Recollections upon the passing of Chris Cornell. From the archive, 2017 from: May 26, 2017 “I’m sorry to hear about Chris Cornell,” our friend Denise texts Theresa, a day after Cornell’s death. “I know he was your Fairy God Rocker.” The story, which has earned us a lot of Awws…

Another home-brewed piece à la The New Yorker’s Shouts & Murmurs column — from the archive, Jan 2019 July 19 It all started when I was buying some things online, and check-out was failing. I call customer service, and they’re like, You have to enter the address that goes with the card…

Something from the vault to get us through 2023 It wasn’t a long story. It was short. Judy loved giving light aerobics instruction to senior citizens at the community center on Tuesday nights but it hardly paid at all, and she wasn’t sure she could keep living on Healthy Balance…

Fiction writers, celebrate your success and accept the failures. What you see here is a transformer. It’s made to convert electrical current — in this case, from 120 volts to 24 volts. I can’t explain how it works; I only what it does and that I needed one. …

Synopsis/Set-Up: In the year 2040, Daniel is research scientist who has quit his college post, administered a gene-changing injection to himself obtained on the black market, and abandoned his house to live in a mountain cave. What he changed about his genetics is the introduction of the mutation which causes…

Some fiction. Night again, and he is in the den, the cave, having hiked down to Mrs. Rickets, his hairy body covered in a civilian suit, and climbed back with the heavy flats of canned goods strapped to his back. When he returned in the afternoon, he ate, then perused…

I’m writing a story about my evening. In it, I take a walk up the road past Jablonski’s place to see if he should happen to be mudding that godforsaken concrete wall he’s been failing at for the last three winters. I have a strong sense of how things will…

An account of some introductions made at a party — Hey, Karl. Come on in. Good to see you. Hey, you remember Denise, whose ham salad went viral last year. You remember Joan, the dental assistant with the really successful autism blog. You remember Augustine, the former bank president who wears a crooked brown mustache. You remember Harold, the graphic…

A writer’s journey from point to point — Part 1, Bullshit Self-Esteem October of 2019 Day Zero Where else could I have been when I spotted Ken? At the bookstore, of course. The memorial was underway. Bookstores are where recently passed poets are remembered these days. …