Fiction

The girl waited outside the barn with the flashlight in one hand and the shovel in the other. It was mid-April and the night was cold. It didn’t take but a minute before the old woman came out of the barn with the bundle of linens in her arms. They walked into the field, the […]

Belinda’s grandmother, who insists on being called Gabby, wears classic t-shirts with the images of bands fading across the front. Fleetwood Mac is missing most of Lindsay Buckingham. The Grateful Dead are mere ghosts of themselves. Heart’s “Dreamboat Annie” has sunk. Sixteen-year-old Belinda loves the way they look on her skinny grandmother and is certain […]

Jim Younger was a copper thief like his father before him. His predilection for stealing the metal led to most of his earthly troubles. He broke his ankle when he was nineteen and sneaking into a condo development. He had a nasty scar on his left calf from an overzealous guard dog when he was […]

“You can’t catch me—I’m the gingerbread man!” My daughter squealed the words as I closed the storybook  “Sissy Bee, go find grandma.” I pulled four bundles from my sock drawer. Two grand. The take from the last round of cooks.  *** Three gates north and a right up an overgrown road to where my granddad […]

Just before daylight, a knock rattles the front door like a branch slapping against her trailer’s tin roof. Lara’s expecting this, but when she opens the door she doesn’t expect Roger. One eye’s swollen shut. Blood oozes from gashes in multiple locations. The hilt of a knife protrudes from his back shoulder. He looks more […]

The stick was a .380, six in the magazine and one in the chamber. I stole it from a middle-class house in a middle-class town nobody’s ever heard of, walked around with it in my pocket for a while until Montez said he had something cooking. Montez usually had an angle, and it always involved […]

Show me a hitman with the yips and I’ll show you a dead man walking. I read once about a shortstop taking his bat to confessional to bust a hitting slump. I could have got my gun ordained and it wouldn’t have broken my cold streak. The jammed pistol in Houston was strike one. The […]

Hundred degree days baked us to the bone. Dry Santa Ana winds whipped westward from the high desert toward the coast, keeping us all on edge. With relentless, blistering heat, I knew bad shit was coming. But when you’re in the joint, savage wind and blazing sun beats a soul-stifling cell. We let ourselves be […]

Glen wasn’t her first office affair.  She’d hoped he’d be her last. She was a toxic tort attorney, a fancy way of saying she represented towns poisoned by local industry.  Her life was depositions, hotels, the office.  She couldn’t remember the color of the walls in her apartment. The men available to her tended to […]

The disease had ravaged her body. She bore little resemblance to the woman she once was, but he still loved her. He’d long since forgotten what day it was. Gray stubble covered his cheeks and made him look older than his forty-five years. The smell of the stale broth on the nightstand, and the odor […]

It’s all about Billy. My little brother. It’s always been about Billy. From the moment he squealed for the first time in the arms of the doctor. He was a much cuter baby than me. A full head of spiky black hair and a small upturned nose. I emerged from Mom as bald as Jean-Luc […]

The pre-war rust-bucket taxi dropped Liam during dusk’s golden hour—the whole world a stage. Liam Gallagher dripped out. The sun backlit his lithe frame. He arched and reached to heaven. He knew he looked delicious. Thick shutters peaked open—the caller observed the show. Liam looked around Nixon’s suburban fever dream. The house was brick. Ivy […]