novels, short fiction, poetry

" It is discovered that there are tiny black catfish in the cenote. The girl sees them first. Arms flung lavishly around her father’s neck, she pauses and says, matter-of-factly, “Daddy, there are lots of little fishes in here.” 

" Soon the music is a wall of sound, at war with itself, falling apart and coming together  again. A calculated confusion of drums and brass. The crowd is shouting, stomping and  swaying. It’s the waggle dance of bees drunk on nectar, Roy thinks, full of that same  urgency and joy. 

"At the precise moment when the bailiff removed his handcuffs, just as the judge pronounced him a free man, the little fragments of eggshell shot forward across the floor of the courtroom, like metal filings drawn to a magnet, and stopped at Carl Hemsley’s feet." 

"I found her later, on the patio off the visitor’s lounge, watching the sunrise paint the mountains the colors of her childhood: yellow ochre, cadmium red, pthalo blue. A goshawk stirred a chatter of starlings into flight against the lightening sky. 'Ever make mistakes in life?' Bob Ross often asked. 'Let’s make them birds.' And with a flick of his wrist, he would turn a wayward splatter or smudge of paint into a flock of gulls or an arrow of geese. 'See, they’re birds now,' he’d say." 

My story "The Best of Everything" will appear next summer in Allium, the award-winning publication of the English & Creative Writing department at Columbia College Chicago. This story asks, when is it okay to lie to those we love?

Two of my poems will be featured this fall in Scavengers Literary Magazine, a publication of Querencia Press!