other selected works
Aurelie grows up in a seaside New England town that's haunted by bloody stories: there's the headless hitchhiker along the highway, the ghost of a Redcoat who'd died of his wounds, the bridge where you can hear a phantom baby crying.
There are smaller demons too: fathers who drink too much and mothers who put up with it; fathers who die young (from a widow-maker on the front lawn, in the case of Aurelie's dad); mothers who drink too much and smack around their children; children who come to school without lunch because there's no food in the house; the long hard winters; the way the salt air rusts everything, even the paint off your brand-new car; the tragedy of living in such a town to begin with.
But of all the horrors large and small, the one most feared is the Terror. It inhabits the woods west of town, neat the wind-bald bluff that casts itself headlong into the sea.
--excerpt from The Carriage Held But Just Ourselves
He’s around thirty, give or take, and woke up one day crazy, or so she understands. He’s quiet, taciturn, soft-spoken for the most part, and completely off kilter. He speaks to her kindly each day, calling her Mrs. Snow and asking if her lawsuit against the theme park where she lost her right hand on the Ferris Wheel is going in her favor; asks about her husband, and his job as a superintendent of a school she’s not sure even exists in the real world.
She has a right hand, by the way, but no husband. Her name is not Snow.
Each night his family comes to the unit: his parents, his fiancée, and they look at a book, the same one every time, for the whole two hours allotted to visiting and this is the book: a coffee table masterpiece printed on luxuriously thick paper, filled with photographs of people who own vineyards and their dogs--pictures of dogs in their respective vineyards, beautifully exposed with the light of heaven falling on their noble, timeless bodies, surrounded by grapevines and sometimes with the sea falling off in the background.
---excerpt from Mrs. Snow and the Damage Done, Published in the Alumni Arts Review, Spring 2017.
He banked the fire and softened the lead in the pot. Lead melts low. It was a good thing Wheaton kept the scissor mold. And Father’s Colt. There were also letters, for Eleanor in St. Louis. Did Wheaton come from there?
Wheaton’s blood had dried on Ben’s back. He poured molten lead into the mold. Let it cool. Opened the clamp, popped the bullet out into the snow.
Do it just how Father said. Father was at Bull Run. At Shiloh. Father marched to the sea.
New bullets lay like acorns beneath an oak. Seeds of violence. He hoped never to use them. Hoped Wheaton’d found his place in Heaven.
--excerpt from Luck Was Not His Warden, short story
There are smaller demons too: fathers who drink too much and mothers who put up with it; fathers who die young (from a widow-maker on the front lawn, in the case of Aurelie's dad); mothers who drink too much and smack around their children; children who come to school without lunch because there's no food in the house; the long hard winters; the way the salt air rusts everything, even the paint off your brand-new car; the tragedy of living in such a town to begin with.
But of all the horrors large and small, the one most feared is the Terror. It inhabits the woods west of town, neat the wind-bald bluff that casts itself headlong into the sea.
--excerpt from The Carriage Held But Just Ourselves
He’s around thirty, give or take, and woke up one day crazy, or so she understands. He’s quiet, taciturn, soft-spoken for the most part, and completely off kilter. He speaks to her kindly each day, calling her Mrs. Snow and asking if her lawsuit against the theme park where she lost her right hand on the Ferris Wheel is going in her favor; asks about her husband, and his job as a superintendent of a school she’s not sure even exists in the real world.
She has a right hand, by the way, but no husband. Her name is not Snow.
Each night his family comes to the unit: his parents, his fiancée, and they look at a book, the same one every time, for the whole two hours allotted to visiting and this is the book: a coffee table masterpiece printed on luxuriously thick paper, filled with photographs of people who own vineyards and their dogs--pictures of dogs in their respective vineyards, beautifully exposed with the light of heaven falling on their noble, timeless bodies, surrounded by grapevines and sometimes with the sea falling off in the background.
---excerpt from Mrs. Snow and the Damage Done, Published in the Alumni Arts Review, Spring 2017.
He banked the fire and softened the lead in the pot. Lead melts low. It was a good thing Wheaton kept the scissor mold. And Father’s Colt. There were also letters, for Eleanor in St. Louis. Did Wheaton come from there?
Wheaton’s blood had dried on Ben’s back. He poured molten lead into the mold. Let it cool. Opened the clamp, popped the bullet out into the snow.
Do it just how Father said. Father was at Bull Run. At Shiloh. Father marched to the sea.
New bullets lay like acorns beneath an oak. Seeds of violence. He hoped never to use them. Hoped Wheaton’d found his place in Heaven.
--excerpt from Luck Was Not His Warden, short story