Micromance Magazine: Body Language
He’s different tonight. His flannel’s new, not stiff like his others. He’s swinging is keys on his left finger because his right hand’s behind his back. He’s not leaning against his motorcycle, but standing, shifting his weight from right to left to right. He’s not picking his scabbed knuckles. He smells of soap and not gasoline. The mint toothpick in his lips twitches with his faltering smirk. He hands me what was hiding. ‘No plants were harmed,’ he rasps. The petals are nuts. The stem’s a bolt. Leaves are bent washers. And I am pure goo.
Micromance Magazine: Soft as a Kiss
We’re sitting on a tombstone bench engraved with Beloved surrounded by pine and honeysuckle. I trace the carved Love. ‘What do you think of that word?’ ‘Dad thinks love hurts if it’s real,’ Cade says. I hold a leaf up to the sun, veins glowing like lightning bolts. ‘And you?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he rasps, bruised lip tugging up, ‘but I want to find out.’ A firefly flutters on a honey-pine breeze onto my hand. Something changes inside me. I blow my whisper-wind wish into her. She lands soft as a kiss in Cade’s palm before floating away.
Vine Leaves Press, 50 Give or Take includes Rocking Chair, Hiding From the Storm, and Mom’s Piano
Hoolet’s Nook, A Red Hood
Suddenly and Without Warning, A Grim Tale, Grocery List, You’re Back, Crushed, Elevator Stop, Floor Twelve,
Five-Minute Lit, Anxiety, Carousels
101 Word Story: It is a tightrope walk up floating stones into the skies, into the heavens. Each cloud is a cushion of memories, a reflection of a life I’ve lived, a world I knew before I was unpeopled, maybe for eternity. It is a tightrope walk across precariously teetering stones that threaten to spill me into a great abyss below, but onward I climb toward a light, toward an absence, toward an unknown emptiness. I climb, each step a phantom knock I’ve yet to answer. Then the fog descends, enveloping me, erasing the me, the everything I once knew. In a blink, gone.
Fireworks Stories: Save. Restore.
I fly into nothing, steered only by wind. Clouds veil my descent. When I land, a dusty poof blooms, cocooning me, obscuring my vision. I gasp, wheeze, breathe, calm. My respiration regulates, the poof dissipates. The world before me is different from what I left, different from my climb above, different from my flight down. I stand, stretch, embrace the hum of my new home. Trees pulse, sky sobs, grass giggles. I’m awake now, alive, alert, right here, right now. I walk into my future, a new me, a collective us. I hit save. I hit restore.
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