Buddy Girl’s One Love
from Sonora Review

“My father and Angela are sitting on the couch. Angela is an enormous black woman with the face of angels, nymphs and fairies. My father is thin, with a shocking tuft of gray hair and long, slender fingers, like a woman’s. I cannot picture the two of them engaged in something as disorderly as sex, though side by side on the couch, in a graceful state of inertia, they are perfect.

My father’s works are on the coffee table. Angela is drifting off. I smoke a joint, not yet involved in the headier side of my father’s preference for heroin. Las Vegas worries the fleas on his back”.

Blue Winter
from Kalliope

“It was spring when they found the bodies. A man and a woman, with their arms wrapped around a child, as if they could all protect themselves from death. They were found in a drift of snow that had not yet melted, beneath the shade of a giant sequoia. Because of the way the snow was melting, the child’s blue mittens were clearly visible.

Paul, Monica’s husband, called the authorities. Being a small town, it didn’t take long for the locals to hear about the bodies and soon the North Grove was buzzing with people. They all stood around the spot where the bodies had been removed, and those that arrived early enough could still see the dead people’s imprints in the snow.

One of the locals said, “It reminds me of those chalk drawings the police make on the pavement around people who jump out of windows.”

The Bridge of Us
from In Good Company: A Collection of Short Stories/Live Wire Press

“I had developed strange cravings. I was driven mad with desire by the scent of cleaning fluids and the taste of toothpaste. I wanted to drink Spic N Span straight from the bottle and squirt lemon fresh Lysol counter cleaner right into my mouth. Colgate toothpaste drove me batty. I brushed for long, indulgent periods throughout the day whether I needed it or not. And I was so flush with raw, engorged blood vessels that the Kegel exercises the birthing instructor told us to do 500 times a day brought on earth-shattering orgasms, though I don’t think they were supposed to.”