Short Fiction
“Minor Repairs to Smile Dragon”
“The tunnel ends and there’s Smile Dragon. Just where I left him. The cars—segments of his massive, green-scaled body—are overturned. I pull away some fallen branches, wipe the mud from his face and teeth. He smiles at me with that wide, sharp grin. So wide I could climb inside and sleep there if I wanted. His forked tongue is broken off, stuck in the mud. I pull it out, run my hands over it. A clean break. We could fix him. Together. We could bring him back, make him run again. Take a ride. Then maybe Noe could remember us the way we were. Enchanted. Vast. Our voices echoing in gold.”
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“Eau de Mims”
Electric Literature, Sept. 28, 2022
“Mims has been complaining a lot lately that Jodie’s breath stinks like dead fish left too long on a hot stoop. She’s not wrong, butI’m tired of hearing about it, so I tell Mims, “You don’t have to haunt Jodie’s mouth, you know. No one invited you—certainly not Jodie—and if you don’t like it, you can go ahead and ascend.” But she won’t. Stubbornness, some have said, is a mark of the women in our family… I’d have preferred a big nasty scar across my cheek for all eternity, not that anyone asked.”
Read the short story here, with an introduction by Halimah Marcus.
“The Wave Rule”
The Baltimore Review, Winter 2022
“It was one of those unspoken rules, not written down anyplace, and maybe more essential for it: if you saw someone out and about, you waved. You didn’t have to know the person. You didn’t even have to be in the mood.What you were doing, where you were going, that was your business. But if you passed a soul along the way, you put up your hand and you waved. It’s just what people do.”
“Helping Hours”
“Sometimes during bright hours I am one thing: I’m a nail in the wall or a shell on the mantle stolen from a beach somewhere way out. Other times I am many things: I’m pennies under the couch or game pieces in a box on a low shelf they haven’t touched in years.”
Read the short story here.
“Bird Versus Glass”
Causeway Lit Winter 2020 Fiction Contest Winner
“As always: the immediate sense of unreality, a carol of dread softly humming in the spine. As always: the smell, like peaches caving in with rot. As always: the perfect terror of watching him take shape across the room…It was good to see him. Of course it was.”
Read the short story here.
