Fiction
“Chicago on the Seine”
Occasionally, I had to send a body home. What I’d noticed was that death abroad was more common on package tours.
“Beyond Imagining”
The friends talked about reviving ladies’ lunches in person. “At my place, please, if you don’t mind,” Farah said.
“Woman, Frog, and Devil”
His father believed that the blame for both national disasters and educational failures lay with a soft upbringing that encouraged girlishness.
“Thataway”
He pictured his town as something glowing from the American past, a Norman Rockwell kind of place, but the picture faded.
“Consolation”
He had promised to love her until they were in their nineties and fit only for lying in each other’s arms, staring happily at the moon and listening to the kiskadees.
“We’re Not So Different, You and I”
“We are both strangers to this world,” Death Skull intoned. “Maligned, misunderstood. We make our own paths, live by our own rules.”
“Pulse”
He felt a pure, infantile fear. The smell of pencils. The cold metal smell of the ladder. There was a static crackle above him. And it froze his blood.
“Finistère”
A man travelling alone in his morbid fifties does not talk to a girl in her teens without family or guardian in sight, especially not in this black romantic mood.
“Bozo”
I wanted to invite him to my place, to ask when his shift was over. But he probably got questions like that every night.