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!)

The sound of a siren approaches his home. His wife asks him why he's so nervous. It's nothing, he says, but he rises from the couch and peers into the night from behind the curtains. The siren approaches relentlessly. The road twists and turns and the sound fades but always…

Once a friend asked me to write about rape in an email, so I wrote that it is a weapon of war that would not work here because partners do not give in to it; in fact, they would say it is infidelity in relationships.

"Commander of the Armies of the Four Winds" concerns a nightmare endured by Commander Daniel Bennett of the San Diego Police Department after he is assigned to recover the stolen Necromancer Artifact, which purports to invoke nefarious spirits imprisoned

“Good to see you, old man,” Greg said. He was like that, an investment banker, a latter-day Tom Buchanan without the polo ponies, self-consciously fusty.

There is an old Indian story which says that if a person inhales basil fumes, then scorpions will grow in the inhaler's brain. We have basil growing all over our garden, so this explains the absolutely stinging sensation I feel in my cerebellum after cutting the basil hedge…

Inspired by "The Dunwich Horror"" by H.P. Lovecraft, this excerpt concerns the events in the life of a man who is coming to the awareness that his son has followed in his grandfather's steps and begun the process of conjuring a spirit that killed him.

Did I refer to Mark Twain’s typewriter as an animal? Did I call it a hyena? I would not say that about Mark Twain’s typewriter.

On our wedding day he carried all of the furniture out of our small bedroom, created a sanctuary.

I imaged him at his mother's house, eating chicken and tabouli with her at her round marble table, leaning back and laughing, then reading my “love you” and excusing himself to cry in the bathroom.

I love the notion of uncertainty-/ which seems inherent/ at the level of particles-

By the time the forked tongue of the flag extended flat like it was pressed between two of my thick volumes on weather forecasting, the man was still walking with his nose glued to the ground.

"That it was my stepdad's fault."

Okay, I’ll admit it, the earth was shaken on the world's underside, when you left for California. And I sometimes slept on the shores of Lake Michigan and Fox River for your tremendous thousand years’ charisma. To say I cried out in pain would be lettin

I go with the wind, like the smoke of this Marlboro red as it dances among the palm trees.