fiction

Complete listing of fiction
and poetry publications.

The Cartographer of Dreamland

This is me at twelve years old, running for all I'm worth up Classon Avenue, bookbag under one arm, with Kevin Lester and three other bullies in close pursuit. They're mostly bigger than me, and the only reason they haven't caught me yet is because I had a half-block head start from the Nativity School gate.
This isn't just about the atlas now; they want to punish me. I don't want to go home again minus my bookbag, with torn clothes and another bloody nose.

Read more in
InterGalactic Medicine Show, Issue 33 | April 2013

Pinocchio's Diary

Of all the tools father uses to make me, the chisel is the cruelest. Long after he has had his Ciró and retired for the evening, I lie on my bed of shavings, my half-formed body criss-crossed with burning gouges. In the small hours I finally drift into a kind of stupor, my head full of the scent of resin that seeps from the cuts.

Read more in
Happily Ever After, edited by John Klima

The Natural History of Calamity

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.

Read more in the Spring 2010 issue of
Black Gate (#14)

Season of the Long Now

It shouldn’t be taking this long--two years in October--Barney thought.

Two years since Yvonne hadn’t come home. Two years since the phone woke him in the middle of the night with disaster in its ring. Two years of going to sleep with a hole in his heart, and two years of waking up to emptiness.

Barney did all the right things. He consulted with a priestess, sacrificed to the gods, and wore nothing but animal skins for his season of mourning. But when he doffed his pelts for the last time, the dull numbness that was supposed to come away with them stayed.

Read more in the Winter 2008 issue of
Electric Velocipede

From Wayfield, From Malagasy

Most of the crew were already at their stations when general quarters sounded on the SGC Malagasy: the delta-vee alarm always brought curious off-watch personnel to the pilothouse and engineering control room.

PT3 Mansourian, on throttle watch, was the first to notice the radiation leak, and the first to die. Because of a design flaw in the ventilation system, there were some dead spots in the air circulation and the steady ooze of highly radioactive coolant hadn’t reached any sensors to trigger an alarm. Mansourian used the IC to tell the engineering officer of the watch about the leak.

Read more in the October 2006 issue of
Analog Science Fiction and Fact (print only)

Do Neanderthals Know?

I was there when Pinky Sills became a proteus. Maybe not at the exact moment--perhaps even Pinky couldn't say when that was--but I was there at the beginning.

We were eating lunch in the fifth floor cafeteria of Ihinger-Ibex's Minnesota Campus. It was April, but there was still enough winter in the air to keep us from venturing outside the corporate park. It was our regular threesome for lunch: me, Pinky, and Joyce Gannet, my wife and boss of the Composite Materials Group. We were sitting in the open section of the cafeteria, even though we all had executive-level badges and could have used the dining room with the suits, when Pinky pulled out a plastic zip-lock bag full of lettuce and set it on the table.

Read more in the December 2005 issue of
Analog Science Fiction and Fact (print only)

Coney Island Wonder Stories

An anthology of fiction set in Coney Island past, present, and future, includes stories from Kij Johnson, Maureen F. McHugh, Mike Resnick, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Lawrence Watt-Evans.

In almost everyone’s childhood there is some magical spot; some nexus where the everyday world touches another universe. Coney Island was that place in my own boyhood. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the historical Coney Island was more apparent than it is today, in the decrepit shells of public baths, hotel facades camouflaged in graffiti, and the picked-apart skeletons of amusement park rides slowly rusting into the urban brownfields upon which they stood.

Coney Island was also the frontier. More than just a tacky collection of greasy boardwalk stands and souvenir shops, the wide sandy beach marked the end of North America. To stand on the sand and look seaward was to gaze on wonder.

From the Introduction
Edited by Robert J. Howe & John Ordover
Available from Wildside Press

Entropy's Girlfriend

You know what the difference is between Eugene, Oregon, and Manhattan? In Manhattan you can tell when the Grateful Dead is in town by the sudden blossoming of deadheads around Madison Square Garden. Eugene sits on the Willamette River (across I-5 from its blue-collar sister city, Springfield), a valley redoubt of aging hippies in tie-dyed tee shirts, and Volvo-driving health Nazis. Moving to Eugene is what middle class folks do instead of joining the French Foreign Legion: people who wanted to transform their lives; abandon their roots and become someone new, fetched up on the Willamette River’s Left Bank.

Read more in the October 2005 issue of
Analog Science Fiction and Fact (print only)

Miscarriage of Justice

Spring at the Phyllis Schlafly Correctional Facility in Broward County. I'm here to visit my mother, who will be 58 in a week. This is no kindness to her, or me. It is a state-mandated visit. I am a living reproach.

I have never seen my mother when she was not in one phase of pregnancy or another, and today is no exception. She looks tired and done to death. The lines around her mouth have solidified since my last visit; they are set in the stone of her face. She looks -- she is -- angry. She has been angry ever since I can remember.

Read more at Salon.com

Long Growing Season
Newer York

Molly was pulling weeds when she saw the first one. He was dressed in old-fashioned business clothes, and he was carrying a briefcase. Molly blinked and stood up. He was facing away from her, looking down along the line of the old street. She couldn't imagine what he was looking at so intently -- the "street" was nothing more than a weed patch, a little straighter than most, but otherwise unremarkable.

"Hello," she called out, walking slowly toward the man. She didn't want to sneak up behind him, but she was more than slightly vexed that he was on her land, as well marked as it was.

The man continued to peer along the track and paid no attention to her.

"I said hello!"

She took another step toward him, her irritation building, and suddenly he wasn't there any more. Molly stared dumbly at the spot where he'd been standing. There were no footprints in the soft ground; not even the least disturbance. She poked the ground gently with a forefinger, making a small dimple in the soil.

She felt her forehead, wondering if she had heatstroke. She wasn't sure, if she did have heatstroke, that she'd feel warm to herself. She took the rest of the afternoon off from her chores.

First published in Newer York, Edited by Lawrence Watt-Evans,
Roc, June 1991
Read the entire story Here