short-story

  • Changes

    There is a particular kind of silence that arrives before something changes. Not the empty kind. Not the silence of abandonment or endings. This one feels occupied, as though something has been moving quietly behind the walls while everyone else carried on believing the house was asleep. For a while, there were only pieces. A…

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  • Almost

    There were rules nobody remembered agreeing to. The alarm sounded at the same hour each morning, coffee filled the same cup, and traffic gathered beneath the same red lights while hundreds of people stared through windshields toward places they had already been yesterday. Hours became numbers in an account, numbers became houses, cars, groceries, vacations,…

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  • No Dominion

    Eventually, you stop dancing with the devil beneath the pale moonlight and let the devil do what the devil is going to do. There is little reason to interrupt a good storyteller when every lie, given enough time, develops a strange habit of revealing the truth. Sometimes the truth arrives quietly. Sometimes it walks through…

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  • No Forwarding Address

    The mail kept coming. Suddenly, you stop calling them by the name you had for them, and you start calling them by their government name. Then you drop the first name. Eventually, the only thing that remains is the last name you see in the mailbox. It happens without ceremony. The envelopes arrive between electric…

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  • By Definition

    They say doing the same thing over and over again is crazy. Some of us call it consistency. Consistency looks crazy to people who have none. The rest of us keep on keeping on because it is what it is. There was a shop at the end of a narrow city street that only appeared…

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  • That Backpack

    The longer you travel, the less you carry. That is what the old travelers say, usually while standing somewhere they have no intention of staying. They learn to count necessities differently. A coat becomes more important than a second pair of shoes. Water outranks perfume. Books become too heavy unless they are worth the weight.…

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  • The People v. Death

    Death arrived eleven minutes late to his own trial. The courtroom had been full since dawn. Every pew behind the railing was occupied by someone carrying evidence. A widow held a wedding ring between her thumb and forefinger. A father had brought a baseball glove that had not been used in nine years. An old…

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  • The first thing she noticed was that animals stopped being afraid of her. It happened gradually. A blackbird remained on the cemetery wall when she passed beneath it. A fox stood at the edge of the woods one morning and watched her without running. Even the old neighborhood cat, a scarred thing that trusted nobody…

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  • The Lovers Beneath the Veil

    You have dreamed of him before. You never remember his face. Only the sensation of being followed through places you have never visited while awake. Sometimes there is snow beneath your bare feet. Sometimes black water. Once, an orchard appeared beneath a violet moon, every tree heavy with fruit you somehow knew you were forbidden…

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  • The Cathedral of Two

    There are two of us living beneath my skin. He arrived first to every war. She stayed behind to rememberwhat we were fighting for. He is iron beneath the tongue,the locked jaw,the hand that does not shakeeven when the rest of the world is burning. He learned strength without boundaries. So he became very goodat…

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