day one
PUBLISHED AT BOOTH, JUNE 2024
Day 1: Widowed after sixty-one years, Elizabeth wasn’t overwhelmed by grief. Rather, she tingled with possibility. READ MORE
ANTI-MOTHER
PUBLISHED AT VERDAD MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2022
Dr. Elm Valor rolled into the middle school parking lot on a sunny Monday in November. The odometer on her beater ’98 Jeep Cherokee clicked to 200,000 miles just as she punched the beast into park. Elm whooped at the accomplishment.
“You’ve served me well,” she said, patting the dashboard. “This is the place. Stand still, my steed, Let me review the scene, And summon from the shadowy past The forms that once have been.”
She’d used the same Longfellow quote most mornings of her short teaching career. It started as a goodbye to her beloved Jeep but had morphed into an incantation, a charm for a good and purposeful day. READ MORE
FAMILY, GENUS, SPECIES
PUBLISHED AT KAIROS LITERARY MAGAZINE, AUGUST 2021
Leigh drove into Yellowstone National Park with her mom, Agnes, in a black box on her lap. She cranked the AC, pointing the vents down. The box was heavier than Leigh had expected ashes to be, and the leather was making her bare legs sweat. She could have buckled Agnes into the passenger seat. Still, the thought of stopping short for wildlife on the road and having her mom spill into every crevice of the car, onto everything she owned in the back seat, was too distracting. Plus, Leigh found that she liked the feeling of Agnes’s maternal weight holding her back in death as she did in life. READ MORE
Maternal Ideations
PUBLISHED AT KAIROS LITERARY MAGAZINE, MAY 2021
Backstage, Roxie peed on the stick, placed it on the vanity, and waited. Panic dried out her mouth, and her tongue felt enormous. Cherry was onstage doing her throwback number, while Beyonce's “Naughty Girl” blasted in the dressing room. Roxie smoothed her tear-away schoolgirl outfit and applied more lip gloss. There was only another minute before Cherry's song ended, and Roxie was supposed to be on stage, sassy and sultry, no matter what the pregnancy test revealed. READ MORE
Impersonating A Civilian
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT UMBRELLA FACTORY MAGAZINE, FEBRUARY 2021
FINALIST FOR 2020 ADELAIDE LITERARY AWARD
Anne woke to Scott rustling in his nightstand drawer, probably looking for that horrible orange gum, the sex gum. He unwrapped the wad, masticating with slurping and sucking noises, like what Anne imagined a greedy nursing baby would sound like. She pulled a pillow over her head and held her breath against the fermented fruit of death.
“Wanna?” He rubbed his hand on her naked hip. READ MORE
INSURANCE AGAINST EXTINCTION
PUBLISHED AT BULL: MEN’S FICTION, NOVEMBER 2020
Lee bit into his PB&J and watched Bono, the dominant Silverback Gorilla, knucklewalk from the back of his enclosure to the front. Bono stood upright near a puddle, reaching his full height of six feet. Even though Lee had seen him do it before on rainy days, it was still unsettling. Despite fitting every depiction of King of the Jungle, Bono also exhibited several endearing high-maintenance attitudes, like never allowing his giant hands to drag through the mud. READ MORE.
THE SLOW BREAKUP
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED AT ADELAIDE LITERARY MAGAZINE, NOVEMBER 2020
FINALIST FOR 2020 ADELAIDE LITERARY AWARD
Kelly’s SUV is packed with seventh-grade boys going to their first school dance. Their bodies reek of too much competing cologne, a chemical stench that barely masks the greasy smell of their fast food dinner and puberty-induced body odor.
Lake, her son, sits in the passenger seat and shouts conversations to his friends in the back. He is jittering in his seat, buzzing with palpable excitement.
“Lake,” Kelly says, placing a hand on his bouncing knee. “Calm down.”
Kelly smiles at the memory of her and John picking the edgy name for their only child. They named him in the hopes of offering a uniqueness that his peers wouldn’t have. The joke was on them though; now she chauffeurs kids named Ryder, Storm, Kale, and one pimply boy named Bronson Money, who shortened his name to Bro Money. Naming Lake after her husband John would have been the more unique choice. READ MORE
BAD TRIP
PUBLISHED AT HEAVY FEATHER REVIEW, NOVEMBER 2020
Merlin Klotz sweated through his t-shirt with giant lettering that read, “OK BOOMER.” He questioned why he wore it in the first place. He was on a shuttle bus, leaving from his hotel in route to a drug retreat full of hippies, as the brochure he found in his mother’s apartment described. The retreat was probably full of Baby Boomers. Did he want to insult them right away? Worse, what if the brochure was misleading, and the retreat was run by Millennials that mistook him as a Baby Boomer, a Baby Boomer too old to understand that the joke was on him? Merlin considered this mushroom experience in Jamaica as a celebration of his 52nd birthday, which landed him solidly in the Gen X age bracket. But his fast-food diet, potbelly, and gray beard aged him into a Boomer, into the same generation as his mom, and he hated that. READ MORE.
FIN
PUBLISHED IN THE ADANNA LITERARY JOURNAL SPECIAL ANNIVERSARY 10TH ISSUE, OCTOBER 2020
Rena was weighed down by bags of swim toys, snacks, and sunscreen to the point where no one at the hotel pool could see her Fendi bikini. So much for making an entrance. Rena flopped the bags at the feet of the nearest pool attendant as she adjusted her bikini to cover the tattoo of a serpent on her breast. She shooed her children away from her and toward the water, regretting firing the nanny based entirely on her own suspicion. There was no proof that Rodger had slept with her. READ MORE.
Franken-tit
PUBLISHED IN AVALON LITERARY REVIEW, AUGUST 2020