short stories & flash fiction
So Moved” | Prime Number Magazine, Issue 181, October 1, 2020
Read it here!
A block ahead of the stop sign where I’m idling, a man loads our couch into a moving van. The van’s parked in our drive, and the couch is the antique one with the arched back and the clawed feet and the hard ribs beneath a skin of upholstery, the couch my wife brought with her into us, and that she’s loved forever—much longer than me—and that we’ve brought along on each move for the jobs or the kids or the dog or the people we were yet to become, and today, I’m home early, unexpectedly, and she’s having the couch moved away...
"Listen: A Fable” | The Fabulist, August 2020
Read it here!
Michigan author Curtis VanDonkelaar’s flash fiction “Listen: A fable” is an allusive, allegorical, and unsentimental look at the militarist imagination.
“Neemie’s Reasons” | Third Wednesday, Fall 2018
Read it here!
There are reasons why Neemie doesn’t like to fish. Reasons why he doesn’t want to go camping. Why he doesn’t own a skateboard, or a scooter, or a bicycle, not like most of the other kids his age, or like old men who live in cities and dodge cars on their ways to office jobs or to restaurants for hot coffees and dinner. There are reasons why Neemie won’t get into a canoe.
“I Keep These Secrets for Ephraim O’Connor” | J Journal, Fall 2018
Find it here!
Mr. Jarvis wore sweatshirts like us, not the button-ups and ties of the other teachers, and if a kid said something funny, he would laugh. So for that whole semester, my second in seventh grade, Mr. Jarvis—Physical Science, third period—was without question my favorite teacher, and we began our learning with him on a handout. He challenged us to The Game. Our tests, he called Innings, and each of us would play nine on our own, but The Game could only be won together, as a team. If everyone kept a test average above C by the end of The Game, he promised us a pizza party. On test days he showed us the scoreboard, so that we’d know what we had to do.
“Bad Man Love Stories” | Thrice Fiction, Issue No. 21, December 2017
Get it, read it, buy it here!
I. Surely This Is how a good love is best made broke:
“You don’t do some stupid thing I want,” he says, “and I want to rain down on the world like God in His baddest pickup. He comes down from the mountains and He brings His mouth.”
“Oh?” she asks, because that’s what she does for him. ...
“The Boy” | Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, October 11, 2017
Read it here!
Two down. Two Greyhound days down, and Texas by morning, so Billy figured. Dallas by noon, and then, who could say? Across the bus’s wide aisle from him, Sam slept, her boy tucked into the crook of her back, the both of them curled against the upholstered plastic of two cruddy seats. Sam cropped her hair high and tight, like a boy’s, like her boy’s, but it had grown out of late, pressing up from her scalp in ragged shoots. Messy. Ugly. Billy sprawled himself over two seats of his own, one sneakered leg thrown sideways from his hip into the empty aisle seat, a single sentence writ across his face: “I dare you to sit with me, motherfucker.” Dallas by noon, and then...
“Chameleons” | Literal Latte, Spring 2017
Winner, 2016 Literal Latte Short Short Contest
Read it here!
Michael’s afraid the TV will blow up again. Two others have burst right here in this living room. He pads his fingers against the TV’s black face. He loves the television. When he pulls his fingertips from the screen, they’re gray, powdered in fine dust...
“The Dream's Alive” | The Gateway Review, Summer 2016
Winner, 2016 Flash Fiction Contest
Read it here!
Speck lay on a blow-up mattress on his bedroom floor. Blackbird Street had been his for months, but he hadn’t bothered, yet, to get a bed for the nights. Cat litter, dragged into his sheets on the cat’s dirty feet, stuck to the skin of his back. His head ached, and when he rubbed his temple, he found a wound, numb and fleshy. ...
“The Sixth Street Bus Conducts an Election” in
Dread State (An Anthology of Political Horror) | ThunderDome Press, 2016
Get it here!
This new rider’s homeless. It’s in his clothes: faded flannel jacket, hunter orange and brown, two holes in its chest resembling gunshot scars. A thermal top underneath the coat, once white, now sooty gray. Oily jeans. Velcro shoes, the hook strips upcurled at the ends. Every article from the Helping Hand clothing drive, I’m willing to bet. From my seat up front of the bus—one of the sideways rows—I have a good view of the guy. I bet he stinks.
“Mr. President,” he yells out, no warning. “I need some help. It’s hard on the streets, I know you know.”
...
“Larry and Charlene in Three Acts” | Storm Cellar, Vol. V No. 2, Fall 2016
Get it here!
They planned to try everything short of knives and pliers. The first item would be an executioner’s hood. That and two leather harnesses, one for each of them, meant to make things uncomfortable down there. ...
“The Old Moose Head and Beyond” | Toad Suck Review, Volume #6 (2016)
Get it here!
The Jesus Man sat in dust and brambles beside the South Haven onramp to US 31, south to Chicago, just off the Fuller Street overpass. When I got in, the morning shift, he was already across the street, not fifty feet from my register. He sat leaning back in a cheap plastic lawn chair. He wore a white baptismal robe over jeans and cowboy boots, a man-sized wooden cross splayed at rest across his chest. Every six or seven cars, he spoke ...
"An Afternoon Recital" | Temenos, Fall 2015
Read it here!
With his fat, solid thumbs, Benji’s grandfather flips two rusty latches and opens the violin case. The old man lifts out a grimy and unstringed violin. He turns it in his hands—such hands!—large enough to palm a basketball, knuckles like ankles, fingers of shins—and they don’t tremble at all, not at all. They do not shake with what you might think are tremors. ...
"The World Between" | Old Northwest Review, Fall 2015
Get it here!
I am called Jimmy, after my grandfather, who told me stories. About his own childhood, about himself, about his brother, his older brother, Jacob. We—my brother Tommy and me—we called him Uncle Jacob, though he was technically our great uncle. If you asked me to describe him, or draw a rough sketch of him in crayon and pencil, he would come out looking as I remember him at Great-Grandma June’s funeral that summer, the summer my brother first ran away, though not yet for good: Uncle Jacob looking like a fat, red beet. Angry, not sad, lumpy, and dressed like some middle school’s lost janitor. ...
"Another Acceptance" | PassagesNorth.com, Bonus Content, 5/5/14
"...this piece [is] a warning, a reminder that we’re closest to those we can’t save, whom we eventually, finally, have to let go, even when we’re not programmed to."
Managing Editor Tim Johnson, Passages North
Sometimes I can’t remember if I’m supposed to like to dance. This is not to say that I don’t know, or that I can’t know, or couldn’t say, but only that I can’t be sure when I did and when I didn’t, and really, what are you asking anyways? ... continue reading
"Facts and Supplications" | Potomac Review, Fall 2013
Spinning hunk of rock, she thought. Melted rock, liquid, like mud. Crust on the outside, a slow-moving layer, a coat of papier-mâché. Lorraine had never played with mud as a child—who would want? —but she felt certain that Franklin had. He wasn’t a bad husband, not really, but he wasn’t a man at all. He was a small boy, sitting in a patch of wet dirt, eating mud like baker’s chocolate, smiling and smearing a cat’s thick whiskers onto his face. His mud was just dirt, but he ate nonetheless. He’d eat until the world had nothing but sand-baked glass for skin. ...
"To Send" | Vestal Review, Web Issue 43, Winter 2013
I am welcome to keep every bit of what we owned between us, but everything else is hers. To her new apartment, I am to send what she’s left behind: two shoeboxes of old pictures and a stuffed toy banana. Never mind the wedding album. ... continue reading
"Oh Luck: Seven Lotteries" | Hobart, Issue 13, February 2012
On an April day trip to Chicago in my third year of college, I bought Skinny a gag lottery ticket I found in a comic shop. The ticket looked official, with a confetti-festooned front and a get-down-to-business list of dense fine print on the back. If you read far enough, the print started telling you things like “Claim prizes at North Pole,” and “All monies in Martian currency,” but if you didn’t read the fine print—and Skinny didn’t—the ticket looked like the real deal...
"Mollerman Swims" | MAKE, Issue 11
The cottage was comfortable, but not so large that one of the four of them could go missing inside and the rest wouldn’t know. Alden searched from room to room, passing first the master bedroom, then his own, then the kitchen, his head so muzzy that solid walls had doors. Some horn inside him droned, pressured his ears with the warm, warning buzz of a hot amp, and nowhere from front door to basement could he escape the tone. Snow. Snow outside. And inside, this hum, the deep hum, bubbled in the dark of his guts, coursed through the marrow of his long bones, transmitted itself into the wooden floor through the tips of his toes. His teeth wobbled. Alden turned his head in circles and the house’s layout rearranged as he walked and looked. He came up empty, save for the all-consuming buzz. Mollerman was gone.
...
"Little Sinner of the Kitchen" | Limestone 2011
We were halfway to Lansing on I-96 before my brother Tommy told me our destination. Streams of sweat ran down his neck into his T-shirt, feeding a stain on his chest larger than those under his arms. The lower half of his buzz cut was soaked, and he looked to have a head of hair in two discrete styles, one spiky and blond on the top, the one below dirty, greasy brown.
“Mt. Pleasant,” he said. “We’re going to check out the casino and get a hotel room. Live like rich people for a day in this God damn life.”
“Do they let minors in?” I asked.
...
"Matilda, or, A Man of Maxims" | Western Humanities Review, Summer 2011
Matilda! Oh Matilda, who was always and always and always the problem; think Griffin’s Meg, think Keaton’s Mallory, think Mary about whom there was simply Something. Manfred, who sold washers, and dryers, and water heaters, had Matilda as his one and only problem. Matilda, and of course, Conrad, who was never the son he should have been, but rather was a sickly whelp of a brat, bad at geometry, worse at running, and always sick. Conrad, best kept at home after school and kept as far from a ballfield as was possible.
...
"Ashes" | The Tusculum Review, Vol. 7/2011
2011 Tusculum Review Fiction Prize Finalist
A thin man came ambling through the park. He was hard to see in the moonlight, but he was certainly very short, and as he bobbed down the soft incline from the footpath circling Little Lake Inlet, his long, gray hair flopped in unruly mopstrings. He walked towards the picnic table at the water’s edge where Deene and Conn sat smoking cigarettes they were four years too young to buy. Deene watched the man bounce off the sidewalk and over the short field between the parking lot and the water. He moved easy and loose. The man swung his entire body back and forth as he moved, looking happy as a weekend night.
...
"An Acceptance" | The Emerson Review, Issue 40, 2011
Robbie killed his mother, but I try to think about other things. His floppy sneakers, his T-shirt, with its too-big neck hole, his thin, bony shoulders. He stands in front of me in our kitchen, with something in his hand that he won’t let me see, and it’s moments like this that I feel particularly ashamed of the things I think and do.
...
"This One Kid's Offertory" | Burner Magazine, Issue 03, The Music Issue
His mother said, “Listen up, little boy. Because my Frere Jacques is about a penguin. He thinks he’s going to be invited to party. He dresses up.”
—This Mother Imaginary, a filament, this low-slung song which was the capper of his bedtimes. She would always be this song, long after she was gone: Father Jack and a penguin dressed for the ballet--
As he lay under bedsheets, she darkened the room. ...
"Living in Winter Takes Practice and Effort" | DIAGRAM, Summer 2011, Issue 11.3
Longlisted: The Wigleaf Top 50 (2012)
I have always stood in exactly this spot. I am the pole that spins the earth at both ends. I am the pin in a hinge, allowing doors to open or shutting them. I am the rusty spike in a railroad tie, the X that marks the spot where the pirates used to be, the stem on an apple. ...continue reading
"Sam Agonistes Picks a Fight with God" | Kugelmass, Issue 1
Get it here!
Sam Agonistes was the biggest, the strongest, the most know-howingest man who had ever lived. Standing runt-like beside Sam, John Henry was a pantywaist and slacker. That steel-driving man was half as good at his day job, and ultimately, was a loser. Paul Bunyan was short. Johnny Appleseed couldn’t outwalk Sam, and Jim Bowie got stuck in the gut when he fought Sam with blades. Daniel Boone demurred to Sam when a bear needed wrestling, and Annie Oakley let him shoot first, and then gave up in disgrace.
...
"Meat Cutter: February 15th, 2005" | Stumble, Issue 4, Summer 2010
Get it here!
He thumped the pork down onto the cutting table and cracked the box open, separating the tape seals with the boning knife he would soon use on the meat. He transferred the slabs of shank, ten pounds apiece, to the stainless steel counter. They had thawed enough, he figured, so he placed one shank on the white plastic cutting board and simply began, no ceremony and little remembrance in the tendons of his arms. With a clockwork’s practice, he sliced through connective tissue and pockets of fat.
He wondered if his father’s shoulder would be so easy to strip.
...
"An Archive of Manly Questions" | Moon Milk Review, Issue 6, July 2010
The delivery man left an oblong box, as tall as a man, two feet deep, on the front porch. Mart tried to lift the ungainly package alone, but couldn’t get purchase, so he went back up the stairs and knocked on the door of the apartment closest to his.
“Jesus,” the neighbor said. “You could fit a body in there.”
... continue reading
"He Would Say" | Sierra Nevada Review 2010
Charlie drove past trees. He drove from September’s Carmela and leaves that had already turned. They flashed red, yellow here and there, in spots like tiny suns. A field lay between the trees and the road, Buchanan Avenue. Charlie’s was the only car and he drove fast, not caring, unafraid. The air was free of manure. The field’s plowed soil appeared like ridges of a line of scar tissue set across the hip of a giant and beautiful woman, but the leaves were beautiful themselves, still clinging to branches. Red leaves, brown leaves, leaves struck with purple and orange.
Yellow is simple, Charlie thought. I don’t need fancy words. This wind is cold. Those trees are pretty. I’m happy this road doesn’t stink.
...
Read it here!
A block ahead of the stop sign where I’m idling, a man loads our couch into a moving van. The van’s parked in our drive, and the couch is the antique one with the arched back and the clawed feet and the hard ribs beneath a skin of upholstery, the couch my wife brought with her into us, and that she’s loved forever—much longer than me—and that we’ve brought along on each move for the jobs or the kids or the dog or the people we were yet to become, and today, I’m home early, unexpectedly, and she’s having the couch moved away...
"Listen: A Fable” | The Fabulist, August 2020
Read it here!
Michigan author Curtis VanDonkelaar’s flash fiction “Listen: A fable” is an allusive, allegorical, and unsentimental look at the militarist imagination.
“Neemie’s Reasons” | Third Wednesday, Fall 2018
Read it here!
There are reasons why Neemie doesn’t like to fish. Reasons why he doesn’t want to go camping. Why he doesn’t own a skateboard, or a scooter, or a bicycle, not like most of the other kids his age, or like old men who live in cities and dodge cars on their ways to office jobs or to restaurants for hot coffees and dinner. There are reasons why Neemie won’t get into a canoe.
“I Keep These Secrets for Ephraim O’Connor” | J Journal, Fall 2018
Find it here!
Mr. Jarvis wore sweatshirts like us, not the button-ups and ties of the other teachers, and if a kid said something funny, he would laugh. So for that whole semester, my second in seventh grade, Mr. Jarvis—Physical Science, third period—was without question my favorite teacher, and we began our learning with him on a handout. He challenged us to The Game. Our tests, he called Innings, and each of us would play nine on our own, but The Game could only be won together, as a team. If everyone kept a test average above C by the end of The Game, he promised us a pizza party. On test days he showed us the scoreboard, so that we’d know what we had to do.
“Bad Man Love Stories” | Thrice Fiction, Issue No. 21, December 2017
Get it, read it, buy it here!
I. Surely This Is how a good love is best made broke:
“You don’t do some stupid thing I want,” he says, “and I want to rain down on the world like God in His baddest pickup. He comes down from the mountains and He brings His mouth.”
“Oh?” she asks, because that’s what she does for him. ...
“The Boy” | Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, October 11, 2017
Read it here!
Two down. Two Greyhound days down, and Texas by morning, so Billy figured. Dallas by noon, and then, who could say? Across the bus’s wide aisle from him, Sam slept, her boy tucked into the crook of her back, the both of them curled against the upholstered plastic of two cruddy seats. Sam cropped her hair high and tight, like a boy’s, like her boy’s, but it had grown out of late, pressing up from her scalp in ragged shoots. Messy. Ugly. Billy sprawled himself over two seats of his own, one sneakered leg thrown sideways from his hip into the empty aisle seat, a single sentence writ across his face: “I dare you to sit with me, motherfucker.” Dallas by noon, and then...
“Chameleons” | Literal Latte, Spring 2017
Winner, 2016 Literal Latte Short Short Contest
Read it here!
Michael’s afraid the TV will blow up again. Two others have burst right here in this living room. He pads his fingers against the TV’s black face. He loves the television. When he pulls his fingertips from the screen, they’re gray, powdered in fine dust...
“The Dream's Alive” | The Gateway Review, Summer 2016
Winner, 2016 Flash Fiction Contest
Read it here!
Speck lay on a blow-up mattress on his bedroom floor. Blackbird Street had been his for months, but he hadn’t bothered, yet, to get a bed for the nights. Cat litter, dragged into his sheets on the cat’s dirty feet, stuck to the skin of his back. His head ached, and when he rubbed his temple, he found a wound, numb and fleshy. ...
“The Sixth Street Bus Conducts an Election” in
Dread State (An Anthology of Political Horror) | ThunderDome Press, 2016
Get it here!
This new rider’s homeless. It’s in his clothes: faded flannel jacket, hunter orange and brown, two holes in its chest resembling gunshot scars. A thermal top underneath the coat, once white, now sooty gray. Oily jeans. Velcro shoes, the hook strips upcurled at the ends. Every article from the Helping Hand clothing drive, I’m willing to bet. From my seat up front of the bus—one of the sideways rows—I have a good view of the guy. I bet he stinks.
“Mr. President,” he yells out, no warning. “I need some help. It’s hard on the streets, I know you know.”
...
“Larry and Charlene in Three Acts” | Storm Cellar, Vol. V No. 2, Fall 2016
Get it here!
They planned to try everything short of knives and pliers. The first item would be an executioner’s hood. That and two leather harnesses, one for each of them, meant to make things uncomfortable down there. ...
“The Old Moose Head and Beyond” | Toad Suck Review, Volume #6 (2016)
Get it here!
The Jesus Man sat in dust and brambles beside the South Haven onramp to US 31, south to Chicago, just off the Fuller Street overpass. When I got in, the morning shift, he was already across the street, not fifty feet from my register. He sat leaning back in a cheap plastic lawn chair. He wore a white baptismal robe over jeans and cowboy boots, a man-sized wooden cross splayed at rest across his chest. Every six or seven cars, he spoke ...
"An Afternoon Recital" | Temenos, Fall 2015
Read it here!
With his fat, solid thumbs, Benji’s grandfather flips two rusty latches and opens the violin case. The old man lifts out a grimy and unstringed violin. He turns it in his hands—such hands!—large enough to palm a basketball, knuckles like ankles, fingers of shins—and they don’t tremble at all, not at all. They do not shake with what you might think are tremors. ...
"The World Between" | Old Northwest Review, Fall 2015
Get it here!
I am called Jimmy, after my grandfather, who told me stories. About his own childhood, about himself, about his brother, his older brother, Jacob. We—my brother Tommy and me—we called him Uncle Jacob, though he was technically our great uncle. If you asked me to describe him, or draw a rough sketch of him in crayon and pencil, he would come out looking as I remember him at Great-Grandma June’s funeral that summer, the summer my brother first ran away, though not yet for good: Uncle Jacob looking like a fat, red beet. Angry, not sad, lumpy, and dressed like some middle school’s lost janitor. ...
"Another Acceptance" | PassagesNorth.com, Bonus Content, 5/5/14
"...this piece [is] a warning, a reminder that we’re closest to those we can’t save, whom we eventually, finally, have to let go, even when we’re not programmed to."
Managing Editor Tim Johnson, Passages North
Sometimes I can’t remember if I’m supposed to like to dance. This is not to say that I don’t know, or that I can’t know, or couldn’t say, but only that I can’t be sure when I did and when I didn’t, and really, what are you asking anyways? ... continue reading
"Facts and Supplications" | Potomac Review, Fall 2013
Spinning hunk of rock, she thought. Melted rock, liquid, like mud. Crust on the outside, a slow-moving layer, a coat of papier-mâché. Lorraine had never played with mud as a child—who would want? —but she felt certain that Franklin had. He wasn’t a bad husband, not really, but he wasn’t a man at all. He was a small boy, sitting in a patch of wet dirt, eating mud like baker’s chocolate, smiling and smearing a cat’s thick whiskers onto his face. His mud was just dirt, but he ate nonetheless. He’d eat until the world had nothing but sand-baked glass for skin. ...
"To Send" | Vestal Review, Web Issue 43, Winter 2013
I am welcome to keep every bit of what we owned between us, but everything else is hers. To her new apartment, I am to send what she’s left behind: two shoeboxes of old pictures and a stuffed toy banana. Never mind the wedding album. ... continue reading
"Oh Luck: Seven Lotteries" | Hobart, Issue 13, February 2012
On an April day trip to Chicago in my third year of college, I bought Skinny a gag lottery ticket I found in a comic shop. The ticket looked official, with a confetti-festooned front and a get-down-to-business list of dense fine print on the back. If you read far enough, the print started telling you things like “Claim prizes at North Pole,” and “All monies in Martian currency,” but if you didn’t read the fine print—and Skinny didn’t—the ticket looked like the real deal...
"Mollerman Swims" | MAKE, Issue 11
The cottage was comfortable, but not so large that one of the four of them could go missing inside and the rest wouldn’t know. Alden searched from room to room, passing first the master bedroom, then his own, then the kitchen, his head so muzzy that solid walls had doors. Some horn inside him droned, pressured his ears with the warm, warning buzz of a hot amp, and nowhere from front door to basement could he escape the tone. Snow. Snow outside. And inside, this hum, the deep hum, bubbled in the dark of his guts, coursed through the marrow of his long bones, transmitted itself into the wooden floor through the tips of his toes. His teeth wobbled. Alden turned his head in circles and the house’s layout rearranged as he walked and looked. He came up empty, save for the all-consuming buzz. Mollerman was gone.
...
"Little Sinner of the Kitchen" | Limestone 2011
We were halfway to Lansing on I-96 before my brother Tommy told me our destination. Streams of sweat ran down his neck into his T-shirt, feeding a stain on his chest larger than those under his arms. The lower half of his buzz cut was soaked, and he looked to have a head of hair in two discrete styles, one spiky and blond on the top, the one below dirty, greasy brown.
“Mt. Pleasant,” he said. “We’re going to check out the casino and get a hotel room. Live like rich people for a day in this God damn life.”
“Do they let minors in?” I asked.
...
"Matilda, or, A Man of Maxims" | Western Humanities Review, Summer 2011
Matilda! Oh Matilda, who was always and always and always the problem; think Griffin’s Meg, think Keaton’s Mallory, think Mary about whom there was simply Something. Manfred, who sold washers, and dryers, and water heaters, had Matilda as his one and only problem. Matilda, and of course, Conrad, who was never the son he should have been, but rather was a sickly whelp of a brat, bad at geometry, worse at running, and always sick. Conrad, best kept at home after school and kept as far from a ballfield as was possible.
...
"Ashes" | The Tusculum Review, Vol. 7/2011
2011 Tusculum Review Fiction Prize Finalist
A thin man came ambling through the park. He was hard to see in the moonlight, but he was certainly very short, and as he bobbed down the soft incline from the footpath circling Little Lake Inlet, his long, gray hair flopped in unruly mopstrings. He walked towards the picnic table at the water’s edge where Deene and Conn sat smoking cigarettes they were four years too young to buy. Deene watched the man bounce off the sidewalk and over the short field between the parking lot and the water. He moved easy and loose. The man swung his entire body back and forth as he moved, looking happy as a weekend night.
...
"An Acceptance" | The Emerson Review, Issue 40, 2011
Robbie killed his mother, but I try to think about other things. His floppy sneakers, his T-shirt, with its too-big neck hole, his thin, bony shoulders. He stands in front of me in our kitchen, with something in his hand that he won’t let me see, and it’s moments like this that I feel particularly ashamed of the things I think and do.
...
"This One Kid's Offertory" | Burner Magazine, Issue 03, The Music Issue
His mother said, “Listen up, little boy. Because my Frere Jacques is about a penguin. He thinks he’s going to be invited to party. He dresses up.”
—This Mother Imaginary, a filament, this low-slung song which was the capper of his bedtimes. She would always be this song, long after she was gone: Father Jack and a penguin dressed for the ballet--
As he lay under bedsheets, she darkened the room. ...
"Living in Winter Takes Practice and Effort" | DIAGRAM, Summer 2011, Issue 11.3
Longlisted: The Wigleaf Top 50 (2012)
I have always stood in exactly this spot. I am the pole that spins the earth at both ends. I am the pin in a hinge, allowing doors to open or shutting them. I am the rusty spike in a railroad tie, the X that marks the spot where the pirates used to be, the stem on an apple. ...continue reading
"Sam Agonistes Picks a Fight with God" | Kugelmass, Issue 1
Get it here!
Sam Agonistes was the biggest, the strongest, the most know-howingest man who had ever lived. Standing runt-like beside Sam, John Henry was a pantywaist and slacker. That steel-driving man was half as good at his day job, and ultimately, was a loser. Paul Bunyan was short. Johnny Appleseed couldn’t outwalk Sam, and Jim Bowie got stuck in the gut when he fought Sam with blades. Daniel Boone demurred to Sam when a bear needed wrestling, and Annie Oakley let him shoot first, and then gave up in disgrace.
...
"Meat Cutter: February 15th, 2005" | Stumble, Issue 4, Summer 2010
Get it here!
He thumped the pork down onto the cutting table and cracked the box open, separating the tape seals with the boning knife he would soon use on the meat. He transferred the slabs of shank, ten pounds apiece, to the stainless steel counter. They had thawed enough, he figured, so he placed one shank on the white plastic cutting board and simply began, no ceremony and little remembrance in the tendons of his arms. With a clockwork’s practice, he sliced through connective tissue and pockets of fat.
He wondered if his father’s shoulder would be so easy to strip.
...
"An Archive of Manly Questions" | Moon Milk Review, Issue 6, July 2010
The delivery man left an oblong box, as tall as a man, two feet deep, on the front porch. Mart tried to lift the ungainly package alone, but couldn’t get purchase, so he went back up the stairs and knocked on the door of the apartment closest to his.
“Jesus,” the neighbor said. “You could fit a body in there.”
... continue reading
"He Would Say" | Sierra Nevada Review 2010
Charlie drove past trees. He drove from September’s Carmela and leaves that had already turned. They flashed red, yellow here and there, in spots like tiny suns. A field lay between the trees and the road, Buchanan Avenue. Charlie’s was the only car and he drove fast, not caring, unafraid. The air was free of manure. The field’s plowed soil appeared like ridges of a line of scar tissue set across the hip of a giant and beautiful woman, but the leaves were beautiful themselves, still clinging to branches. Red leaves, brown leaves, leaves struck with purple and orange.
Yellow is simple, Charlie thought. I don’t need fancy words. This wind is cold. Those trees are pretty. I’m happy this road doesn’t stink.
...
essays
"Life Here in Fallout Hell" | Nowhere, 12/22/17
Read it here!
I come from nowhere. Specifically, the middle of nowhere. The sort of place where, if you met me on the street and asked, “Where’s home?” I’d lift my hand—as many Michiganders do—and point to the meaty edge of my palm. Here. There. The part of Michigan that is best recognized as Not Detroit. ...
“Five Reaches: A Prose List” | Eastern Iowa Review , Issue 3 2017
Get it here!
In a cheap kid’s bucket—blue plastic, came with a shovel for a dollar ninety-five, though I’ve lost the shovel—I collect apple snails, their soft, wet feet the color of chocolate, their speckled black shells spiraling up their backs. They’re smaller than you would think, more the size of plums than apples. ...
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I come from nowhere. Specifically, the middle of nowhere. The sort of place where, if you met me on the street and asked, “Where’s home?” I’d lift my hand—as many Michiganders do—and point to the meaty edge of my palm. Here. There. The part of Michigan that is best recognized as Not Detroit. ...
“Five Reaches: A Prose List” | Eastern Iowa Review , Issue 3 2017
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In a cheap kid’s bucket—blue plastic, came with a shovel for a dollar ninety-five, though I’ve lost the shovel—I collect apple snails, their soft, wet feet the color of chocolate, their speckled black shells spiraling up their backs. They’re smaller than you would think, more the size of plums than apples. ...