Publications
In Print:
ChArlie’s Leitmotif
-in Story
"With mindfulness, with the right music, with the right appreciation for small things—like my tennis balls in the dryer—I felt I could get my life to approach eighty-percent meaningful. I wasn’t greedy. I could accept that. That’s domestic life. You grind a slice of lemon in the garbage disposal and call it art.”
Dentists
-in Glimmer Train
"He started telling me about shoes. Rooms had been filled with them. Mountains of old leather shoes. Warehouses full of them. You wouldn’t believe you could fill a space that big with shoes. And if you imagined a person in each pair of shoes? They don’t teach those kind of details anymore, he said. He’d asked some of my history teachers. Jewelry, furs, clothing. Whatever people had. Gold teeth. They had a whole staff of dentists."
Rulon Gardner vs. Alexander karelin vs. the nature of timE (Nonfiction)
-in Barrelhouse (issue 18)
"If we can imagine looking at it from Gardner’s perspective, it might seem like a cruel joke to ask but what about Karelin? What have the last 15 years done to him? and find out that he’s a member of the Russian parliament, and that he has a law degree and a PhD in sport-related pedagogy with a dissertation on defending against the suplex. He may be the only person in the world with a PhD in suplexes. Gardner was correct, though he probably didn’t mean to insult an entire nation, when he said in a 2015 interview that ‘even though he’s from Russia, he’s so smart.’”
Retrograde mountain time
"There are so many versions of this ride tonight. There is the truck I see, Rick's old truck, Rick's self as I last saw him, Shasta as I last saw her. There is the truck of reality, which might not even be a truck. There is a truck ride in which Shasta doesn't make it to the hospital. There is the a truck ride in which she does. There is a ride that ends with him and me saying we'll talk again soon, and meaning it. There are many roads to the the other possibility. There's the ride he's on and the ride I'm on, his side of the phone and mine."
Miracle Fruit
-in the New England Review and in The Pushcart Prize XLII
"By the time I’ve finished my pedantry, it’s taken effect. We set upon the lemon tree. We bite into them without peeling them. The insides taste like lemonade. The white pith tastes like meringue. We eat whole lemons this way, not bothering to spit out the seeds. I yank other things out of the garden: arugula, which now tastes like some kind of crazy herb sorbet; rhubarb like raspberry jam; radishes like sweetened ice. But we go back to the lemon tree. It seems to be what this was made for—ambrosia, jellied light bulbs. The miracle doesn’t keep our bellies from feeling full, from growing hot with acid, but we keep going."
The Unplayable Etudes
"She blew out all the candles and touched a knuckle, not a fingertip, to a little gleam at the top of one of them, and she felt it turn into a thicker skin inside the little folds. The antidote. The antidote to the antidote. What could she do but alternate? She did not want sweetness only. She did not want roughness only. She especially did not want anything in the middle."
Warnings from the future
-in the Michigan Quarterly Review
"Because he’s laughing along, because he makes it effortless, because it’s not about them, people think it’s easy standing up there deconstructing himself for an hour. They’re right only to the extent that telling comedy is like a sport, no time to dwell on anything while the clock runs, just enough mindspace free to do quick assessments and make minor adjustments. When you walk off the stage it feels like you just went on a minute earlier. What gets him is the rest of the night, the bar or the hotel, where he replays the jokes in his mind and is now just the butt of them, rather than the teller. His second hard lesson: The thrill of the laughter only lasts as long as the laughter."
Every Face was in the crowd
"Rounding the corner into his living room I was confronted with a kind of optical mystery: the condo, which from its little brick façade should have been cozy if not cramped, was as spacious as the house I grew up in. That’s the type of magic money can make. A part of me hated coming to Beacon Hill, because I started to see price tags on everything: on the Durant, on Deckinger’s artisan dinner table and matching leather couches and the beveled lowball glass out of which he drank a spirit I didn’t want to know the price of. He had poured a glass for me as well."
Online:
Anchors
"A decoy fantasy is a good asset in a marriage. Else they’ll poke around endlessly searching for the real one."
the warden’s prowess
"Our consensus: the warden’s failure to erupt in rage was a very bad sign. The minority opinion was that the warden had aged and gone soft just as the old inmates had. But most of us would have felt much better had he thrown a few of us against the wall and kicked the shit out of us. As was his prerogative. Get the poison out.
Or it will come out in other ways."
Did You Check the Appendix?
"After sex that night, she curled against him and asked how much he thought she could sell her story for: a night with the next top director. It depended on fluctuations in the market, he said, and it was a tough market to speculate. Hold onto a vintage bottle of wine, maybe the price skyrockets, maybe it goes to vinegar. Oh, she said, this vintage was sure to increase in value. It was all anyone in town could talk about. She didn't understand, he said. Almost famous was more famous than famous-famous. There was still an impossibility of expectation. Trajectories had been sketched and all that was left were limits."
DR. DIAZ AT THE BRINK
"He put the scalpel to the artery. The scrub nurse was yakking about his lunch. Apparently it was incumbent upon the doctor to try the chicken salad at the Mediterranean place down the street. Nick said to let him focus. 'Everything okay, boss?' the nurse asked. Imagine your bread knife against the crust of a dinner roll, Nick said, your index finger pressing into the back of the blade. One quick vertical movement, one ounce of pressure, and the roll splits open. 'That’s where I was, and I was waiting for a moment of moral clarity, to reaffirm the decision I’d already made, and all I could think was ‘chicken salad, chicken salad, chicken salad.'"
The Law of Threes
"But now that each pair is wrapped in a cruiser, some doing doughnuts or fishtailing out of figure eights, the lot is a rave of red and blue lights. They roll past Whit and Vargas flashing three fingers in the air, expecting to see them flashed back. Whit does not. Though he knows he’s always had the tendency to be carved by the expectations of others, he won’t celebrate this. He remembers this mood. High school. Homecoming. The radio says stay safe out there, but the body politic says be aggressive, B-E aggressive."
419
"Sure, the buzzing proximity of her Hundredth Birthday Bash should have been enough to keep her heart chirping happily away in harmony with the whippoorwill at her birdfeeder. But the sudden territory annexed in her attention by a personal plea for help, shot halfway around the world in a tube called the Internet, by a man with such a story that the whole world should have cocked its ear, interrupted the small intentions she had of buying the flowers herself, of taping up some purple streamers, of shaving some Scharffenberger over her black forest cake. Who shaves Scharffenberger over cake, she thought, when a deposed African monarch has requested your individual assistance?"