Fiction
I write and sometimes publish short stories, and I’m working on a novel. My story “DREAMHOMES,” which is not available online, won the Calvino Prize from the University of Louisville and was published by Salt Hill Journal. My story “The Wrong Man” was published in The Southern Review in Summer 2018 but is likewise unavailable online. Here are a few of my stories that are available to read on your electronic device.
The East
I was talking with a friend about real estate. We’d just finished volleyball practice and we were feeling robust. “That neighborhood’s overspeculated,” he was saying. “The best deals now are further south. The trains have been rerouted, they’re all express now, and a new private park is being built across the former tenement rooftops.”
A waiter came around to take our order and piped in. “Did you hear,” he said, “they’re diverting the river to flow through the old railroad yards on the western city limits....”
Mugger and Mouse Get Married
Mouse meets Mugger on the roof of a tall building one day when it’s raining and the wind blows hard. “Whose raincoat is that you’re holding?” Mouse asks.
“Nobody’s. I always bring an extra one, just in case,” says Mugger.
Mouse thinks this is sweet, romantic. She walks to the side of the rooftop where Mugger is standing and asks if she can wear his extra raincoat. Water streams across her face like the little beads that stretch across the windows of moving cars. She is hoping this makes her look pretty.
“No,” Mugger says.
“Why not?” asks Mouse.
“If I gave it to you, I wouldn’t have an extra. I always carry an extra one, just in case....”
After the Party
Mr. Cool steps out onto his balcony to watch the stars. The stars begin to wilt. His glass door slides open and shut silently as Mrs. Cool joins him on the patio. The stars resume their original glowering stance. I had thought the stars would wilt to see you so beautiful tonight, says Mr. Cool. Mrs. Cool glowers. From the garden below, the well-sung song of katydids rises to mingle with the summer air.
Dr. Infecto lurks in the shadow of the palm tree. If Mr. Cool is a ten billion gigawatt laser beam, thinks Dr. Infecto, then I am the abyss in which he never finds his mark.
Mrs. Cool is caught in the throes of a previous marriage. Her sadness stings the silence that elsewhere hangs so elegantly about the house of Cool. Ice cubes swirl against her new husband's glass, crashing with a fragile, contained violence. She speaks, and the words slip off the gangplank of her tongue: I think the party was a wreck....