Writing News

I’m very happy to post that my novella, “The Natural History of Calamity,” will appear in issue 14 of Black Gate.

Here’s a sample…

I took the Will Charbonneau case on the same day an exceedingly creepy ex-boyfriend reentered my life. The way the case played out, and the reason the pinhead smashed back into my life, were intimately related. It would have saved me no end of trouble if I’d known that from the start.

I’m on the phone with my mother. “So are you seeing anybody?” she asks.

Coming from my mother that’s not a question, it’s a deep pit full of scorpions and irritable cobras. From her second generation, Italian-American perspective, the way my 34-year-old uterus was going unused was a disaster on a par with Frank Sinatra’s death.

“Ma,” I say, in the Universal Warning Tone, “Don’t start.”

“I was just asking,” she says, in the Universal Wounded Tone. “I wanted to know if you were bringing someone to Brenda’s wedding.”

That would be my cousin Brenda, who at the advanced age of twenty-three is marrying a Port Authority cop she met while getting a ticket for drinking Stoli on the PATH train. I’m saved from the pit by Gerald, my secretary, who sticks his head around the corner of my door.

“Someone to see you,” he mouths.

I nod and held up one finger.

“Gotta go, Ma, business,” I say.