Short Stories

Ten Feet Short of Useful
Featured in: Moonlighting by LitPub Jerry crouched in a hoarder’s living room, staring down a giant rat. The thing was almost two feet long and shockingly burly, an alpha scavenger. Jerry waved a leather gloved hand toward the open door and said, “Scat.” The rat’s lewd pink nose twitched but it made no move to flee. And why should it? In the weeks since Jerry’s father died, the mice and rats had held dominion over hillocks of sleeping bags and chewed tiny highways through drifts of unopened mail. They slept... Read more...
Mass
Mass
Featured in: Hipocampus Magazine Earlier today, they cut the growth from my throat. Now I’m home in our bed, trying and failing to sleep, and I envy my religious friends... Read more...
Dumplin
A would-be gentleman farmer brings home a four-hundred-pound Gloucester pig, and his long-suffering wife finally gets the last word. Originally published in Defenestration. Read more...
Gingerbread
A wife keeps baking children who come out as nothing but cookies. Meanwhile the cow gives only blood, the pig hides in the hills, and a smiling fox gets rich. A dark fairy tale originally published in Psychopomp. Read more...
Soon Enough
On a summer night, a shooting star leads a father to a conversation he isn't ready to have with his seriously ill six-year-old son. Originally published in Birch Bark Editing. Read more...
Sara, Laughing
Thirty years into a marriage of aging parents, failing bodies and friends moving away, one rainy October night in the kitchen shows what's still worth fighting for. Originally published in Eastern Iowa Review. Read more...
Good Bones
Next door, the childless neighbors turn their house into a showpiece. In our leaky, crumbling one, a toddler tyrant rules and a baby called "The Passenger" is on the way. It turns out that what makes a home has little to do with Sub-Zero fridges. Read more...
Jelly
Retired, with the kids grown and his friends moved away, a man hauls a box of old contracts and failed journals into the woods to burn his past. The mocking Steller's Jays have other ideas. Read more...