Selected Short Stories

Is This You? LitHub

You know it’s going to be a bad day when you get up and find yourself already in the kitchen, seated at the table and eating Cheerios. The you at the kitchen table is thirteen, and she’s eating the Cheerios straight out of the box by the fistful. Try to call her Maura. You are also Maura. Two people can have the same name, but two people cannot be the same person. A few Cheerios fall from Maura’s hand and roll pinwheels across the tile. You tap your foot.

Endangered Animals, The Colorado Review

I drove Harry from LA to Michigan the same August that California burned down. California burned every year, of course, and had all my life. Fire was one of the only seasons we had. But it was getting worse in a way we could see and sprawling out over the calendar. In May, I’d driven to CSULA to take my last final of the semester with the smoke so thick on the highway I had to turn my headlights on. Here and there, ash fell at the sides of the road.

Algal Bloom, Michigan Quarterly Review

I remember the first thing Vienna said to me, after she ran up the driveway to our cabin, was “The water is full of poison.” 

When I said “What?” she stepped back, and scraped her eyes over me, instead of answering, a clear appraisal. 

“You got a little taller,” she said. She was much taller, the year since we’d seen each other having stretched her out into a cornstalk leanness. Her blonde hair was newly short, gathered up in a stubby paintbrush at the back of her skull. The difference between twelve and thirteen rested on her with a sunlit gravity. Vienna had a sleek runner’s body that I would never have.

Hunting the Viper-King, Strange Horizons

At the mathematical center of Dorothy’s father’s RV, at its golden ratio curl, there is a tarot card pinned to the corkboard. The High Priestess; she has been there longer than Dorothy can remember. Worn at her edges, drawn in lines of gold and white and blue, crowned by a crescent moon. She tips her head to listen to the snake coiling up her white throat, whispering in her ear. Dorothy has always loved her, the wisdom writ into her lines, her beneficent gaze on the RV’s interior, the art nouveau spill of her hair down her shoulders.