Updated 2007-09-17

Among the Moabites, Cherry Bleeds, September-October 2007

The first time Wilson saw them was when he opened the medicine cabinet one groggy morning in search of aspirin and his toothbrush. Between the familiar can of shaving cream and the plastic tumbler that held his toothbrush, lying on his crushed and twisted tube of toothpaste as if it were a luxurious pillow, were two tiny people. They were no bigger than his thumb, and a little pinker, lounging in a tangle of spindly limbs. One of them lifted its head from the toothpaste and he slammed the door shut.

The Oologist’s Cabinet, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #20, June 2007

It was a mahogany chest almost as tall as me, with intricate scenes of birds in flight and willow trees sighing beside winding rivers inlaid in teak and ivory. When the doors swung open and folded back against its sides, they revealed a warren of drawers and slots and yet more doors, many with yellowing index cards affixed to them behind gold-colored plates.

The Tune Collector, Going Down Swinging #23, June 2006

The only working light bulb in the old man’s apartment is in the kitchen, so they sit on low metal chairs with tattered vinyl seats around a table a little too big for the space. The tune collector asks the old man if he can unplug the refrigerator humming in the corner; the old man shrugs. There’s nothing in it anyway but some butter and a bottle of vodka.

Bank Holiday, Lily Review, April 2006

This morning I came downtown to meet my agent. He keeps an office in one of the towers across the street from the bank; through his window I can see the revolving doors that spin into the spacious lobby, and the mahogany desk in the sun lit corner office on the tenth floor. While my agent speaks, I look over his shoulder at the suit coats and Italian shoes streaming in and out of the portals of commerce.

Then Worms Shall Try: Seven Studies in the Efficacy of Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”, Melic Review, Spring 2006

She countered with Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “First Fig”, then took my hand and led me to a stand of cottonwoods in the back of Patty’s yard. Her lips tasted faintly of the peach schnapps Eddy Wright slipped into the punch.

Ichthyology, JMWW, Winter 2005

The doctors said, when she was born, that the gills would eventually fade away on their own. Nothing to fear, they said; no more unusual than the rare child born with a tail, or a dense pelt of fur, or a single sharp tooth jutting from its new pink gums. We carry, after all, the genetic memory of our furred and finned and feathered ancestors in our twisted strands of DNA; dreams of ancient seas are bound to surface now and then.

A review of Brock Clarke’s Carrying the Torch, Small Spiral Notebook, October 2005

Each of the nine stories in Brock Clarke’s Carrying the Torch ends with a turn — not the O. Henry twist or the Joycean epiphany, but something subtler. Faced with the loss of love or home or family, the characters in Carrying the Torch realize that life demands compromise and loss in return for small graces. These are quiet and hopeful stories that suggest that we not hope for too much.

Practical Haunting Considerations, Duck & Herring, Fall 2005 (sold out)

Becoming a ghost requires planning, but few put enough effort into the process. They end up haunting a spot out of circumstance or necessity: a treacherous intersection, a tall bridge, a lonely room in a dark nursing home. And that seems to me the greatest avoidable tragedy, because we all have the same destiny, as inescapable as love or taxes, but we waste our time denying the inevitable and fill up our idle hours contemplating our past errors or planning for a fleeting, ephemeral future that will seem like a firefly’s flash when we awaken in the dark eternity haunting the wrong place.

I might not miss you, The Summerset Review, Fall 2005

Parallel lives were the trope of their friendship. Sometimes she would launch into the middle of a conversation, expecting him to follow along, and then stop at his confused stare.

Carabosse, Clean Sheets, August 30 2005

This is the first time I’ve had sex with a third person in the room. Gretchen doesn’t seem bothered by it — if anything, she’s more enthusiastic than ever, and she’s been the very definition of enthusiasm in the three weeks we’ve been together. But I’m distracted, my head constantly turning back over my shoulder to see if the still form in the bed above us has moved. Of course, she hasn’t, but somehow I feel her eyes on my naked back, staring through her tightly closed lids.

Self Defense, Pindeldyboz, Summer 2005 Listed as a Notable Story of 2006 by storySouth’s 2005 Million Writers project.

The toy store on Grand Avenue didn’t sell squirt guns. At least not gun-shaped squirt guns. They sold “squirters” shaped like fish, flowers, and whimsical beasts which promised to “spit”? water up to twenty five feet. The red plastic triggers were disguised as dogs’ tongues and fishes’ fins, and the water shot from smiling mouths and petal-fringed stamen.

Summer Reading, Somewhat.org, July, 2005

The summer everyone read Faulkner, I read Hemingway. Out of spite.

Two Shadows (photograph), Rumble, June-July 2005

Mermaid, Rumble, June-July 2005

While the other kids blew bubbles, Maddy clung to my neck. She didn’t cry or scream, and she held on loosely, not with the death grip some kids have. For five Wednesday afternoons, Maddy wrapped her pudgy arms over my shoulders and rested her bottom on my hip while I shouted encouragement to the rest. At the end of the class I set her down on her feet, she ran to her mother for a towel, she came back and stooped to kiss my cheek and whisper, “I love you, Penny.”

Call Me Pearl, Ballyhoo Stories, Spring 2005

We were working that summer for Herb’s dad, Ray Dwyer, who owned an antique shop in St. Paul. Herb grew up in the shop, surrounded by highboys, vanities, and mirrored coat racks. From the time he was ten, he knew furniture like most boys know bicycles and baseball cards. I swear he could tell a genuine Stickley table from a reproduction, blindfolded and bound to a chair, just by smell.

Haute Couture, Somewhat, February 2005

They first appeared at the Dior Fall show in Berlin, strictly a second-string show, weeks after the season was opened in Paris. The Paris show had not gone well–young upstarts from Barcelona and Lisbon were gnawing away at the old houses, stealing the glow of the flashbulbs with their daring hemlines and Third World models who still had the smell of refugee camps hovering around their sallow faces. At first the fashion press excoriated Dior for the publicity stunt, accusing them of making a grotesque farce with their three dog-faced, statuesque models wrapped in silk and cotton.

Pieces, Small Spiral Notebook, January 2005

I find my mother’s pink Pyrex mixing bowl at the antique store on Fairview Avenue. It’s in the hands of a fat woman in a blue down parka, and she’s holding it upside down, squinting at the sticker on the bottom.

Sunshine Over Helsinki, Failbetter, October 2004. Listed as a Notable Story of 2004 by storySouth’s 2004 Million Writers project.

No one in Helsinki saw his weather reports. They didn’t need his two-minute segment, twice a day, nestled between the football scores and children’s cartoon based on the Finnish epic “Kalvala”; they could just look out their windows, stand on their stoops, and know to wear a coat today. The reports were for Finnish expatriates, nostalgic for Baltic winds and icy sidewalks, or for a handful of students learning the words “lumi” for “snow” and “pilvi” for “clouds.”

To the girl who shared my umbrella on October 14, 1989, So There, May 2004

I’m sure you don’t remember the incident at all; it lasted less than a minute, that rainy October morning in London fifteen years ago, barely a wrinkle in the ribbon of your life. By noon, when the sun had returned, it was already a distant memory, crowded out by the boutiques and perfumeries you visited. By suppertime, it may not even have been a clever anecdote worth repeating to your sister or boyfriend.

After Ice Cream, Eyeshot.net, April 2004

They had decided to jump with an air of sudden jocularity. All week they had commiserated over the hundred little tragedies that stained their lives: He complained that the Peterson account went to Bixby because Bixby had married a partner’s ugly daughter; she countered that the price of nylons at Schuneman’s had gone beyond the reach of her secretary salary; he told her that he suspected his wife was fooling around with the milkman; she had caught her fiance in bed with a streetcar conductor named Bud; he had wasted his youth, and looked forward with dread to the long gray hours of middle age; she detested her youth and wished she had been born old.

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