Select published fiction
The Craft of Drowning
The Bellevue Literary Review. Volume 14, Number 1, Spring 2014.
Imagine yourself as a girl sitting in a lifeguard tower staring into the calm ocean on a sunny day. School was never your thing. You tried a year of community college after graduation, but it never took. You were always a strong swimmer. You were on the varsity swim team. Your senior year you made it all the way to the state finals.
Imagine yourself as a girl staring out into the ocean, sometime after your first year of work, when someone comes up to your tower and points out a snorkeler floating in the water, his body drifting lazily with the current. His arms and legs are not moving.
You grab your orange, foam buoy, jump from the tower, and run into the water, kicking up a spray of water as you dive under.
The top of his snorkel is just beneath the surface. His arms and legs hang straight down from the center of his chest. You wrap your buoy under his armpits and raise his head above the water. His mask is filled with blood.
…
How to Construct A Lie
Hayden’s Ferry Review. Issue 59, Fall/Winter 2016.
Sorry: It’s just a word you say, like, love.
Start with the truth and twist it, turn it, bend it. Feed it, let it grow. Train it to be what you want, because what you want is better than what you have: just a skinny post- highschooler with a few awkward encounters and no girlfriends to mention. But this is a new school in a new city with new people—a chance to be new. The girls away from home will not know about the time the wrestlers locked you in the Dumpster. Or the soccer game where your father stumbled out of the stands and kissed your coach on the mouth when you scored your first and only goal of the season. Or the other time when Alister teabagged you at Darren Michaels’ party after you passed out with your mouth open on the living room couch. This time will be different. You will be free to mold your past as you see fit.
Use pieces of reality. Make it seem real. Take an image here, and put it here. Do your research—you are good at research. Watch pornos and take note of which techniques get the real, honest reactions. The techniques that make the women’s faces blush and their bodies spasm.
This is what they will want. This is who you need to be. This is how to not end up like your parents. This is the way.
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Education
[PANK]. Issue 11.1, Spring/Summer 2016.
[Two black guys walk into a bar. One is light-skinned, and the other is bi-racial, but his skin is slightly darker. The difference in hair texture betrays the racial distinction. The light-skinned one is younger, about twenty-six. He is wearing a hotel porter’s outfit unbuttoned at the collar. The bi-racial man is slightly older at about twenty-nine and is taller with a thicker build. He is wearing a cook’s uniform, also undone at the collar, with sleeves rolled above his forearms. The two are halfway through a game of pool. A near-empty pitcher of beer sits next to an empty pitcher on a bar stool near the table. The state of politics and Barack Obama gets mentioned by the light-skinned black guy between billiard shots. The bi-racial cook responds.]
Yeah, I voted for Obama, but Im not one of those niggas that thinks he should give his shit back. You know the ones Im talkin’ about. The ones that go on and on about how he used his blackness to win the election. Like that shits some kind a crime. Come on, bro, the people that been in power been doin’ the same shit since this country was founded. Only they didnt win elections because they was white, they won that shit because they wasnt black. You know what I’m sayin’? They made it so whatevers different has to be bad. It dont matter if there aint no real difference. To be good, they just got to be the same. And if they is the same, then it’s all good. They been usin’ this same trick to make a person feel like bein’ black is somethin’ that a person has to overcome in order to make somethin of themselves. Like the color of they skin is a yoke around they neck that somehow holds em back. (What’s that look about?)
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