Dear Humans Substack (9/15/25)

“All remaining staff, please report to bay seven for the final evacuation launch.”

The announcement turned Bridget from the mechanic shop porthole. She’d watched the first two shuttles today streak past the blue sun of Alpha 4, the little planet the teams had been terra-forming for nineteen months. And the asteroid. She’d been watching that turn from a distant star to a ponderous hulk lumbering in their direction to an increasingly accelerating bomb that could fireball into the station at as much as 70 kilometers per second.

Flash Fiction Magazine (7/28/25)

I got the plastic pond from Lowe’s, way too soon after Jay died, and overpaid the lawn guy to install it. Jay had always said a pond would attract snakes. Possums. Armadillos. Maybe skunks. Would be a mosquito breeding ground.

Bodega: Your Literary Corner Store (11/24)

By eleven o’clock, we’d been hiking for almost two hours, and the morning chill had transformed to a humidity that settled thickly on my skin. The canopy of trees blocked any chance of a breeze, and I was feeling more out of shape than usual. My daughter wouldn’t walk next to me, or even near me, but that was okay. After nineteen years, I was used to following her.

Harpur Palate (9/9/24)

It was supposed to sound like a runaway train. Like an airplane lifting off. Like wind through a tunnel. But Kayla hears groaning, like a giant who has the whole world in its fist. Like murderers are trying to pound their way into her house. Like the sound someone makes when they lose everything.

Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literature (5/11/24)

When your son is on a ventilator, you need someone to say it’s just a precaution. In the space those words would fill, I tuck his man-hand along with the answers I didn’t have when I brought his limp body to this place.

Flash Fiction Magazine (1/7/24)

Nominated for The Pushcart Prize

I’ve known how to load and shoot the rifle since I was five. Mama always says that where we live, out in the ass-crack of nowhere, we have to handle our own business because by the time someone else comes, it’ll all be over. 

Short Story Today (2/12/23)

So we sit out back and watch the birds. There are eleven feeders, hung one by one by Jason who knows that’s absolutely too many.

Every Day Fiction (6/2/21)

Mom’s ashes are in the urn on the table, and I smile with my lips at people who hold pieces of her. I am greedy for every fragment, but hugs are extortion. “She never got to be a grandmother,” one lady tuts, tipping her head to the side to regard me with sad eyes. The revelation throws me once and for all out of the peace I’d been hiding in. We say we are putting her in the ground in a “private ceremony,” but my dad keeps her next to the winter coats in the upstairs closet. He thinks there will be a right time.

Rowan Glassworks (5/1/21)

Nominated for Best of the Net 2021

I need to make myself smaller. I need to not take up so much room. I suck the oxygen out of the house, this family. I’m busy shrinking myself when she comes into the only room in the house with empty hinges.

​Mom has those eyes, and I know she’s about to say again (and again, and again) “Did you take your meds?”

Yes. It’s always yes. I swallow the pills every morning, round like a buoy. I do what I’m supposed to do even though nothing keeps me afloat.

Read at the Key West Literary Seminar as the winner of the 2020 Marianne Russo award for a novel in progress

Cease, Cows (5/7/20)

Nominated for Best of the Net 2020

Maddi Mitchell has three lovebugs in her hair. One is poised on the edge of a golden curl cupping her left eyebrow. One is burrowed into the dark space behind her ear, its orange head peeking out like a signal fire. And one is perched on Maddi’s part, and I imagine it grabbing two strands of hair like reins and riding her scalp all day.

X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine (2/26/20)

Nominated for Best Small Fictions 2020

I sit on the bench outside Publix. A little boy ran by me in light-up sneakers when I was almost, almost, almost to the door, and suddenly I could hear Caleb’s feet, encased like two meat loaves in the shoes I got him before he started K-3, drumming against the cart.

Lost Balloon (1/29/20)

At the stoplight, I think about turning left instead of right and going who-knows-where but definitely not to my office. Then it turns green, and I move along my path just like every weekday morning. Once I merge onto the highway, the idea of turning the steering wheel ever so slightly and letting the car wander into the other lane occurs to me again.

The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature (11/1/19)

The man in the parking lot handed her a pink carnation. Sara reached automatically to take what the stranger offered as unconsciously as passing a fork when she used to help Mother do dishes. The man just smiled and kept going across the black asphalt that shimmered in the late afternoon heat.

The Jellyfish Review (5/25/19)

The door opens downstairs, and I freeze with a fistful of freshly washed underwear poised over the drawer. After twenty-six years of hearing his familiar feet entering our home, I know it’s not Jack, coming back for his wallet, his coffee, a file. I’m realizing that my phone is downstairs in my bag and scanning for a weapon or a place to hide when she calls out to me. Her voice in that one wavering syllable is worse than a home invasion. Worse than a serial killer picking this house at 8:07 in the morning on a Thursday.

Spelk (7/3/19)

We know where the hard corners are. We crouch together, our breaths slowing down while our hearts race, but we are quiet, quiet, quiet, quiet. If we are still and silent it’ll be over soon, and we can get back to Hamlet’s indecision and the Civil War and the laws of multiple proportions and espero, esperas, esperamos.

Crack the Spine (5/14/19)

The beer splattered onto Gabby’s lap where the cup landed, making a large wet spot on her jeans that looked like nothing so much as a pants-peeing.