A Record of Our Debts

Winner of the 2015
​Moon City Short Fiction Prize

Lake Effect

But there is nothing lucky in the dirt of this house. The way it comes in on me when my back is turned. The things I find, the unimaginable bugs, with their stingers and their countless eyes. The tiny animal bones and teeth, unexplained, unaccounted for. I try to keep my thoughts on the task at hand. The endless sweeping. The moving of dirt from one pile into another pile.

​"The Bride and the Bear"

Moon City Review

She stands up and looks around her and does not panic. This is a park, she thinks, and the thought is comforting in the way that parks are always comforting--the familiar geography of flatness, the surety of grass, threaded through with gently bent concrete paths; the universality of bench, of lamppost, of garbage receptacle. Paulette knows that she has never been here before.

"Fugue"

McSweeney's

"How come they do that, Daddy?" I ask. "Is it like a funeral?"
"Nobody knows. What do you think?"
"I think maybe they don't want to leave the other ant behind. Maybe he's important."
Selma chews on her thumb for a moment, her head cocked. "That ain't it," she huffs, spitting out a bit of fingernail. "They're taking his body home, so's the rest of them can eat it."
Daddy stares at her.
I don't say it, but I was just trying to be pleasant before. Of course they're going to eat it.

​"A Record of Out Debts"

Kenyon Review

I am smarter than Handy and I have always been. I've always known I could get my will on him just by talking. But why would I. I never wanted anything different from him.

"Mister Visits"

The Chapbook

When it's her turn at the register, there is something ashamed in the way she swipes her card, something of guilt in the dropped angle of her head. As if the cashier could see all of the preparation, all of the spicing and mixing, that will go in to this dinner for one.

"Leftovers"

The air was hard to breathe. We took it in small gasps that blazed across our lips and turned to dust, settled in the lungs. In every pocket of shade a dog moaned and tried to die.

                                                       "No Such Thing as Deserve"

Mid-American Review

It rains here like a terrible grudge, and we take it as such, heads bowed, shoes filled and rotting. In the nights here, in the summer, the rain pins us in, We take to the porches in humble attempts at cooperation, where we breathe the hot, wet air and watch the ropes of water falling like weighted lines racing down the sides of a boat into some endless ocean.
​
"The Drowning Season"