Novel Excerpts
from GABRIEL (Sibylline Press, upcoming in 2027)
Excerpt: MAPMAKER
He was ten years old and a mapmaker. There are many ways of being lost and this was his; when he was six, with a cornflower blue crayon, he began to record where he lived; a blue ocean, blue islands, blue far away mountains and a blue moon. When he drew the same map with burnt orange, the map became memory. The moon was the sun, and the ocean, grasslands. He added the orange flat-topped mountain on the ranch where he once lived a long time ago, with his brother Luke and his grandparents, outside a town he couldn’t name. READ MORE
Excerpt: LUKE
The boy could ride. Hours before she escaped the spring blizzard up on Cat’s Claw Butte, she’d watched him running the legs off his grandfather’s flea-bitten gray. There was no joy in it—he was riding the fury out of that horse, a darkness out of himself, the only thing he knew to do, twelve-years-old and bareback.
When he charged past, he didn’t see her resting against the stone. The large woman, the megalith—both out of place on the high flat plain; she, the color of the rock in her overalls, aching from the climb. This time she thought he was going to ride right off the edge, the air clean before him, the dust swallowing him. READ MORE
from EDDA (Sibylline Press, upcoming in 2028)
Excerpt: ROSE
With the unknown charging down on Edda, the collective kindness felt like a righteous happily ever after. But if the death of her mother, laid out on the dining table of Olympic Lane, was the beginning of strange, pregnancy took the cake— the shape-shifting, voluminous middle, the Venus of Willendorf breasts, ravenous with no room for food.
On an early September morning, Mount Rainier stark and beyond the city, her time came. The Lake House women peeked in while Edda hollered without restraint. At a certain predictable stage, she vowed what other happily married women have said through the centuries, that she would kill the bastard who did this to her. She meant it more than most. READ MORE
Excerpt: LUCAS
The next time Rose saw him was on a weekday in November, one of those last, heady warm days before the rawness of winter locked in. She was at school, in line for lunch when Mrs. Harold, the teacher supervising the cafeteria, tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Your uncle is here to see you.”
“My uncle?”
He stood next to the head mistress in the cashmere drape of his European sports coat—he might be a film producer—hogging his share of handsome in the empty corridor. The clink of eating utensils and two hundred girls prattling their way through lunch clattered on the other side of the door. His arms cradled a wicker basket covered with a floral tea cloth while the head mistress beamed with the happy surprise she was providing.
If Rose said too much, he might disappear again. She was no snitch, though she didn't yet grasp the ploy. “Uncle!” She didn’t know his name. “What are you doing here?” READ MORE
Two Short Stories
ESCAPE VELOCITY (Massachusetts Review)
One. Noticing how we are.
I asked Kris, when I was doing the crossword, how many crows make a murder. He furrowed his brow. When we were young, I was curious about what might come from him, but by this time I realized I didn’t expect his answers to matter. He said, “That was only a movie, Baby. Remember? We watched it on the TV. You nearly twisted my hand off.”
Kris and I are like a grizzly and a marmot. He’s 6’6”, husky, broad faced, with rusty hair going to white. My face is narrow, and my sister says I have darty little eyes. I say I’m 5 feet, but really, I’m shy of it on the doctor’s scale. How can Kris not think of me as a pet? It’s something we don’t joke about anymore. When I was young, I thought the very size and quiet of him would keep me.
Two. Ash doesn’t re-become wood.
Life was fine, or normal, or normal as it gets, when the fire took the stuffing out of us. A fire like that tells you exactly how it is; you stand there and take it. I still can’t understand how the house could burn to the ground surrounded by so much snow. READ MORE
THE WORK OF HUNTERS IS ANOTHER THING (1st Prize, Glimmer Train)
He’d crossed Rita Seidman’s path often enough and she still didn’t recognize him; he was always sitting in the corner at Merv’s when she came in for groceries, but she never looked his way. Two years ago, when they ran into each other in the woods, she’d been so distressed about his gun—as if it was going to jump together and get her on its own—that she never saw his eyes. READ MORE
Creative Nonfiction
from THE TROUBLE WITH HORSES (Work in Progress)
I was five, riding in the car on the way from somewhere to somewhere else in Southern California. We’d left behind the brilliant green lawns and palm trees of West Los Angeles—all those sprinklers and sparkling swimming pools leeching the Colorado River into a trickle. Instead, we were driving through a more natural chaparral growing where it could manage—scraggy shrubs, silver-grays and dust. There were big people in the car—I don’t remember everyone. My fashionable mother, certainly.
We passed a roadside attraction. A clutter of little round-bellied creatures stood under the manufactured shade of a pole tent. And even though I was only five, I could read the sign. Long ago I’d mastered Sam and The Firefly, so the placard was a piece of cake. In hand-painted block letters, it read PONY RIDES.
Stop! I begged. Please!