, Constance raised him on her own, working as a…

So, Fred Pasternack is standing behind the counter on his first day at work — this must be back in 1962 — when a guy walks into the pawnshop. “I need a loan.” “Okay,” Fred says. “Whaddya got to hock?” The guy reaches inside his jacket, fumbles around a minute,…

Jerry Wiggins lights a Pall Mall, fits a screwdriver attachment into a drill, and eyes the hinges of a door that’s been scuffed, dented, riddled with bullets. “People stop by for free coffee sometimes,” he says, sliding a stepladder over the threshold. “But this is a working station. It’s not…

Harry and Linda Weber stand in their Loveland basement, gazing down at several dozen reluctant houseplants. “If they don’t start blooming more,” she says, “they won’t make it.” “No, they won’t.” Harry, a buzz-cut Vietnam vet, doesn’t look like someone who would fret over a crop of dainty flowers. Linda,…

“Did you see that?” In a blur of movements from measuring cup to rolling pin to cast-iron griddle, Charlotte Saenz mixes, rolls, toasts and then presents the perfect homemade tortilla to her Aurora cooking class. “You make it look so easy.” “Do you cater?” “What about the aluminum tortilla press…

Not too long ago, a customer walked into Martín Ramirez’s botánica complaining that he couldn’t have sex. And he’d tried, the man explained. A lot. So Martín asked him for a personal object, and the man handed over a watch. Martín rubbed the trinket in his hands, closed his eyes…

Not even Alice saw it coming. Eighteen years ago, when her husband went into his workshop with some bicycle parts, Christmas lights, teddy bears and Barbie dolls, she thought Richard was doing what Richard always does: tinkering. But now, whenever the holidays arrive, tour buses pull up outside the Kloewers’…

Lieurance and Shirley Sullivan are not looking forward to Christmas. On December 25, 1998, their daughter Polly was stabbed and beaten to death in her east Denver apartment. Two years later, her killer still walks the streets. “We’re going to do the best we can, but it will be hard,”…