Short fiction published in 2010
Pissing on Dolphins
When the last beer was gone, he made his way down the steps, supporting himself against the wall. He paused at the final step, where the high tide barely licked, and began to urinate.
"Take that, you fucking fish," he said. "Come on, man. Do your part. We can fill this thing to the brim. Let's flood those rich fuckers' houses with piss and seawater."
I hesitated from shyness.
"C'mon. No fish is going to bite your pecker off. There's nothing like pissing in the ocean."
So I pissed in the ocean.
When I released my stream, he said, "That will put those dolphins in their place. Uppity fish."
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Published by Beat the Dust.
This is another published excerpt from the unpublished novel of the same name.
Moi et Toi
Short listed for the Fish International Short Story Prize
Learning Stick
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"Come here and give your Grannie a big wet kiss." She was half as tall as me. She had the delicate roundness and wrinkles you expect from a grandma. I imagined if I hugged her tiny frame too hard she would turn to sand and pour from my arms. |
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An excerpt from an unpublished novel was commended by the Willesden Herald 2010 Short Story Competition and appears in the New Stories 4 anthology. It can be purchased from Pretend Genius Press or Amazon.
Short fiction published in 2009
The Family Snaps
Republished by Cell Stories (only available on internet capable phones)
October 2008 (that's the title, not the date)
"Hello," Grandma says, answering the phone in her crackling rural Connecticut accent.
I wish her a happy 85th birthday and we chat. She complains about the monkeys upstairs. I remind her it's not nice to call her Puerto Rican neighbours that. It's not her fault; she picks up the epithets from the rotten old men at bingo.
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When Grandpa Stayed
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One time, after Mom came to live with me and my wife, she told me that Dad had cried twice in his life. Once, he had been told that I would die before my first birthday and only prayer would save his tiny son, but that`s another story. The other time was when they were still courting. She had innocently asked about his Dad, my Grandpa. |
The Family Snaps
"All right, wee man?" asks Morna as she pushes the pushchair up the steep incline at the top of Leith Walk near John Lewis. Her head down, she strains to push the creaking plastic and aluminium contraption. She has the sexless figure of a pre-teen but the gaunt face and the bony fingers suggest a grandma.
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This Collection Transmits
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After the first night of bombing destroyed his work at the University and the second night destroyed his life, he made his first specimen case from the heap that was his home. Its glass front taken from a large picture frame from which he had removed the photograph showing his smiling family: a proud husband, sitting stiff and straight, a wasp-waisted woman and an open-mouthed baby upon her lap. Since then, his collection maintained a line that crossed the gulf between the time before the war and now, a constancy that transmitted and each specimen its receiver.
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Today I Eat the World
Voted best of 2008-09 and performed by Liar's League at their 2nd birthday party.The Last Voyage of the Agata
Its mainly a heavy, irresistible drowsiness you feel. Of course, there are the initial moments of confusion and panic when your body revolts against the shock of the cold water and your mind switches from placidly watching the ripples amongst the waves to the panicked realisation that you are about to die. But, the final moments of drowning are like drifting asleep on a cold night.
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Short fiction published in 2008
Luke 5:16
At first it was gruesome work watching those disembodied heads pouring from the large silver cylinder. Dragging the filled box to my bench, their eyeless faces -- all bald, button-nosed and rosebud lipped -- would shake in disapproval. The sockets of their eyes were empty, because it was my job to fill them.
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Today I Eat the World
Today I eat the world, I said to myself.
I descended the stairs, pyjama-clad, and began preparing an American breakfast from the deepsouth of my childhood. The kind of breakfast that gave my bearded forefathers, still stinking of bourbon, the get-up-and-go to destroy entire Cherokee nations and still have enough moxie and pep to lay an intercontinental railroad with their bones. It was to be nourishment enough to win the cold war, the war on drugs, and, for kicks, a few south Asian conflicts and humanitarian interventions. You don't cure polio or invent rock and roll on an empty stomach, no sir.
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Magnolia
The bravest man I ever met wore gold ballerina slippers and cleaned bank toilets. Magnolia was always last inside. She gathered her cleaning products from the back of the van and followed us, wearing her ballerina slippers and a costume jewelry tiara combed into her thinning bubblegum?pink hair. First into the building was the crew boss. I forget her name but she was a bitter, spiteful, old woman. She spat cigarette smoke and nasty gossip from a wrinkled mouth that reminded me of a mutt`s asshole. I avoided her as much as possible. Michael floated close behind her with quick, little steps and a black plastic veil of garbage bags. I dragged the dusty, ancient bulk of a vacuum cleaner into the building trailing a tangle of cord and hosing.
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