Mason (from Nights Without Rain)

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This short story appeared in my book, Nights Without Rain, and is a fictionalized account of my trip to Mason, Texas to explore the remote Hill Country town where my great-grandfather once lived.

Mason 

He stood in the cemetery west of Mason, where sun-bleached headstones and granite crosses punctured through the tall yellow grass in irregular rows. Stunted oak trees stood together and reached upward like the twisted legs of dried-up dead spiders. He turned in place and surmised the landscape with a disappointed eye, a man in a place out of time offering little but dust and wind and the chittering whine of locust in the summer heat. Texas in June, wet blanket waves of swelter, the kind that made mere breathing a discomfort. He fanned his collar and conceded the fact that his great-grandad was not in this place. His name was not among the strangers long forgotten and blanched by time and the relentless stoicism of weather generations heartless. It seemed to the man they had both come all this way for nothing.

Crickets and pale lime Katydids sprang from his path as he cut through the grass to his truck, a small thing in a state of behemoth vehicles in both form and function. The once cool interior had quickly changed to stifling, and he let the air conditioning run with the windows down for a few minutes as he again surveyed the landscape of the cemetery, including the abandoned well house just beyond, a decayed stone and stucco square with a wooden water tank resting atop like a bloated sleeping monolith waiting for night to fall before wrenching free its moorings, stretching limbs over the cemetery audience, and launching into the expanse. The man had poked his head inside the fallen wall of the old well house and jerked away from the writhing assemblage of brown recluse spiders that scattered at his presence. That had been his last pass through the cemetery, looking one last time over the stones for the name he knew by then would not be there. Let the spiders have their roost, he though as he rolled the windows back up. There was nothing he wanted less than another moment in that place.

Mason did not contain multitudes. The gathering knot of five or six disparate roads leading into the one central square belied the otherwise geometric mediocrity of the town’s construction, with small neighborhoods surrounding the square laid out north and south and east and west in streets as flush to one another as cinder blocks in a prison wall. The small homes of brick and clapboard stood identical to each other save for the fact that some owners cared for the green grass that came with attentive watering and pruning, while others condoned the yellow and brown colors of the surrounding hill country, a mix of grasslands and dried arroyos cluttered by oaks and knotted tinder-brush. But for the most part the placid neighborhoods resisted the wilds on all sides. He glanced at each passing house while moving toward that central square, the taller oaks there providing shade and respite, a space somehow cooler and almost gentrified with benches, sidewalks, lampposts. He parked his truck along one of the many open parallel parking spots on the square’s south side and stepped forth into the high heat of the day.

Surrounding the square he saw a pharmacy and general store, a men’s clothier, a large café, a newspaper office, a closed real estate office, assorted empty storefronts, a stone jailhouse fenced off with a historical marker out front, about three banks, and at the far end was a small movie house called The Odeon. With letters askew and in various faded shades of red the marquee above The Odeon’s unlit neon sign read, “There Will Be Blood,” a film that had been out for nearly six months. The man wondered if it was simply a second-run theater now, or if The Odeon had gone under since the grim drama’s final showing the winter prior. He walked the length of the square for a closer look and found the doors bolted and dusty, the interior difficult to parse through the dark glass.  

An assortment of scrambling children turned the corner and halted before him, surprised to contend with an adult in their chosen journey. Half the gathering cackled with wondrous guilt and sped away down the sidewalk clutching small plastic water pistols, shooting one another. Three children remained, and one asked the man what he was doing.

“Ain’t no more movie there no more,” a boy of about six told him.

“I can tell. Any of you know anyone with the last name Thurmond?”

“Nope.”

The three remaining children stared at him until the tallest, a girl of about nine, tugged on the boy’s shoulder and they all turned and began to run. The boy paused and called over his shoulder, “Our daddy’s in the café yonder with Uncle Hugh. Ask them!”

After a few more seconds of call-and-answer laughter echoing back to him from around the corner, the man looked across the square toward the café. A red truck passed. Pairs and groups came and went through the door. He began that way accordingly.

The dull cowbell clattered against the heavy glass door and a waitress bumped into him, edging the man into three families waiting for a table. It was a long room full of cattle men, overalls, dirty Stetsons, and older women in plain blue or white dresses. Some bounced infants on their knees. Families and weekend laborers, a Saturday gathering before the next day’s holy deferment of chores. The waitress said she couldn’t spare a table for one but offered a spot at the small bar. It didn’t serve alcohol but had become a depot for knives and napkins, water glasses and round wooden food trays piled atop one another. He sat at the far end alone and studied the menu.

“You bein’ a stranger I’d suggest the chicken fried steak,” the waitress suggested as she set fork, knife, and spoon before him, and then a tall glass of water. “You want potatoes or coleslaw salad with that?”

He said potatoes and waited for his meal as families sat and ate and left and returned with only slightly adjusted faces and clothing, a seeming Rubik’s cube of rural humanity hungry for steak and salads and pies and sweet teas. He wondered if this café had been there when old Wash Thurmond had owned the filling station on the western edge of town, if he ate there, if he took his son and later his grandson to that very café, a place he was never able to take his infant great-grandson before passing away in a nursing home, horizons away from this place, only returning in a box. So he’d been told.

The waitress had been right. The chicken fried steak was fearsome in size and worth any wait, smothered in white pepper gravy tasting of that floury richness that accompanied so much southern food. Potatoes and two biscuits later he pushed the meal away and smiled at the waitress offering a hearty congratulation. She insisted on pie as well and asked him about the circumstance of their meeting. He told her about the family name, the filling station, a house he couldn’t find and a grave he could not reconnoiter despite all evidence and advice from his family back in San Antonio. She told him the name was unfamiliar but the filling station was something she knew, although it had been torn down a decade prior. She couldn’t recall anyone knowing the owner, however.

“Which is a mighty odd circumstance ‘round here. Everyone knows right about everyone, but not everyone, I s’pose.”

“I suppose not. Every place has its own social circles.”

“That’s one way of sayin’ it. You know who you know, and you can’t fit everyone inside.”

“Exactly. Thanks anyway.”

“Which cemetery? The one out the Dairy Queen or the one out 29?”

“There’s more than one? I did pass a Dairy Queen, heading west. I was told he’d be out that way.”

“Maybe, maybe not. You might want to check the one out 29, east of here. Go on east, take a left on the Old Pontiac Road, the second one, not the first one. There’s about three out that way, believe it or not. The second. If you hit the Starks farm you done gone too far east.”

“I’ll check that one. Thank you.”

“You do that. Hope you find yer grandaddy.”

He nodded and fished out the money for the meal, and the tip was the last of his cash. He had just a little bit more in the bank, and a tank of gas. He wished he had more for her though and stood up from the bar and waded through folks waiting by the door, which shunted him back to silence once it closed behind him. The sun was now angled to impact its heat directly into his eyes seemingly no matter where he looked and he walked into the shade of the square where he watched cars rounding the corners and pinwheel off east, south, north, all directions. It looked as if the town’s somnolence had stirred up the morning hibernation and the café was but one of many active corners visible from his sanctum beneath the trees of the square. It was a happy sight, but it also hurried him somehow, as if time began passing in ways no watch could portend.

The man restarted his truck and let the air conditioning come to life as he considered the day, the time, the drive home, and the people of the town of Mason walking the sidewalks and disappearing from view, reappearing. He thought of his great-grandad and the picture the man kept in his wallet of old Wash Thurmond standing beside his filling pump sometime in the late 1930s, sepia-toned and handsome, when he was young Washington J Thurmond.

He’d remain that way, a sepia-toned image in the mind of the man who turned the truck not east but southeast instead, down Route 87, the way he’d come that morning from San Antonio. While history was a thing resistant to change, memory was another matter. Sometimes you didn’t want it to change. Sometimes it was best to let sleeping memories lie. The man considered this as he passed the edge of town and did not feel any remorse in the knowing he may never return. Not in that life, at least.  

"Widow's Watch" now appears at Lonesome October Lit

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My short story, “Widow’s Watch,” now appears at one of my all-time favorite online journals, Lonesome October Lit. I’m honored that they chose my story to cap their 2018 run of fantastic eerie tales and poetry, and I assure you that a deep read through their archives will not disappoint fans of the macabre and the spooky. This story of mine, which involves a trek through a forest to an abandoned seaside estate where things are not as they seem to be and escape may not be as easy as one hopes, also appears in my latest collection of flash fiction stories, Nights Without Rain, which you can find at Amazon or order direct through me. Thank you very much for all of your support in 2018, and I hope you enjoy this spooky story!


New Interview with NY Writer's Com.pen.dium

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I recently had the pleasure of having a great phone chat with Jeff Doherty, one of the young writers over at NY Writer’s Com.pen.dium, a growing literary website highlighting events, writers, workshops, and publications in Upstate New York and beyond. Jeff threw some excellent questions my way about my writing inspirations, how writing evolves over time, how technology can help or hinder a writer, and also about my latest collection of short stories, Nights Without Rain. Our interview, titled “From Mysterious Figure to Mysterious Author,” is now posted at their website, and I hope you’ll take a look at their other interviews, write-ups, features, and literary event listings. My thanks to the editors and Jeff for reaching out! Enjoy!

New Flash Fiction "Hopper House" at South Broadway Ghost Society

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I’m very happy to announce that my flash fiction story “Hopper House” is now posted over at an excellent online journal called South Broadway Ghost Society. This short tale is about a strange and possibly haunted green Victorian standing just down the street from wherever I lay my head, following me around for age after age, dream after nightmare. I hope you enjoy reading it, and if you do, it’s also in my latest collection of short stories titled Nights Without Rain, which is now available at Amazon in both print and digital formats. My deepest thanks to the editors at South Broadway Ghost Society, and to all of you for your support!

"Ages of Us" from Nights Without Rain

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My new book Nights Without Rain contains 50 brief stories, and this is the newest story of the bunch and the last one added before publication. Signed copies of the book are available and you can find both print and digital versions at Amazon. I hope you enjoy!

Ages of Us

Incandescent afterglow 3 a.m. where the streetlights stain brick walls and dumpsters yellow, orange, filthy neon silent in the southern nights, cigarette ash on my shirt, on the floor, out the door to the broken pavement where the wind carries everything away in time, nothing really yours, never will be mine. I cannot afford a motel room and I cannot afford to call her again. All that is left is the rest of her cigarettes in this pack that I’m burning through one by one and the single REM cassette she left in the dash radio, Dead Letter Office.

It plays on near-muted repeat, insufficient willpower to turn it off, up, or change anything. Drinking Jameson dregs from a pocket bottle all the way down until it’s just the taste of glass on my lips, dull and bitter. Held up to the light, the bottle reflects a dead street, a blurry line in the sand, empty hours approaching 4 a.m., dawn, and whatever comes after.

It was the long drive through Vermont that started it all, a silver creek running along the back dirt road to an A-frame she knew was empty for the summer. We stayed a week, driving into town to find food and liquor and things to talk about.

We met at a party in the town of Hudson and decided to drive north, easy as that.

Want to go for a drive?

And the days took hold, along with black flies that swarmed our eyes during long walks through the forest, but at night they disappeared as we’d slip into that silver water rushing, stony footholds, orchestral turmoil, sweet and daring, holding hands to keep balance. Nocturnal extravagance in the earthen pitch of night. Wet as all things when they begin.

A derelict honeymoon of stupid love.

She began smoking again in Nashville after some good panhandling and stealing quarters from pool tables. We both had the look now, dark rings under our eyes at all hours, unshakable desires that glued our piecemeal existence to one another. We would take the money and feed jukeboxes up and down the back streets where the tourists fade to distant shadows and blinking lights. Her weight against my weight as she played all her favorites: Dead Letter Office, Chronic Town, Life’s Rich Pageant, Document...

She ran her finger down through the condensation along the side of my glass of whiskey and anointed my forehead with a thick bead of water, a blessing. “St. James of New York,” she said, and I asked, “Patron Saint of…?”

In the neon dim of the bar we would pray over glasses and bottles and jostle elbows among rising plumes of smoke and circular stains of dampness on bar tops. Halos cast aside by long dead sinners and saviors. Holy nights of music and her finger wet with condensation, her lips a eucharist I gratefully accepted and returned with all the fumbling grace I could muster, leaning into the night and neon of the bar. We ate the music and stole any drinks we could scrounge up, leftovers, free popcorn at this bar, peanuts at that one. We slept in a parking lot down by the river with legs entwined and music whispering from the dash. She was never far from music, never far from the home we built within one another.

Outside the car the remains of her cigarettes scattered as the wind carried everything away in its own good time.

“Going west is going home,” she said, “all of us going home.”

In Tujunga, CA we ate at diners and would watch for unattended tips left too long on tables, coffee going cold. We got by like that, but by that point our silence with each other stung and we worked that pain like a tongue into a dead tooth stinging long and deep and undeniably pleasurable despite the gutting pain. There was a bar there with red leather booths that opened at ten in the morning and we’d go, play pool, watch the TV showing black and white movies with LuBelle the bartender on weekday mornings.

It was nearby in Montrose where she met the country club chef, tall and rangy and funny, so it wasn’t long before we lost track of one another. The west held little else for me despite the months I spent holding on to any scrap of life that tumbled by, and when I heard she was not long for this world I tried to find her again. But the nurses said she only cried when they told her I was outside waiting, and they would not allow me through.

I like to think that whatever remained of her after the ravenous transition of her body ascended into the fog and warm California nights, thick with condensation and holy silence. I like to think she rose northward beyond Los Padres and Morro Bay, beyond the Big Sur wilderness and the aimless seagulls calling her death song, flying in damp rings in the sky, the lights of Monterrey and Santa Cruz like distant bar signs, calling us home.

But not my home yet. We had lost something at every dot on the map when we headed west, so I headed east, hoping to find a few of those pieces along the way. But whatever I found only made the loss hurt more, made the glaring absence in the passenger seat just goddamn intolerable.

Now, through the blur of windshield rain, the lampposts all catch fire and explode in the 5 a.m. light. The Jacksonville dawn edging on, dashboard clock dead, instincts ticking that internal clock toward the last grain of sand. I’m sobering up now and thinking maybe I’ll drive until I find a boat ramp and roll this old Honda into the sea to find what the land and all its cities have kept for itself all these years, jealous of all us wanderers and what we seek.

I’ll go down there into another age, down into the cool deep, where the holy jukebox music cannot go, where the fire cannot follow. It might be worth it to find her again, and it couldn’t be any worse than this chronic sort of life without.

'Best Of' Anthology from Nixes Mate Review

Nixes Mate Review just released a Best Of Anthology comprised of poems and stories from their 2017 and 2018 issues, and they included my flash fiction tale “Cold Beer—Cheap Rooms”. I’m very excited and honored that they decided to include my piece alongside the work of such writers as Matt Borczon, Meg Tuite, Suchoon Mo, Susanna Lang, Alan Catlin, and Pris Campbell, among many others. This story about a young couple on the cusp of breaking up trying for one last vacation of normalcy and possible redemption also appears in my latest book, Nights Without Rain, which is available in both print and digital formats at Amazon. Thanks for taking a look!

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"Cold Beer - Cheap Rooms" at Nixes Mate Review

My flash fiction piece "Cold Beer - Cheap Rooms" now appears in Nixes Mate Review in their summer 2018 issue. As Nixes Mate says, "With every new horror, with every new heatwave, with every norm a carcass swept up in the dustbin of history there is always poetry and literature. ... We share new voices and returning voices, the voices of friends, voices of hope and voices of humor." This issue has a wide variety of voices and styles, and I hope you enjoy this new story of mine. Thanks!  

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Flash Fiction Contest at Hobo Camp Review

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Hobo Camp Review is hosting a contest with a $25 prize (no fee) for the upcoming autumn issue! The HCR Flash Around the Campfire Competition is open to any flash fiction (we'll even consider long-ish narrative poetry) under 1,000 words, and the shorter the better. All the usual guidelines apply, and again, there's NO fee. There will be a special judge (TBA) who will award $25 and a free book or two from our knapsack to the lucky scribe. The submission window closes on Labor Day, 9/3/2018. For info about the kind of work that moves us,  or give any of our issues a look online. Thanks! 

Piece By Piece: Writing Your Way Out of a Creative Dry Spell

It happens to all of us at different points in our writing lives: we hit a stretch where we can’t seem to finish anything, or the ideas have dried up faster than morning rain on an Arizona highway. It happened to me this last year when I finished one novel and was excited to start a fresh project, except each novel idea I started fizzled out. They weren’t right. Same went for a few short stories I had rattling around in my head. I’d make it halfway through before casting each aside. Even poems felt forced. I felt stuck. I WAS stuck. And I was breaking Neil Gaiman’s wise and important rule: “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish.” It was a hollow, scary feeling.

But instead of sitting back and waiting for inspiration to strike, I tried a few of the methods below to jumpstart that old excited feeling, to help me start something I could finish. I picked these up from other writers, so it's not like these are fresh, original ideas, but they helped me out, bit by bit. I’m hoping that if they worked for me, they’ll work for you. 

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New Flash Fiction "Two Kings" Now At Indigent Press

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My new flash fiction story "Two Kings" now appears at Indigent Press, which you can read online alongside a slew of other great poets and writers, including Heather Minette, Jason Ryberg, Kat Giordino, Paul Corman-Roberts, and a bunch of others. This quick little story of mine takes place just before Christmas as I scrounge for extra cash to get by and visit the quarreling "two kings" to trade gold for cash. I hope you enjoy. My deepest thanks goes to the Indigent Press editors for including my work!  

New Poem / New Flash Fiction in Kleft Jaw #11

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Kleft Jaw #11 just blew a hole in the internet with their 11th issue, and I'm grateful to have two pieces within, a poem titled "Lo Cool, 69 Degrees" and a flash fiction story called "$10,000" which used to be a poem I originally wrote in Colorado but I fleshed it out to an actual story because it needed more room to detail the weird encounter I had with a man in a coffee shop out in Ft. Collins a few years back. You can read these pieces in the online magazine, and please check out the other work and art in the issue. It's a wild collective over there and I'm always pumped to be included in some Kleft Jaw chaos.  

New Flash Fiction Inside Ink In Thirds Magazine

My flash fiction piece "Thompson Hill" now appears in Issue 10 of Ink In Thirds Magazine, on page 17. It's available in print or as a PDF that you can read online for free. The story is one of about thirty flash fiction pieces I'm hoping to include in a collection titled, at the moment, as Nights Without Rain, and I'm holding off on releasing the collection until one of my upcoming poetry books comes out. Both have a TBD release date, but I'm hoping it will be in late 2017. I'll keep you posted. As always, thanks for reading.      

New Flash Fiction in Full of Crow, Winter 2017

My flash fiction piece "Desperate Ain't Lonely" now appears in the Winter 2017 issue of Full of Crow. It's a brief story about a couple driving through the West Virginia mountains at night pondering what love and loneliness really mean. I'm planning to include the story in a collection of flash fiction perhaps later this year, tentatively titled Nights Without Rain. I'll post more about that as publication nears. And as always, thanks for reading!

Poems, Reviews, and Upcoming Fiction

It's been a busy winter so far, and it's only getting busier. Here's a rundown of what's out now and what's coming soon!

  • My review of Nice Feelings by Iris Appelquist now appears at Up The Staircase Quarterly, which is a stellar publication you should be reading.
  • My poem "Going Ghost" now appears at Boned, a journal of skeletal writings. I omitted this poem from my collection Berlin (Maverick Duck Press) so I'm happy it finally found a home.
  • My poem "Nights Don't Die" should appear in the upcoming issue of Five:2:One this month.
  • I have two flash fiction stories coming up in late winter: "Desperate Ain't Lonely" will appear in Full Of Crow, and "Thompson Hill" will appear in Ink In Thirds. I'll post links when they both hit!
  • And finally, for now, I recently had a poem called "The Carson Effect" in Winedrunk Sidewalk: Shipwrecked in Trumpland, and I'll soon have another titled "The Young May Love Without Fear". They publish a new poem every day of Trump's presidency, and if you're not the biggest fan of the current admin, you'll want to take a look.

Thanks for reading and all of your support!

New Short Story "Long Road to Luckenbach" Now at Drunk Monkeys

Call "Long Road to Luckenbach" flash fiction, call it a short short, but whatever it is, it's now live over at Drunk Monkeys, and I'm really excited to be there. The story, inspired by hearing Waylon Jennings' song on a jukebox, is a quick and (hopefully) amusing tale about how quickly plans can go awry when they're made over shots of whiskey in Texas dive bars. The story has a little truthful backstory to it, but I'll let the reader decide what really happened and what's fiction. The names, however, have been changed to protect the guilty! I hope you enjoy.