Category: Fiction

  • Trimming the Fat 

    While a week’s worth of laundry spins inside my mother’s washing machine, we swipe through potential matches on that dating app, the one for post-menopausal women seeking love or something like it, a close mimic.   Her desires are clear enough. Retired male, preferably her height or slightly taller, bird boned and big brained, her exact…

  • Letters to Birdie

    Birdie, how long has it been? It feels like an eternity. After high school I saw you a couple of times coming back home to the lake, boating and skiing, going out on the jet-skis, sunbathing on your dock, right next to ours. Then poof.

  • Anything for a Friend

    I should have known it wasn’t going to end well when Sheila switched from strawberry wine coolers to boilermakers. But, I’ll admit it, I was sort of enjoying the dent she was putting in Greeley’s cocktail party, the brittle smiles and edgy eyes on the faces of his guests, a cross-section of stuffed shirts from…

  • The Gulf

    On his second day sailing from Tampa Bay northwest across the Gulf of Mexico, Dawson Melburn spotted a massive container ship coming out of the fog on his port side. The baritone blast from its horn echoed across the water, causing Daw to jerk the tiller. He immediately came about, not wanting to play chicken…

  • The Blender

    We found it behind our school, in the alley the four of us liked to roam late into the night, after I dared Jesper to leap into a blue dumpster. “Fine,” he said, boosting himself up, jumping in. He landed with a squishy splash. “Sometimes people find things in dumpsters.” “We have better things to…

  • Bloody Mary

    The house sat on the shore of the lake with a bald, open face. It was wide and white with a black front door and blacker windows, two gaping eyes on the second story that blinked with the flutter of pink lace curtains. The roof lumbered to a lazy gambrel peak and the siding was…

  • The Widower

    Enjoy your life after I’m gone, Jon would tell Rachel. Go to the theater with rich widowers. Travel. Just promise me you won’t die first. But then her cancer returned, and she tried to prepare him, explaining where the passwords were filed, how to use Venmo and WAZE, telling him which of her widowed friends…

  • An Orgy in the Time of AIDS

      I was seventeen and a half when I took part in my first and only orgy. It was 1991. My family and I, originally from Belgium, lived in Rwanda, where my father worked as an epidemiologist mapping the HIV-AIDS pandemic. In November that year, Magic Johnson announced he was HIV-positive; a few weeks later,…

  • Still Birds

    2005 Bruce Kuipers found the baklava on his porch, plated and wrapped. It sat on the table, under the eight-point rack of antlers, and his retriever sniffed at it with a wagging tail. The plate was heavier than he expected, and he nearly spilled its contents kicking off his sandy shoes in the mudroom. In…