Published Work

Iwake from the crushing and blink open my eyes.  There she lies, inches from my face.  Her massive paws rest near my chin, her golden eyes stare.  She arranges herself down onto my chest and tells me, “Good morning.”

“Is it morning?” I manage to whisper.

“Yes,” she says.  “Every lion knows morning.”

I grunt.  From her weight, even the grunting takes some effort.  “Good morning,” I finally manage to husk.

Her ears flick, then her tail.  She chins her head down onto her paws.  “We’re not so good with calendars,” she says.  “I want to know — is today the anniversary?  I think today might be the anniversary.”

My arm is free, so I reach for the nightstand to grab for my phone.  I check the calendar and grunt:  “Hmm.  It is...”

(read the whole thing at StoryQuarterly)

I haven’t felt any good in many weeks.  There’s been a bug making the rounds that I caught early on in the season, the exact wrong time of the season, because I was still working a job.  It’s bad this year, the bug, and it put me down for days and days when I couldn’t afford to set aside any days.  Then, by the time I came to, they’d already replaced me on the job, and that didn’t leave me enough money to swap out the tires on my truck.  So of course, one of them blew, and then patching it cost me a chunk of change, so again the year is turning over and again I’m flat broke.  I’ve been trading in electrical work down at George’s for food and fuel, but the bigwigs there frown on enterprise, so we’ve been keeping the deal hush-hush.  If I didn’t know the night manager I’d be starving and freezing my ass this winter.  Another gut-starving and ass-freezing winter...

(read the whole thing here)

The world’s best nothings come with vertigo.

This is what the boy says while propping his arm against the wall.

The girl lifts the red plastic cup to her lips. Which makes something to do without something to say.

Because without that apprehension of succumbing to nothing, what would be the point?

The girl chews on her cup’s brim. It smells awful, whatever the boy has handed her in it. Vaporous and sickly. She takes one sip just to be polite. Then another pretend-sip so the first sip won’t be impolite...

(read the whole thing at Blackbird)

He does no different, of course. Than any other boy. Swish, swish — he whips the switch. Off with all of their heads. Puffing decapitation. Puff, puff. Decapitation. Beheading each dandelion for the unspeakable crime of being a dandelion. Swish, swish. Criminal flowers, off with your heads. One by one. Two by two. Your entire weedy tribe.

When the boy turns ten he will throw his first punch — his first genuine punch, not the half-flinching swinging and flailing he sometimes indulged in before he turned ten. No...

(read the whole thing here)

We stand at Laolongtou: you and I. Over the parapet we look down at where the Pacific crashes against the wall. The tide is high. This is the end. After this, only the ocean. After this, no further need for a wall. The swirls and currents, the rocks and shoals: What they proclaim is victimhood. This is the message: You will be a victim. No more and no less. Between the battlements and the sea, the line of your fate is fixed. Today will lead unflinchingly to the suspension of your final desires. What can I say? You and I together at Laolongtou...

(read the whole thing here)

The story before I was born was my father was a prick. So my father becoming a prick had nothing to do with me. This is just the story I was told. And since this story of my father isn’t of me, I won’t vouch — I won’t verify. I won’t stand behind these words. I won’t testify for any stories of fathers before I was born, so all I will vouch for is the repeating: my father was a prick...

(read the whole thing here)

The moon was blazing, a perfect circle, fat and white and glowing in the sharpened sky with a halo of light ringing around the moon.

An omen of weather, said my mother.

Omens were something my mother knew. She’d learned them from her own mother, who’d learned them from her own mother, who’d learned them from her mother before her, and so on back through time. (So my mother always told us. So this wasn’t any news about omens.)

She said, I’ve been reading omens ever since I was a girl...

(read the whole thing here)

It’s winter: the season of hunching, the season of sleeves and long jackets, of hands in pockets, of woolen caps, flipped-up collars, and darkened streets. You can walk down city sidewalks on winter nights wrapped and folded, just another figure walking about alone, wrapped and folded. The air is cold so your breathing steams, and most people stay in from the cold except for me and the several other figures walking the city blocks. The gapping is right, the season is right—the corners are right, and the dark. Winter’s the season; I pass a figure alone, wave him down, and tell him, “Excuse me.”

The man looks up from his walking.

I tell him, “Hand me over your money.” I take my hands from my sleeves and one of them grips a knife...

(read the whole thing at Web Conjunctions)

It’s all coming back: the ponderosa and hairpins, the noon light and blue sky, Allison sitting in the front seat, singing. The stereo blares out old songs that were old when we were in college, and over it all she sings how she sings: badly and with abandon. Her key’s awry, her pitch is awkward, her lyrics are mispronounced. Awful is the only way Allison knows how to sing. But her face is unapologetic—her only audience is me, and she’s told me she won’t sing out loud in front of anyone else.

We used to do this before, in college, just the two of us: hitting some road or other when restlessness and time got the better of us. Improvised vacations just to get the hell out of hell, out of Dodge, out of life, out of mind...

(read the whole thing at Narrative [signon required])

The truth is no one tells me anything. And the truth is even when they tell me something, sometimes the something they tell me is a lie. This was true even for my mother and father. But they didn’t lie all of the time, which is also the truth. One of the truths they used to tell me is that no one lies all of the time. So you can never tell if someone is lying just by knowing the someone who’s lying. You only know if the someone is lying if you know their story is not the truth...

(read the whole thing at Web Conjunctions)

This was us: me and my father, my brother and my other brother, Franny who was the dog, and my mother before she passed on. This was back in our family days, in the years we were traveling. Back when us five drove crammed in a van, traveling state to state, every day a new place and a new camp.

I was maybe eleven and my brothers both seventeen. That year we were in the West, which is how my mother called it. The season was spring and we were driving the desert states, solo on the road, orange with the morning. With my father at the wheel and my mother still dozing, us brothers still packing from when we broke camp.

We were in the state of billboards. It was billboard after billboard along the length of the highway, advertising the highway west. They proclaimed gas, food, and souvenirs. They called for stopping and gave the miles away. Some read Authentic. Some read Mexican. All of them read Exit...

(read the whole thing at the New England Review)

He ate pie like his father ate pie. Both arms forward on the table, fork gripped in his fist. Watching the pie cool so he could eat. This is what his mother said: You eat pie like your father. And he said back what his father said: There’s only one way to eat pie...

(read the whole thing here)

Natalia sings the blues. Isn’t that the purpose of rain? Crickets chirp, the windows are shut, who knows of who spoke of last. (Of what.) Can you imagine how the whirlpool draws helpless ships with helpless crews whitely pulling dripping lines and oars? The impenetrable future — that’s what. The center at which events are destined. When the waiting turns to realization and where sightless groping turns to the wall. (Here. Not here. There...)

(read the whole thing here)

So the story, the reason I was there that day had to do with what’s the neighborly thing to do, which in this case was sit and drink a beer with my neighbor at my neighbor’s house at his invite. This was the second part, actually, of the neighborly thing to do, the first part being my lending my neighbor a wrench (for what I can’t remember, but it was a size he didn’t own). So it was a week later and he saw me, said to come on by for a pint and the game, and he said this exactly, “a pint and the game,” and I didn’t want to go, not really, much of a sports fan I’m not, but I said, “Sure, give me a sec,” because it’s the neighborly thing to do, taking payment, neighborly payment, for letting him borrow my wrench...

(read the whole thing here)

The water ran out in the city. Everywhere the taps went dry. Women walked in from every quarter to gather at the river’s bridge. They bore pails with rope knotted to the handles; they threw the pails plainly to the river. (It was midday.) Lines were fed, pails were sunk, water was drawn, women came. They reached over the railing to lift over pails. (White Nights was not long ago.)

(read the whole thing here)