Fiction

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 […]

Girls. That’s what Mr. O’Malley called us when he gave us the strawberry Seagram’s wine cooler, which meant he knew it was wrong, since we were sixteen and his students. Felt weird to call him Mister. He wasn’t that much older than we were. Twenty-two, with golden hair and a face tanned from being in […]

Frank was a Junior. Hated it from the day he learned what “junior” meant. Frank Senior drove like he’d wrapped the car in eggs. Junior drove like Hell closed in ten minutes, the St. Christopher statue his ma gave him hanging on to the dashboard for dear life. The old man nibbled around the periphery […]

Their only hope was that Father Derosiers was a creature of habit. Every Friday at 12:25 p.m. sharp, his 1984 Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham rounded the blind curve in Kavanaugh Street on his way downtown to what he called his deputy’s luncheon: deputy mayor, deputy police chief, deputy school superintendent and him, the auxiliary bishop of […]

Daddy don’t smoke, but he don’t fuss about it. Live and let live, he says. But Daddy don’t like the man chain-smoking at the Steelworker’s Labor Day Fireworks. He says it’s inconsiderate with kids around. Smokers should go to the third base line where a dozen men stand smoking, spitting and telling bad stories. The […]

Look, I’m not going to sugar coat things. These overhead lights, Danny, this basement, it’s the last place you’re ever going to see. And everything that’s planned, it’s going to happen right over there and you are going to feel every last bit of it before we dump you in that hole. Call it a […]