So, to recap, Juliet sends her Nurse (appropriately named “Nurse”) to the marketplace at nine o’clock to give her lover Romeo a note about a later important meeting. When the Nurse has not returned by noon, our sweet, soon-to-be-dead Juliet…

This is no way to die, Clara thought. If I'm going down, I'm taking someone with me. She visualized scrolling through her text app. Who had she been texting with most recently? Is recency indicative of closeness? And if she…

There's one doctor on the island. One gas station. One senior citizen who manages the internet and phone connections. There's no airport, not even a strip, but there is a 4-hour ferry to a better-equipped island, 4 times a week…

"Death's knuckles," Julian cursed under his breath when he rounded the corner and suddenly found himself on what seemed to be the main street of the town. He had hiked three days to get here, and his coin purse currently…

And yet, I'll open with a definition: Unpretentious: not attempting to impress others with an appearance of greater importance, talent, or culture than is actually possessed.......simple, plain on the face of, not striving to be anything it is not..... Truth?…

This wasn't what I planned. In my youth with a catalog of expectations of greatness, of wealth, of accomplishment, of notoriety, the artifacts and evidence of proof to my parents and my siblings that I was not "the dumb one,"…

It was a hot summer day. The kind of day that sticks to your skin whether you're inside or out. On such a day, the only thing to do is to embrace the discomfort. Only then does it become bearable.…

Brace yourself. I’m not going to take that phrase and see it as a trigger that spins out a scene in my head, a scene that develops into a story. The story, if I continue this fantasy, as yet undeveloped,…

Unbeknownst to me, the third box held a rotting body. I was giving a job talk at the college I'd left just two years earlier, persuaded to apply for the job when I saw how much the starting salary had…

Life in Karvellir was hard. Far harder than Marsuvin ever expected. He was used to hard work. From the age of seven he had been helping his father in their shop. Business was booming, which meant there was never a…