Between 1991 and now, I've written many short stories, and a few garnered awards. Some are funny, some are dark, and some are both.
“Ideas are like rabbits. You get a couple and learn how to handle them, and pretty soon you have a dozen.”
― John Steinbeck
When a man rode out of town in the trunk of a car, he wasn’t coming back. That much Pablo already knew from his short experience as driver and errand boy for Desantis.
This story won the 2001 Hirschberg Award for Florida Writing.
This was supposed to be an easy job. They fly down from Detroit to Tampa for a week, and in between doing the tourist act, they make Mantini disappear like Jimmy Hoffa. Everything had started out right. Then things stopped going right...
Weekend at Bernie's meets The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight as Lefty and Norm try to dispose of a body that just won't go away.
This story won the Tampa Writers Alliance 1997 Florida Fiction Award.
Helen's grip on the can of Chase & Sanborn failed, and the container clattered to the bottom of the shopping cart. Her jowls quivered as she closed her mouth and stole a glance over her right shoulder.
Her long-dead mother's voice rang out in her mind, He's following you, and he only wants one thing.
Helen lives in a paranoid world of fear in the big city until she finds a deadly solution.
Tom touched her shoulder and snatched his fingers away. The flesh felt soft and yielding, like pressing fingers into Jell-O. The sensation had felt revolting, like stepping barefoot on dogshit. This sorry excuse for a human made a knot form in his stomach. How hard is it to just show up every day for work on time? The trained apes in Dad's crew could do it, and they often did it hung over or just plain sick. Yeah, it was different in the world of laying pipeline and pouring concrete versus running an office of order takers and clerks, but that's why Tom made the big bucks, dealing with bullshit like this.
Beth Andrews had learned how to drink from Mama. Her schoolhouse in this arcane art had been a single-wide on the outskirts of Lynchburg. Tonight she practiced in a smoky roadhouse near the edge of town, still celebrating her twentieth birthday, which had come and gone over three weeks ago.
...Like Mama, Beth wasn't a drunk who passed the day in a booze-softened state. Neither drank before sundown and never alone. Mama and Beth each went to great pains to make sure they weren't alone after dark on a Friday or Saturday. Having to spend either of those nights at home alone was the worst kind of personal failure.
This is a chapter excerpt from CROSSING THATCHER'S CREEK.
They stared and waited as if the newcomer might sprout wings and fly around the yellow skylight the way a junebug orbits the porch lamp. Maybe he’d turn his head all the way around like that little girl in The Exorcist. Nothing exciting like that ever happened in Guilford.
A hippie comes to church in rural Guilford, Virginia in spring 1997.
This is a chapter excerpt from CROSSING THATCHER'S CREEK.
...the economy was picking up, except here. Maybe I could hire on at another shop after Ellsworth ran this one into the ground.
Vinnie tossed his toothpick into the trash. "You don't need a freaking quality engineer. You need a quality enforcer."
"Enforcer?" I had never heard of that before.
"Yeah." Vinnie smiled with a lot of teeth.
A struggling small business hires a wiseguy to work smarter.