other selected works
Watseka, Illinois, mid-1860s. Mary Roff can recite from books she’s never read before. She’s had fits since she was a baby, during which she speaks to spirits. By all accounts Mary is tormented. She speaks in strange languages, bleeds to let off the pressure in her head, and dies in the asylum at age 19. Her parents Asa and Dorothy never forgive themselves. Their girl is gone.
Twelve years later, fourteen-year-old Mary Lurancy Vennum can’t sleep. She complains to her mother that someone’s calling out to her at night. Rancy suffers stomach pains and trances. Extended family tell her terrified parents to send her away to an asylum. But they can’t bring themselves to do it, calling in the minister instead.
Rancy’s increasingly vacant, possessed by spirits. She says she speaks to her dead siblings in heaven. Then the unimaginable happens—Rancy becomes possessed by Mary Roff. Mary reunites with Asa through Rancy, and the Roffs agree to take the girl in until whatever is happening happens. For months, the Roffs feed and clothe Rancy, the vessel for their lost child. One terrible day, Mary says Rancy’s spirit will return and that she’ll be departing for good this time. At eleven o’clock in the evening, as promised, Mary leaves.
Lurancy goes home, still an awkward girl of fifteen. She’s seen things you shouldn’t, and for the rest of her life she cringes whenever she tastes citrus. It was Mary’s favorite, and for those months at the Roff home she ate nothing but, it felt like. Her parents think she’s been “cured” of her fits by spirit power, by Mary. In truth Mary’s never left. She’s just gone dormant.
Rancy, known as the Watseka Wonder, is studied by Spiritualists and psychologists, and is noticed by William James. People say that Mary haunts the Roff house. Not true, of course. She haunts Lurancy instead.
Rancy marries a man named George who isn’t interested in spirits. They have twelve children. There are reports that Mary takes over when it’s time for labor so that Rancy feels no pain. Mary’s not a giving sort, so this never happens.
Sometimes, though, Rancy gets a frisson of unknown origin, guesses it’s just Mary enjoying the way George’s hand feels on the small of Rancy’s back, or the smell of a cut rose. When the end comes in 1952, Rancy hasn’t willingly eaten an orange in over sixty years. She dies happy knowing she denied Mary that pleasure.
—excerpt from Girls Who See Gods, part of the Satellite Collective's third Telephone game which premiered 10/10/25
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, part of the Satellite Collective's second Telephone Game
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.
(on reverse)
Nov 1st, also Tennessee somewhere
Dear Lydia,
Are you his Mama or his wife or his sister? I don’t think he’s your Papa because he didn’t seem very old. Don’t listen to what they wrote to you. They’re not kind men. I wish I was not of the 53rd. And it was mainly Abel DeWitt who wrote the letter. He is not one to be crossed.
They sent me to post it. But I did not have a minute till now to think of what to do. Abel read it out and every man nodded his head as though he agreed with the trick. But many turned their eyes away as their heads shook. Because they did not think it right to do it. Nor do I.
I am 2nd best bugler Garrett Meany. I will be fourteen in May should I live that long. Even though Grimes died they still call me second though I am now the only bugler.
I write on the back of DeWitt’s letter to say that Leighton has been dead and buried since about noontime on Oct 29 so don’t send the money. I dug his grave with my own hands. He was my friend.
—excerpt from Concerning The Death of Leighton Caulfield, honorable mention in 11th NYC Midnight Short Story Contest
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
Twelve years later, fourteen-year-old Mary Lurancy Vennum can’t sleep. She complains to her mother that someone’s calling out to her at night. Rancy suffers stomach pains and trances. Extended family tell her terrified parents to send her away to an asylum. But they can’t bring themselves to do it, calling in the minister instead.
Rancy’s increasingly vacant, possessed by spirits. She says she speaks to her dead siblings in heaven. Then the unimaginable happens—Rancy becomes possessed by Mary Roff. Mary reunites with Asa through Rancy, and the Roffs agree to take the girl in until whatever is happening happens. For months, the Roffs feed and clothe Rancy, the vessel for their lost child. One terrible day, Mary says Rancy’s spirit will return and that she’ll be departing for good this time. At eleven o’clock in the evening, as promised, Mary leaves.
Lurancy goes home, still an awkward girl of fifteen. She’s seen things you shouldn’t, and for the rest of her life she cringes whenever she tastes citrus. It was Mary’s favorite, and for those months at the Roff home she ate nothing but, it felt like. Her parents think she’s been “cured” of her fits by spirit power, by Mary. In truth Mary’s never left. She’s just gone dormant.
Rancy, known as the Watseka Wonder, is studied by Spiritualists and psychologists, and is noticed by William James. People say that Mary haunts the Roff house. Not true, of course. She haunts Lurancy instead.
Rancy marries a man named George who isn’t interested in spirits. They have twelve children. There are reports that Mary takes over when it’s time for labor so that Rancy feels no pain. Mary’s not a giving sort, so this never happens.
Sometimes, though, Rancy gets a frisson of unknown origin, guesses it’s just Mary enjoying the way George’s hand feels on the small of Rancy’s back, or the smell of a cut rose. When the end comes in 1952, Rancy hasn’t willingly eaten an orange in over sixty years. She dies happy knowing she denied Mary that pleasure.
—excerpt from Girls Who See Gods, part of the Satellite Collective's third Telephone game which premiered 10/10/25
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, part of the Satellite Collective's second Telephone Game
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.
(on reverse)
Nov 1st, also Tennessee somewhere
Dear Lydia,
Are you his Mama or his wife or his sister? I don’t think he’s your Papa because he didn’t seem very old. Don’t listen to what they wrote to you. They’re not kind men. I wish I was not of the 53rd. And it was mainly Abel DeWitt who wrote the letter. He is not one to be crossed.
They sent me to post it. But I did not have a minute till now to think of what to do. Abel read it out and every man nodded his head as though he agreed with the trick. But many turned their eyes away as their heads shook. Because they did not think it right to do it. Nor do I.
I am 2nd best bugler Garrett Meany. I will be fourteen in May should I live that long. Even though Grimes died they still call me second though I am now the only bugler.
I write on the back of DeWitt’s letter to say that Leighton has been dead and buried since about noontime on Oct 29 so don’t send the money. I dug his grave with my own hands. He was my friend.
—excerpt from Concerning The Death of Leighton Caulfield, honorable mention in 11th NYC Midnight Short Story Contest
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