Selected Stories:

 

Casements

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Because of your name, and mine. Because we were seated in the A’s in class, until your mother changed your name back to W when she found out what your father did. Because of your shoulders.

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LA Review of Books, Fall 2016

 

Rink

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Children do not think of memory. What use do they have for nostalgia?

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Prairie Schooner, 2015 Winter

 

The Late Music of Morton Howell

 

Dad always said that it was all about the standard. He thought that purely free jazz was like building the ground you’re standing on at the same time as jumping off it. There’s too much to think about, and thinking gets muddy. The standard does the thinking for you, he said. You’ve got to have common ground in order to fly. You’ve got to have something to return to.

 

Slice Magazine, Issue #15

 

Witch

 

She said this was for my own good—if I was kept in the dark, I would never be afraid of it.

 

An excerpt from my novella-in-progress, The Spirit Photographer in the Guernica/PEN America Flash Series. (Read more at Guernica or PEN America.)

 

Plum Baby

 

There isn't enough time in this world to grow your own tree. 

 

NPR 3-minute fiction finalist. You can read and listen here.

 

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The family store went down like a sinking stump in the swamp. Mama and Little Key and Daddy Key walked the entire four miles to the store together, Daddy shrieking like a chicken all the way. Then Mama and Daddy made Little Key walk the four miles home while they cleaned up the body. Down that dirt road Little Key kicked his feet, all alone. The flat, fat, swamp road walk. Fields on either side. In the Mississippi Delta, the earth is water-line flat. The earth is no egg. Horizon so far off you have to imagine it’s there to keep your heart steady.

 

Glimmer Train, Issue #86