Published

Big Fiction — “The Dale Machine”

Dale went out to the garage. The time machine was humming like a fridge. It looked like one without a freezer, a sort of standing coffin. There was a circular porthole in the door. A hundred wires and corrugated rubber tubes connected to the sides and back of the time machine and went down through the concrete, and into the dirt, like roots. Dale had broken up the concrete with a pickaxe once. He dug into the dirt. The wire and the tubes went down deep. He didn’t know how far.

PANK Magazine – “Robot Christ”

Robot Christ climbs down from the cross. The Romans are all gone. It is dark on the hill in the cave beneath New Jerusalem. The artificial stars twinkle. Tomorrow the largest, his own star, will bloom above the animatronic shepherds. The plastic cattle will bray and froth. Three wise androids will see the shine move slowly through the night like a balloon adrift or a nearly-still silver wheel. Smoke will come out of their ears.

Hobart — “Navigators” / With bonus material, “Metroid: An Appreciation”

Their game was Legend of Silence, or LoS. LoS was different from their other games, because whereas in Metroid or Zelda the player character became more powerful as he explored, the heroine of LoS was diminished by every artifact she found. The manual still called them Power Ups, but this was, father and son agreed, misleading: they should be called Power Downs, or Nerfs, or Torments, because this was what they did. The goal of the game was to lose everything, so that one could enter Nirvana, where the final boss lay in wait, enjoying all the ill-gotten fruits of not being and not knowing.

The Collagist — “Angband, or His 55 Desires”

Every name forgotten or never-was. With sufficient time a trained technician might isolate the file’s ghost. A character is very small, though, and needs little remembered. He read once that an adult human’s memories would hardly fill a floppy disk. He didn’t believe it. He believed and could not be confirmed.

Booth — “What They Did with the Body”

Once the community had agreed that Mr. Reed would have to die, including Mrs. Reed and the sheriff and all the sheriff’s deputies, everything was simple and easy, and the murder came quite naturally. John Taylor was chosen for the job, on account of his relative neutrality concerning Mr. Reed – they did not want this to be a hateful act, unduly painful or otherwise immoderate – and his ownership, legal but generally frowned upon in their town, of a handgun. The gun was a .357 caliber Smith & Wesson Model 60, which some believe to be the most widely-owned handgun in America, though 9mm models have become more popular in recent years.

The Good Men Project — “Better Weather”

Since then she had taken to looking at their home through her brother’s eyes. Jacob thought it might have been better if they had ever seen Uncle Ellis’ house. It couldn’t be as good as his mother thought. She apparently imagined a three-story palace where everyone was too busy admiring the Renoir prints and original, commissioned abstract sculptures to eat or use the toilet. When Marvin scooped spaghetti sauce from his tin Godzilla TV tray with his finger and sucked it off the tip she asked him what his uncle, aunt and cousins would think if they saw him acting that way. He looked down at his plate, surveyed the family, and belched. Then he focused on the television (asking who had the remote) as if he didn’t know she would break another plastic hairbrush on his butt as soon as she felt calm enough to control herself. The handles of dollar store brushes were, they had discovered, hollow and brittle, but the flat side of the head was too broad and weightless to bruise.

The Lifted Brow — “Zero”

For all legal purposes, her husband was alive. The doctor made a point of this. Given a physician’s agreement, removal of a rubber feeding tube was not murder. To put a knife through his kneck, or to shoot him, or to instruct the body to end himself somehow–this was different. “Not that you would do such a thing,” said the doctor, “but you should know what could happen if you did.”

Bluestem Magazine — “How and Who and What and Why”

The windows are all closed, the blinds and drapes as well, the lights off except for the one hanging over our heads. In the living room, separated from the kitchen only by the difference between linoleum faux-tile, there are no decorations, apart from a novelty phone that looks like a revolver, a vast DVD collection stacked on the carpet (heavy on crime television and noir), and several dozen photographs of me in my natural environs. In the photographs I am someone else, other, more beautiful. In the now I am myself.

> kill author — Three Poems

A cappella Zoo — “The Snake Charmer’s Teeth”

The snake charmer Fanish had a dream. He was curled beneath a cherry tree and the blossoms were fallen on his arm and leg. On waking, he remembered the dream with clarity that made his teeth ache to their pulp. The dream had been with him all his life, an itch on the back of his neck, a tickle in his throat, a need in his jaw. He felt the long bone beneath his skin from one ear to the other: its slow sweep, its hard grace.

Dark Sky Magazine — “Family Gibson, Summer 1891″

Mama kneels to meet my eyes. She fusses with my too-small coat. She says, “Don’t you speak that way of him. You were raised together from the crib. We bought him the day you were born, we bought him so that you might have a friend. He played your games with you, and he joined you in your studies. He was with you every day, in everything, and he slept in the same room, in his own bed beside your bed.” She smooths my cotton collared shirt and pulls a loose thread from beside the topmost button. “Do not tell me that you have no brother.”

Pop Serial — “The Growing World”

Hiram woke with his hand in a pile of ash and charred wood fragments. There were several orange or orange-white flecks still glowing in the pile, still alive with small tastes of fire. He rubbed his hand around in the ash as if stirring pond-bottom murk, searching for warmth. His other hand (his left) was blue. This hand, the right hand, came out smeared gray and black.  He wiped it on his fur-lined coat. Beneath the stains this hand was also blue. He put on gloves, which he had left to dry the night before. They were still rotting. It was still winter.

The Emprise Review — “Husband”

I’m tired of your record collection. It used to be impressive, objectively it still is impressive, but I’m not feeling very objective right now. Right now, right now I want to smash them to bits, right now I want to throw them out the window like rainbow discuses, from Angels of Light to White Hinterland. So they litter the steps of this fine hotel, and the bums can collect them, and the leavings can glow till they melt in the sun. Like fish scales or sequins.

PANK – “Strange Fruit”

In the last summer before he would be a man, Norman bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Florida. He bought it with his last handful of dollars. He had bought the dollars at a two percent loss with hundreds of rolled quarters. The quarters went as far back as 1895, when it was still John Adams’ face on the top side and the edges were smooth. Grandma Anita had built and rolled the collection for him. Norman got them when she died.

Mud Luscious — “Brother”

The MRI is like a picture of the moon. Everything inside me is dead. Gray. I am vast again, like I was. I am a landscape.

There are strange things inside me. I thought it was water. Doctors say he might be a tumor. Some years ago there was a baby with a penis on his back, they say it was his brother’s. Mine has a penis too.

So small inside me.

The Sycamore Review — “Our Young Hero’s Adventure in the Land of Pinwheels and Light”

Cranky — “Mr. Drum Hears the Voice of God”

The Bodies Project

The bodies are a series of short poem-stories. Some bodies have appeared in elimae, Abjective, Used Furniture Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, jmww, Everyday Genius, and Metazen.

Reviews

Puerto del Sol – This Orange Eats Creeps, How They Were Found (Forthcoming)

The Review of Contemporary Fiction – The Logic of the World (Forthcoming)

The Collagist — Pee on Water

Puerto del Sol – The Fixed Stars

The Review of Contemporary Fiction — Kamby Bolongo Mean River

Puerto del Sol — A Heaven of Others

Puerto del Sol – Last Days