Short Stories
Short Stories
Small Rodents and Other Unwanted Things
Redivider
December 2021
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
"At night, we hear them scratching in the walls, soft like they are sharing a secret. We feel the mice moving around us, hear their nails scuff across the rafters. The house is alive--little vibrations, fingers on a waxed car, door hinges. Liz thinks they are playing with her, some game of hide-and-seek."
After Hours
Contrary
Winter 2020
Nomination for Sundress’ Publications’ Best of the Net
Winner in Wigleaf 50
"I used to go to clubs with a girl whose father hanged himself on her thirteenth birthday.She liked to drink the clear stuff and I, the brown. She thought clear liquors made a cleaner pass through her liver. I suppose I never minded mudding up my insides."
Bad Construction
Hobart
March 2020
"The crawl space is musty and large enough to fit the both of us. The shape of it makes no sense like the rest of his house, a sign of bad construction plans. He found it because he is curious and anxious, the type of person who has to know all corners, all ambiguities. I have to put too much stock in the fact that he showed it to me and no one else. My lover doesn’t like to speak of love. It makes him terribly uncomfortable."
Junkyard in Passaic County
First Prize: New South
October 2019
"On the day my mother leaves, she cooks us a quiche and does not stay to eat it. We stand in the foyer as she hugs each of us. Our faces smush into her puffy snow jacket. She promises she will be back soon and leaves with a suitcase and a stack of books under her arm. Bentley is sixteen and I am fourteen, old enough to know we are being lied to."
Euphoria
The Masters Review
May, 2019
Editors from The Masters Review write: When an accident reveals an affair between Lydia and Dean, Abby’s boyfriend, Abby spirals into a drunken depression. “My mother thinks it’s my job to pick her back up,” Lydia says. “Euphoria” is a striking tale about the things we can’t find the words to say.
Listening to Birds
Salamander
December, 2018
Molly Antopol wrote: "'Listening to Birds' is a gorgeous and heartbreaking story that manages to find poetry in the most painful parts of our lives. The voice is so persuasive and precise, so clear and compassionate that I'd follow it anywhere. Wildly intelligent writing by a writer I can't wait to hear more from."
Red Dodge
Trillium
May 2015
"She would never say so but his anger excited her, the restlessness, all that testosterone. It was, to Tye, his most attractive trait. He was quick to protect her, that dog in him always ready to snap. In a way, she thought, his temper was a display of passion and this passion was a display of love. She let him pace the room a few more times. 'It's no big deal,' she said again."