Signs of Suffering

I want to make it home sober but before I left the station tonight I made the mistake of pulling the report from that time when you called.Continue Reading

Freebird Lands

Later this afternoon, his daughter would catch her flight to Atlanta after dumping him in this latest waystation of life. Her eyebrows pinched forward like her mama’s did when he stumbled home late or lost another job due to his affection for long legs and curves he couldn’t resist.Continue Reading

Letter to My Father, on His Thirteenth Posthumous Birthday

If you’d shared even a shard of your sorrow with me, I might’ve sooner had the blessing of being pierced with the truth of why: why you needed the sweet justice of Pam Grier’s sass and strength; why you needed to see a good woman get away with doing a bad thing.Continue Reading

My Father and Me Too

My father sexually harassed Mamie Van Doren. He did so in a scene from Guns Girls and Gangsters, a crime movie released in January 1959, the month Alaska became a state, the year Mattel launched the Barbie doll. I was a sixth-grader.Continue Reading

That Documentary About Lions, Again

Side-eyeing him while he’s engrossed in the show, I can see that iron will in miniature, the light in his eyes of pursued desire. But he’s still only young. His ambitions at the moment are with lions.Continue Reading

Three Stories

Jared is going to shoot a pig from a helicopter, probably more than one, and I’m going to hear about it forever.Continue Reading

Friends

Acquired the boxer’s dose somewhere in the late huns and to this day still. Out for a drink after one bloodied the other and in come the bar dame with a sawed-off smile. You, on the other side, shouted Rodney’s punched up liver.Continue Reading

The Senior Games Pickleball Champion of Macon County

If we had come here a couple of centuries ago, I’d have hunted bear, chased down wolves, and maybe fought an Indian or two. But lacking the athletic challenges with which Daniel Boone was blessed, I’ve been forced to embrace the frontiersman in me by playing pickleball.Continue Reading

The Skin of It All

Now in the poolhouse, with total access to the woman he craved, John pulled away, gulped back two, three mouthfuls, who was counting. “I love you, I don’t know, that’s not the point. It’s just—I’m not Des. You can’t slap a tattoo, a beard on me and, boom, I’m your husband.”Continue Reading

Viewer Discretion Advised

Lukas wasn’t talking to Jesus. He was thinking about words a straight boy would use to describe Amy’s boobs that he could later use with Mark. Melons? Knockers? A sack and a half of tits?Continue Reading