Fiction

If someone looked into his eyes they would see how ugly his mind was.

She examines her left hand, finger by finger, gripping and pinching the flesh.

He hit all of us sometimes, but he hit me hardest and the most.

Lorna was like a sculpture carved by some Greek out of marble.

What you seek has eluded you. Yet you stay on. You take comfort in the music.

Suddenly Julia’s silence had solidified like cold fat in a frying pan.

Then bullet strikes were spiderwebbing the windshield.

The tension between words and actions, in a six-word story.

I know exactly what to do when Papa has a seizure in the middle of the night.

Theirs was a free fall that went on and on. If it’s time to fall, let’s fall.

The jealous Othello, ready for murder, was transformed into a school-boy.

I’m alive, Sarah thinks, the slam of his look going all the way in.

The social-media world was ablaze with his daughter’s bagunça.

His flannel sleeve dangled into the flame. Pretty soon, I was on fire too.

Our father crumbled after her affair. We watched him for signs of cracking.

Maybe he was preparing for a disaster that would never happen.

I thought about the little graveyard where the man would be laid.

What right had Flora, of all people, to pronounce on what was strange?

When he bent close to her, his balaclava glowed silvery in the dying sunlight.

Was he a good man or a bad man? Was it necessary, even, to speculate?

I must tell you what it is like to be human, or you will drift away.

Her last relationship was with Elsa’s Instagram, truth be told. If Elsa is going to accept her follower invite, it needs to look believable. You did a bad thing, she thinks, and this is what you get.

“I wonder what will stay longer,” Frick said. “Me or that headstone.”

She’ll grow into a beauty, but she needn’t contend with that yet.

Thank goodness Dad died—sounds awful but he left his condo paid for.

That late afternoon in the park, with its kiss, wasn’t an ending or a beginning; it was both. The piano had been a great bird rustling and swooping in the vast space.

A plus B; a child in peril, plus love, dissolution of, equals a story.

“You look like you’re about to fall over,” he says. “Are you all right?”

I build our life together as I want it to be.

Evangeline thinks of the forged double-bit whistling through the air.