Published Works
“This is the Story About the Eyeball I Found in the Gutter”
Blue Monday Review
November, 2016
This morning, I found an eyeball in the gutter. I went out in my slippers and robe to pick up the newspaper and saw it at the edge of the big leaf pile. It still had the shine that eyes are supposed to have, like it had just blinked.
My kids love that part.
I tell them how at first I wasn’t sure it was an eye, so I crouched down with my butt resting on my heels and I grabbed a stick from the leaf pile and I gave the eye a poke. The stick slid across the surface of the lens. I poked the trailing band of stringy, fleshy nerves and they seemed drier and rubbery.
Kids like gross things.
“Lichtenberg Figures”
The Louisville Review
May, 2014
It’s the Sunday after Jen got hit by lightning and the burst capillaries in her chest makes it look like the lightning still runs beneath her skin. We sit in the living room in front of the air conditioner. She can’t wear a shirt or a bra since her whole body feels tender. The doctor said the scars would fade in a few days, but for now they look like thin, pink tree roots winding through her veins. The air conditioner rattles until I weigh it down with the largest book I can find, Astrophysical Objectives of Optical Astrometry. The house now bathed in the white noise of cool air.
“On the Clock of Decomposition”
eFiction
May 2014
He was waiting for the woodchuck, his mind settling deep into the quiet of the woods, when the flutter of wings by his left ear distracted him– a vivid green hummingbird poking its beak desperately into and out of the nooks of crumbling leaves, plants dying for the winter. He watched for a moment, the hummingbird’s wings a blur in the cold, watched as it slowly lowered towards the ground. Wings beating slower until it hovered barely an inch above the dirt. He took careful note of the color of the hummingbird’s eyes, black but with dark flecks of green, before drawing his right hand forward to catch it. Its heart whispering against his hand, like the vibration of a distant train, until he placed his fingers beneath the wings and compressed its thorax, waited for the whir of its heart to quiet.
Mona used to love hummingbirds– she’d set out feeders by the kitchen window filled with red sugar water. In the cold vacuum of his car, he tries to forget that.
“What a Dead Elephant Weighs”
Necessary Fiction
January, 2013
Fifteen zoo animals got loose the Sunday that Tom died on the train tracks. His grandmother thought it was fitting, a metaphor for how her heart felt. Tom’s football coach also thought it was fitting, but because it represented the team the boy had been a part of — an unstoppable force. The escapees consisted of three lions, seven monkeys, a zebra, three pythons, and an elephant, and the accident was blamed on insufficient funding for transport cages used to move the animals to veterinary visits. The police department was stretched so thin trying to figure out how they had escaped, and had so much of its manpower dedicated to finding the animals, that it took them forty-five minutes to get to Tom’s body after it had been reported.