41 works
It started as a Wednesday like any other, hanging like a new moon between weekends. I stood patiently at the bus stop waiting for the number forty-three. The shelter was made of sandstone with a wooden roof so that the tar dripped down the…
Read More →May. Carnations on table. Mother brings soup. Looks. Fingers trace bowl rim twice.Dusk. Boy sleep.Night. Foot hurts. No wound. Grips sheet. Teeth shut.
Read More →16.03 22.08‘He's just a harmless hobbyist…’ Amber turned away from her screen, a grainy security-cam image of an elderly man in a red anorak carrying a dented computer tower down a muddy garden path; and paused him in mid-stride as he arrived at a…
Read More →First published in Nocturne Magazine, 2022Mrs. Moon looked forward to watching church service on TV every Sunday morning. Not only because she was a faithful follower, but because the priest reminded her of her late husband. That, and the fact that one of the altar boys was the…
Read More →A slight haze blurred the skyline, and the expanse of lights faintly reflected in the wall-sized ceiling and bay windows that wrapped midtown Manhattan around the rooftop club. The buildings were dotted with lights like the chessboard's…
Read More →“You’re here because you’re dead.”The clerk at the hotel desk, dressed in a red uniform with white-trimmed lapels, spoke in an abrasive, upper Midwest dialect, and said this like he was explaining something painfully obvious. He looked familiar, not from a personal…
Read More →The same sun scorched downtown Los Angeles that had seared the Iraq desert. Army Private First Class Samantha Cummings stood at attention holding a stack of boxes, her unwashed black hair slicked back in a ponytail and knotted military…
Read More →The line of cars outside the entrance to the Mukoshima Outlet Park and Gardens complex, a short drive from downtown Osaka, stretched back a good 300 meters, and was steadily building in length. Only two hours after opening, the car parks…
Read More →“All rise!” the bailiff announced after he entered the rustic courtroom even though he was the only one there. Briefly he cleared his throat then repeated the command but not quite as loudly.Better, he thought to himself, much better.
Read More →My wife doesn’t laugh at my jokes anymore, and I’m not sure if that’s because they’re no longer funny or if they never were. Either way, she used to laugh at my jokes. She still laughs at Horace’s.
Read More →United Transcontinental Flight 117 raced from a dawning sun. Descending, the aircraft surged, then throttled back. In first class, Matthew Thomas cracked a window shade to peer down at Chicago’s yellow-lit expressways. Matthew sighed. He…
Read More →It was the talk of the town, and there were no two ways about that. A body found floating in Wabbins Creek? The body of a Negro? When you have a town like Kenton, population eight thousand, every one of them with a white face, then there…
Read More →Oomph!
1
Aloft a sky-rise ascribed to a sunrise, a head lay on a dweller’s pillow. Aground below…
The house was new then, and newness itself was a kind of promise nobody had yet learned to distrust. Homewood, they called it, a new neighborhood on the far end of South Lorain, which was itself an old neighborhood. The sort of name meant…
Read More →The desk belonged to Hendricks, but the janitor owned it now. He was face down on the green blotter, one arm stretched toward the telephone like he’d been trying to call the one person in this city who gave a damn, only to find the line…
Read More →Donny Lewis awakes each morning and mutters a disappointed “Oh, man!” first thing because he’s still alive. Says it before his morning prayers. Maybe it is a prayer. Maybe “man” is The Man.
Read More →Excerpt from my novel in progress, The Shawl SellerThe Saffron Warriors, as the other team prided in calling themselves, had already arrived on the field. Their team was comprised entirely of boys from the Kongposh colony, the inhabitants…
Read More →Summer wasn’t there yet but that day the air smelled hot and sticky. The traffic was congested and my uncle’s van followed the cars in front squeezing its massive presence trough the last miles before the airport. The cabin was silent.…
Read More →In Romania I grew up in one had no choice but to live inside; of himself that is. Freedom was just a word locked in the dictionary with no meaning on the streets. My grandfather did twenty years of political prison and labor camp for…
Read More →I was born an old soul, ready molded into this world but rarely allowed to be part of it. I was always in a fight, either forced to meet standards or rebel against rules I didn’t agree with. I don’t know why, but I was never at peace with…
Read More →