What Happened While You Were in Africa

    I ran a fever for three days. It started a couple hours after I got home from the airport, actually, but I didn't notice until later. By then, of course, it was far too late to do anything. You know how fever are: if it isn't breaking 100 degrees, it isn't trying, so I spent a couple evenings roasting my brain. Anyway, I spent that night drinking water and mildly hallucinating. There wasn't anyone in town, with you and everyone on the plane, so I couldn't get anyone to go to the store for me, and of course I couldn't drive myself. Became paranoidly convinced that the tap water was contaminated for a few hours there, which resulted in ... (read more)

Brick Is Red, page five

    Carol yanked the handbrake, halting the slow backward wobble of the car in the pull-around, and killed the engine. Keys still in the ignition, she switched the fans, lights, and radio off, practiced fingers flicking through a check that always reminded Wendy of a pilot in the cockpit.     "This is the right thing to do, right?" Carol looked over at her, hand stilled on the key, as she breathed the sentence out. "I mean, I'm not moving out or giving up. We just need a little distance. Some perspective. So this is good, right?" Facing carefully forward, she kept her eyes on Carol, beside ... (read more)

Third for Adam

    Three days' indifference after the word for Kate and him had ceased to be 'we,' Adam lay looking at the falldown sky, clouds standoffish bickering, and wondered if it would rain. Kate had liked the rain, curled up in sweaters and windows in her apartment, for the slow dull atmosphere it imposed: not like Lisa, who'd played in summer storms, soaking wet in borrowed trunks and sad opaque t-shirt. Not like Amy, who'd needed the weather clear, blue sky hard December powder or deep June sapphire, so long as she could see the sun, or suffered. Kate was over now, but lying under a tree in a small patch of green two blocks from his apartment Adam ... (read more)

Another One About Adam

    Slick as he turned them over, Adam watched antibacterial soap make frictionless surfaces of his hands, inhaling the simple clean scent he knew of the iridescent bubbles on his skin. Behind him Linda lay in the bed, murmuring her way into or out of REM sleep she hovered just below consciousness: later she would tell him about her dreams, the strange turn they took to some suspended reality corresponding with his trip to the bathroom, though neither of them would make the connection. Fingers glided apart for the awkward turn of the handle, trailing suds back to the sink he rinsed them away and rubbed himself with the handtowel, supple skin ... (read more)

One about Adam

    Perhaps Adam had learned to drive, in a borrowed car during his sweaty adolesence or on a long trip some time in college; perhaps he knew how to sit behind the wheel and take a vehicle through its paces, in some quiet unremarkable part of his mind that harbored latent reflexes, like how to catch a baseball just seen from the corner of his eye. Stepping from sidewalk to bus to subway to station, Adam betrayed no secret knowledge, though, of talents buried, unused. Privileged private citizen on public transport, Adam knew that he never racked his nerves front bumper fairly on top of the tail lights ahead of him in traffic jambs, never ... (read more)

Strychnine Over(ride) pg2

    Adam, as his 23rd girlfriend had once observed, could be effectively described by the periodicals which he took but did not read. The Economist, for his father, so that he'd have something to discuss with a man he never called. Spin, because he couldn't take Rolling Stone seriously. The New Yorker, which he scanned for the cartoons and then ignored, for culture. Those he did read were less revealing.     Monday, Adam had a newsstand New Republic boiling in his backpack. Off the table, he kept it well out of sight while grinding down the day behind the half-wall which provided the illusion of privacy. Adam kept his desk ... (read more)

The Park Avenue Hovel, page one part 2

This goes, straightforwardly enough, between page 1 and page 2.     The house had been built on cattle speculation money, Horace Aloysius Yarbough's second fortune, after the railway came through in 1886. He'd won and lost his first fortune living out of cheap rooms south of the stockyard, but when he made the money back he'd built a cattle baron's house and transported his wife and children down from Chicago to live in it. Three floors not counting basements or attics, it included servant's quarters, two kitchens, and a set of stables and carriage-house behind it which Horace's son had converted into automobile garages and an indoor ... (read more)

Copy Book #1, page 2: the Contest

     "You can't be self-conscious. You've just gotta open up, breathe, and be natural. It's that kind of thing. If you're self-conscious, you'll choke." That was Mooney-- his real name (last)-- doing his best in-the-moment pep talk. I was staring at my watch, at the folded Tribune on the bench (two days old, making predictions about yesterday's election), at the door, pretty much anywhere but at Django. Ten minutes until showtime and I still hadn't seen the competition. It was making me edgy.   Not that I wasn't confident about our chances. Nearly six feet tall and thin as a rail, Django didn't look like much. His short blonde ... (read more)

Copy Book #1, page 1: Long Day

     Shifters were jammed on the 10-speed: damn thing wouldn't downshift, a hassle in a town with so many hills. She was always surprised by the size of the cycling population in difficult cities, and she was always one of them. There were worse places to ride. riding my ten speed the shifters are not working big hill coming up     On her toes, she ground up the incline, swearing silently and with surprising creativity. Dark parked cars brooded at the kerb beside her as she passed them, neck and neck but pulling ahead. The top of the hill, a short sharp one, came into view, and she gnawed at the distance remaining. ... (read more)

Contrapposto

    Things were different a year ago. They're different now, for that matter. I notice things more. Sometimes I think it’s just a side effect, one of the many quietly listed on labels I forget to read: hypersensitivity, under dehydration but above nausea. It’s a physical thing, colors and sounds and textures intruding on me, and after being shut up in the sensory deprivation tank–  with cable–  they called a private room, I could understand it, for a little while. Persistent thing, though; I wonder if this is a common complaint, if I should contact my physician. For all I know it’s like hospital ... (read more)

The Queen Must Die

    I was with the Philippine army at the last assault on Reykjavik.     Hard to believe it's been long enough that mention the Queen of the North and all you get is a funny look or some spare change. Maybe that's the way it has to be, though: those of us who survived don't like remembering, and those who didn't don't.     I was there, though, at the beginning, and I was there at the end, bunked down in a troop carrier with a bunch of scared kids on the Forgotten 5th of November. Miserable weather, no time to be fighting on the North Sea, but our army, scraped together from the dregs of dead armies, floating in ... (read more)

[...but what if we're the sideshow and they're the crowd?]

     There was no sound; the room was clotted with silence. Furniture neatly arranged, floors swept, shelves straightened. All tidy. And silent. No florescent bulbs singing, no fans humming, no papers whispering, central air choked off. Just to clarify, no noise was being made. Got it? Silent. Even the guy sitting on the couch with the shotgun in his lap wasn’t making a sound.       All the lights were off. Through the blinds a little secondhand streetlight seeped in, but it rapidly dissolved in the dark. No candles, no lamps, no glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, no LEDs, no warning lights or backlit ... (read more)

Introductions

This is an experiment, to see if I can write on a regular basis. The hope is that every week I'll update with a new short fiction piece. No designated length, no specific genre. No freewriting, either: the goal is a piece of well-constructed fiction every week. So I'll probably update as late as possible.
There are two categories. Pieces which stand on their own are in the 'Short Fiction' category. If I write something worth exploring or continuing, I'll post any following pieces in the 'Ongoing' category.