DISPLACEMENT
Short fiction, published in Epiphany, 2023
The pool water glowed as though a small child had taken toy scissors and cut a fanciful shape out of the cement, revealing the incandescent teal beneath. The surface was filmed with the reflection of the lights along the motel’s open-air hallways and, if Maria looked closely, the stars.
The Prince of Aspen
Short fiction, published in Epoch, 2025
My father taught me to string a racquet when I was eleven. It wasn’t meant as an act of encouragement. On his way to becoming one of the greatest American players of the seventies, he’d spent every spare minute of his childhood doing tennis drills. He loved the game, maybe more than he loved anything, but he was always ready to fire off a complaint: about the pressure, the solitude, the dingbats he always got as his linesmen.
OBSERVATIONS OF TRANS-NEPTUNIAN OBJECTS
Short fiction, published in The Coil, 2022
About 120 years ago, during a campaign against the U.S. Army in Cuba, several Spanish soldiers reported seeing a bluish burst in the sky that lasted no more than two seconds. The sun had set, but the sky was fluorescent, likely a chemical byproduct of artillery as the event occurred in the very heat of the Battle of Cienfuegos.
THE ROOF OF HEAVEN
Short fiction, published in The Coil, 2022
They enter their home for the first time. They’ve both been here before, but it wasn’t their home then.Treat is wheeled in backward. When the wheelchair lurches over the floor trim, he feels torn open all over again. He thinks he can hear the ambulance sirens, smell the recent rainwater in the pavement’s flumes. Jenna will learn how to be gentle with him.
THE FIANCÉE
Short fiction, published in Arcturus Magazine, 2021
Miami was the city Managua dreamed of being and woke up shattered that it was not. All the colors shone confidently: the palm trees knew how green their fronds were expected to be, the streetlamps glowed an opulent white. The billboards were fresh, the neon sharper. They flew between LED skyscrapers, past the islands alongside MacArthur Causeway, through colors and music, voices and skin.
END WALTER
Short fiction, published in Capsule Stories: Isolation Edition, April 2020
The highways and streets that had led me from San Francisco to our little Washington town of Meadow Glade had been vacant strips of gray, like something written in pencil and then hurriedly erased. Ten hours of driving with the feeling of having just forgotten something; exhausted though all I’d done was keep my car straight. My parents’ garage door was opened, but I stopped short of it. I staggered out of my pre-pre-pre-owned Impala, and smiled at my parents across the no man’s land of our yard.