[fiction] The officer stands over the body that has bled out on the ash hardwood floor. His only job is to keep everyone away until the detective team and the coroner arrive. Voices rise and fall outside on the street.…

Felix wandered through the back alley leading up to 4th street looking for what exactly he did not know. By deduction Felix figured George had come through this way, contrary to what the police had told him, and he felt…

There was a line the second night, too. People who hadn’t been able to come for the opening. My cousin Katie and her husband, Clay, carrying their new baby daughter into the kitchen so I could see how much she’d…

We’re waiting for it to stand out. Be published in the newspaper. Like MLK. Like Thich Nhat Hahn. Like the President of Ukraine. All these people were surrounded by casts of characters we will never know the names of, though…

Why am I awake right now when I worked til 3am? I slept a little bit. I think? Insomnia has struck again and all sorts of trippy thoughts fly through my head. The sun is up and shining in the…

Today I sat at the kitchen island eating dinner with my parents. Oh, to have the certainty we have when talking with our parents. We are right, they are categorically, deplorably, wrong. Except of course when they are profound or…

Jennifer woke up from her brief drug induced sleep of 4 hours. Looking around the clean yet equipment filled room with IV machine sending various fluids of pain pain killing and additional nourishing fluids through rubber tubing to her arm…

What I was doing two weeks ago was life. Planning where to stay in Tunis, wondering if the never-mentioned city of Bizerte really was as untouched as it appeared, worrying if I'd get my photography apps straightened out in time.…

The wind howled through the cracks in the siding blowing random snowflakes across the floor. Andrei put another stick of wood in the metal oven and hunched closer to it rubbing his hands together. He judged the blizzard was just…

For a long time, I believed that life is a precious gift and that it was worth living under any and all circumstances. I supported Dylan Thomas’ exhortation to “rage, rage, against the dying of the light”. Dylan Thomas died…

From the beginning John knew the vote was sure to fail. It wasn't so much pessimism as John had a reputation of doing the impossible but he knew this was a losing cause. There was simply too much money in…

(Note: I'm using this morning time to write into the novel I'm working on. There are multiple povs. This is one of them. A chef who's come back to her small Iowa town to open a restaurant.) I opened Feed…