New Stories From the Midwest
2011 Sister Light-of-Love Love Dove EXCERPT But to be told that the miracle of a child was growing inside me in such a menacing way made me stop and think twice where I was. Up until I got sick, Mr. Fulton and I had relations once a week only, after Sunday supper. It was not a happy time for me when he lumbered into my room with his privates swinging to and fro beneath his nightshirt, all worked up and getting right down to business without any pleasantries, as if it was all just another of his legal transactions, and not such an important one at that. But I thought maybe it was because it reminded me of Mr. Hernandez and my other doings before I was lifted up. Because Mr. Fulton was nice enough to me; he bought me a grand home and we had servants to take care of us. I never in all my life thought that anyone wearing that same uniform I wore at that nice dead white lady’s house would now be waiting on me. Yet it was so. 
The Normal School
Volume Seven, Issue One The Fall of Man, 2014 EXCERPT I’d seen the insides of these offices all too many times. I knew better than to put up a fight. My shoulders went slack in a passable imitation of a petty first-time-found-out unprincipled candy-palmer, and I let L’il Bro steer me into that cramped stern space where, undoubtedly, countless times before I’d ever arrived on the scene, hardened teenaged girls had suddenly cracked and given up their purloined lipsticks; where daring, bored-to-death housewives pushed out the sheer pantyhose, push-up bras, and fishnet knee-highs they’d never have worn anyway from under their blouses, as if they were losing their pregnancies in do-it-yourself cesareans; where scared little boys slowly uncurled their balled-up fists to show melted stolen chocolates and begged the bored security guard to torture them, fine them, indenture them, only please do not tell their mothers, please! |
Burrow Press Review
3/17/2015 Adult Swim in the Kidney Pool EXCERPT The hair on his head is gone, but his eyebrows still inch across his face like two black caterpillars playing a polite game of chicken. His body may be down for the count, but his face still has it going on. Each day of the week there’s a different colored cap on his head, and I’m proud to say I crocheted each one. Crocheting is a recent conquest for me, one that did not come easily, since my fingers are short and blunt and often feel more like stubby tan pencils than those sensitive personal tools some other women own. Wind swoops over the house and gives it a bad case of the winter jitters. The boiler sends steam hollering up from the pipes. When I was a kid, when the lights went out for good each night, I used to like this sound of clanging steam. Instead of thinking about how my nose was too wide or my voice was too high or my legs were too short, how I couldn’t dance right and boys didn’t like me, I would float on a calm sea of steam and drift off into dreamland. 
storySouth
Issue 37, Spring 2014 A Hundred Hands EXCERPT When he walked his toes turned out like morgue feet and when he talked he stuttered like a lawnmower with a dirty carb. He had barbed-wire curls at a time when straight was in. His prom date was Nula in her third-wearing prom dress and if he had any hope that the others wouldn’t guess who she was that hope was squashed when someone started whistling the music to Kissin’ Cousins. When his blush matched the color of a Mortgage Lifter ripening on the vine, Nula took pity on him and whisked him out for coffee and then home so that Perley wouldn’t ask too many questions about why they were home so early. In those days she had a bit of a drinking problem herself since Jonathan the Third had been gone for four long years and the single-mother thing was wearing thin. Dwight was still hat-in-hand respectful to Perley and Little Luther and so everyone was on their best behavior out in public, while at home things continued to decay. |
Redux
#46 Salvation, 2012 EXCERPT His testicles, her tits, her juices, his steady-state steady stream, were only the most obvious, the most publicly acknowledged aspects of male-female pleasure and lust. He would give up the last before-dawn hour of work at his studio to hide in the bushes behind the house, watching her hazy early-morning bathroom silhouette as she soaped and shaved her armpits. He would linger beside her when the other boarders were around, just to smell her vapors. He dreamed of the soft, vein-specked skin behind her knees, the curve of the muscle opposite her elbow, the fine blond down that feathered her jawbone. He imagined the places her fingers had touched, the heady aromas that permeated the whorls of her fingertips. He guessed at the number of her eyelashes, right and left, upper and lower lids, as if he were a child at a birthday party. The frictions of finger against finger, hand against thigh, tongue across lips, was almost more than he could bear. Meals were excruciating, an exquisite torment. |
The Southern Review
Winter 1992 Defender of the Faith EXCERPT He bemoans his partner's death. He blames himself, after Tyrone. When he sobs, great scoops of air pass up from his lungs. He was just doing his job the best he knew how, he says, his hands flopping through the air like big fish. Jack, wherever he is now, would be the first to understand that. Day in, day out, it's stop this punk, nab that thief. The very pettiness of the quarry makes their crimes loom large, as if to dignify all the cops who build their days and nights around them. Saliva accumulates like sea froth in the corners of his mouth. But look at it from the punk's, the hood's, the dealer's point of view. What they do buys them a little pin money, that's all. They're not caught in the cogs of some corporation; oh no, indeed they couldn't crawl or crowbar their way into any corporation. Big corporation takes one look at them and spits them out before breakfast. So what can they do? They diddle, they dice, they deal. And they get caught, because that's their job. It's part of the natural order that they keep the coppers in business. |