She might have kept her nightmare day to herself if she had not been so fucking hungry. Hangry the kids say now and that’s what she was after working and failing at teaching her college journalism classes and basically not eating during the half hour available for stuffing food in her face between classes. The…

written via zoom, revised during crescent city retreat, november 2021 The writer of fictions pulled off the street in front of Coast Central Credit in Arcata, California, and slid her Prius along the curb. In front of her car, a vintage Volvo with faded bumper stickers:  a rainbow Kamala in all block letters, “Read a…

Gerta Gonstern was thirsty. “You need to decompress,” Isabella J. Malthus advised Gerta, who’d arrived at the bar lounge looking harried. Gerta’s social calendar was booked solid. A meeting of the Hot Old Toddies, then on to lunch with the ladies at the Cotillion Bar & Grill. Gerta spent the afternoon as a senior candystriper…

Not carter house June 10, 2020 Act 1 emerging from early morning sober raves
 Folds part and the oblong opens like an ovum. A growing, a bursting ensues. She pushes through the layers of door and steps from darkness into a dull light. Inhales the thickness, letting it coat respiratory membranes. She turns her head…

Not carter house July 1, 2020 The wind blew the thoughts out of my head. And dinner landed in the dirt, along with the six-pack of to-go margaritas. The wind blew the thoughts out of my head and dinner landed in the dirt when table tumbled over, the table with the avocado green umbrella, the…

Not Carter House June 24 2020 Slather hated his apartment complex. Let’s start with that. Every day at Raven Acres Deluxe Gardens, he could smell what all the neighbors were cooking. And they could smell his. Cooking. Family ruckus? Everyone knew about it. Everyone knew which mom yelled the loudest at her kids. Everyone knew…

Not carter house May 3, 2020 Tensions were riding high. But the conflict was all the make-believe drunk shit, the kind that comes when the silent strong type drinks a couple shots and becomes the talking weird type. She had not seen it coming. A person couldn’t always tell, with Melvin, what was play and…

  Not carter house March 27, 3030 In the bottle, a jumble of liquid wind. Raven shook the contents of the two-litter jug. Elevate delight, she said. She grinned. He stumbled across the room. Reached for the jug and unscrewed the cap from its hole, the entrance to a life of sunshine or an evening…

Carter House! Probably the last time, maybe forever and ever but who know that then. Feb. 19, 2020 Rose pushed her butt to the end of the tall rock, mostly quartzite but a composite really, grey slate below her that peeled off in layers. Flat rocks, nothing glam. Like the blank pallet on which an…

She woke up that morning with all the time in the world. Her to-do list was so remarkably short that it didn’t deserve to be called a to-do list. She needed to put a piece of mail in an outgoing box. She needed to shave her shins. But really. That was hardly a reason to…

Twanker preferred to think of himself as a preference hedonist, the kind of guy who looked at his options and chose the paths that made him happiest. Tonight, that meant a few drinks at Bruno’s Supper Club, just off the playa, two barstools down from Psychic Mike. The room reeked of Mike’s cigar-soaked leather vest…