Stories are added as the exclusivity rights with their publisher ends.
Ellen Jane Duvall was born three months early on February 10, 2020, weighing only three pounds, six-and-a-half ounces.
When my daughter died three days later, a part of me died with her. My grief was indescribable. Total. But Marin’s grief was more than total. It consumed him.
Grapes
The Antihumanist, 4th Edition (May 2022)
Marin lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling, trying his best to ignore the rhythmic thumping from another bed against the shared wall of the hotel room.
He’d checked in an hour ago and was supposed to text Jenn that he’d arrived, but something about the hotel manager bothered him. There was something not right about the man, something that worried about the edges of Marin’s subconscious like the fraying of a door’s weather stripping, gradually admitting a draft.
The Lobby of the Hotel McCoy
Flame Tree Fiction Newsletter (Flame Tree Press, March 2022)
Marin began to worry he’d done something wrong the night he first brought a man home from the bar.
One hundred and sixteen miles from his quiet Cape Cod along the coast of Maine, the bar wasn’t one he’d ever been to before. No one to recognize him, to pick him out from a crowd. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, and bound at the wrists and ankles, with tape over his mouth, the man wasn’t going to be giving it anytime soon, either.
Piano Man
Love Letters to Poe, Volume 1 (Love Letters to Poe, September, 2021)
Thicker Than Water
Strange Lands Short Stories (Flame Tree Press, November, 2020)
It was not unreasonable for Marin and Damian Karras to assume that they would both return to the shelter alive. Plenty before them had.
And as brothers, they had the highest chances of any. No one knew why that was so, why siblings returned more often than those who ventured out unrelated to one another. Even after more than forty years in the shelters, there was a lot that wasn’t known, like what started it all, or why the sky was poisoned. About the only thing that was known for certain was that science had nothing to do with what was left of the world.
It was the witch.
The man I have been living with does not know that he is my father. If he did, I would be dead.
"Zeus!" he bellows, the gruff sound of his voice further muddled through the floor. "Beer!"
His speech is slurred, though it is only six in the evening. I make my way down crooked steps, passing sugar-thin windows that rattle in their latticed frames. Gritty snow lashes the weathered walls of our sagging Colonial, sounding like sand poured over a washboard. We lost power two days ago. I cup my hand around a small candle, protecting the dim light against a bitter draft that threatens to snatch it away.
Father
Shallow Waters Volume 6 (Crystal Lake Publishing, September, 2020)
Holly doesn’t understand all the bent ways of her mother.
She doesn’t realize that mothers shouldn’t do things like watch their ten-year-olds bathe, or that she has no friends. Momma quietly destroys all of her relationships, turning and folding them over in her hands like salt kneaded into the loam of her daughter’s heart.