My father’s cousin grew up on a grain farm with his big sister and their parents, who were two generations off the boat from Sweden. They named him Harle.
When he was a teenager, his father Joe died. His sister had already married and moved away. He stayed and farmed the family’s acres and took [...]

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I lied about your friend’s paintings.
They suck.
And don’t think they’re actually good because I had some visceral negative reaction, and his bold work engaged my emotions on a higher level, and therefore since his work provoked something real it validates the crudity of his technique. You shouldn’t think that because that didn’t happen, and it [...]

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It’s 8:34 p.m., and an elderly woman has fallen down in her home. We take the stretcher in past the evergreen bushes, the mailbox, and the Christmas lights, blinking through the cold darkness their message of suburban yuletide greetings, as the ambulance’s lights frantically spin and light up the driveway. The door’s open, so in [...]

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Archimedes I
I woke up, looked at the clock to the side of my bed. It was flashing. The only information it gave was that the power had blinked off more than two hours ago. I looked at the letter beside the clock. No blinking on that front. It was pretty stationary. I laughed at the [...]

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The Upper Crust, is what the locals called it. A steady strip of flatly laid out ground, stretching out across a plateau and resting at the often frozen grounds of the North Country. There, in the Upper Crust, the ground was covered by trees much like an old man and his beard - full yet [...]

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Read Part I of “Midway” online here and Part II here.
The shock of finding over a hundred thousand dollars hidden in the bedroom ceiling temporarily got me out of the stupor I’d been in. I got an old army surplus duffel bag out of the cabinet under the bed and Shaun and I shoveled the [...]

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Like suede, the grass combed over the Irish hills of the Flinn Family Farm in a natural way, which looked inviting and warm. It was late in the day, which was one that had been drizzled upon four five hours prior to the boy’s chores. Both of the Flinn boys looked like their father - [...]

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Her words just hang there, festering in the room. The air…sticky with anticipation of the next note to fall. As he lies in the corner languidly dreaming of pumpkin pie and tornadoes a whisper sets in his brain.
“Don’t sit like that. They’re watching you.”
“Who is?”
“They are.”
“There are only four of us here.”
“Yeah, and all of [...]

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In the summer you place tea bags in a glass jar with water and bring it to the back porch. You hardly come out here any more even though it gets the best sun. You don’t wipe away the dust as you set the jar on an end table next to a notebook filled with [...]

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Old Tetrahedron Jim, straight out of the Eastern Bloc with a box for a head and a bag for a heart. A swaggering Bogart with egg cartons ‘neath his cassock like a tumored ninja turtle. Cassock being a gentle way to say muumuu, or tarp. The good tarp with the gilding that he wears outandabout [...]

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