I slide my CD toward Eric Burdon who sits, smiling and gracious and fatigued from Seattle traffic, at the table at Silver Platters, where I have just purchased ‘Til Your River Runs Dry, and stood in a line of old gray heads to have him sign it. I remove my hat and…

You stretch my heart / in sacred ways

She had just done it in the backseat with the man she decided would be her father. Or maybe it was the cast of his eyes under the dim bar lights. Maybe she insisted that this had to be done, to relive the night under the stars, under a dented roof of a station…

Nik Wallenda was going to walk a wire stretched from Sarasota Bay across US 41 to a condo on Gulf Stream Drive.

Mayumi faced forward, channeled her Mana, and gathered a small pocket of air under hand. Soon the voice returned, rattling her mind.

'Every raindrop sounds different.' says Barney. He's bouncing along beside his mother, twisting in her hand like warm milk. She looks down at his Big Bear hat and tugs. They wait together at the edge of the busy road. 'How do they sound?' 'Zzzing.…

Before the railroad tracks are blown off by the wind, the wall tiles morph to trace 34th Streetwhile a silver balloon emerges from the end of the tunnel. A child’s hand reaches out for the gleam and she, the woman in a black-dress with a mandarin collar,

New Underwear

The doctors said, when she was born, that the gills would eventually fade away on their own. Nothing to fear, they said; no more unusual than the rare child born with a tail, or a dense pelt of fur, or a single sharp tooth jutting from its new pink gums.

My sixth grade teacher used to tell us all the time about how being poor is nowhere near the same as liv­ing in poverty.

The stain upon / many others cannot be discerned.

This story is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintentional and should not be inferred. (Really!)

I woke up to the humming of an empty space in the shape of a sweatshirt,

I want to read a story that ends unhappily ever after: one where the bad guy wins and no one gets the girl.

Smiling, holding hands, Joe and Lara basked in the sunshine of the mid January day as they approached the diner. The temperature was warm enough for golf. Joe had played in far colder weather in spring and fall.