Ordinary Handsome

 Last night, I dreamed my father’s Great White Continental flattened Mira’s last bucket of calibrachoa. He was a jagged silhouette in the headlights, jacket and slacks ruffled in a gulf of mossy fog until the rain blotted him away. My last act of attrition was leaving Miami when I was seventeen. He gave me fifty dollars in expired Harris Teeter coupons and a one-way bus ticket to this perdition…

A big thank you to DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Suzanne Craig-Whytock, and judge Rod Carley for choosing my short story ‘The water ran cold’ as the winner of DarkWinter’s Second Anniversary Contest. DarkWinter has become an exceptional showcase for fiction and poetry, so congratulations to all who entered and contribute their work! The water ran cold channeling down her back. She sighed and…

Photo by Amaan Shaikh on Pexels.com Fresh cut oak was stacked behind the restaurant, a scent thickened by rain. He recalled Miss Tracee liked the way it burned in a stove but complained about the stink. Hiccuped out of pig mud, she said. She wouldn’t keep it in her house, she had him bring it in from the woodshed whenever a fire was required. He carried it wobbly over stone ground, and the bark…

We do not talk about her passing.That is settled language. you complain about the undercooked soup,the soggy hambone beside the crockpotdripping on brown butcher paperas if it were our lives You still believe in unseen thingswhich, once seenbecome clutter Ask when there is nothinggrief is not nothing

Comes a cracked field with sheaves of brown ice sideling across a wide muck, luminous steam rises silver, twines above random pines missed by the clearcut. Spelman recalls this road, how it sat then, hackled like a mean dog, shoulders rising, backend dipping. It’s different now, a different land. A run from the long legs of that last Tennessee day and he is still and always caught hiding in its…

Comes a cracked field with sheaves of brown ice sideling across a wide muck. Luminous steam rises silver, twining above random pines missed by the clearcut. Spelman recalls this road from his woebegone youth, how it sat hackled like a mean dog, shoulders rising, backend dipping. It is all different now, a different land. A run from the long legs of that last Tennessee day and he is still and…

It is with much surprise to hear I was nominated for ‘Best of the Net’ for one of my short stories, “Lamentations of a Farmer.” Many, many thanks to Suzanne Craig-Whytock and DarkWinter Literary Magazine for the nomination. The story can be found here should you wish to read it. And please check out the exceptional writing in DarkWinter. It should also be noted that Suzanne is also a remarkable…

In the dimming ecstasy of copperish summer light, they walked this same section of Windermere Street. Liselle wore a shapeless indigo dress and grass-stained cowboy boots, and he, a pair of Levis and a linen shirt. They paused at the grounds of the old liquor store to stare at a row of battered tin pails overflowed with scarlet and white calibrachoa. Blood and ghosts, he said. She smiled,…

we wear our old age and fabrics hunched  over well remembered cucumber stained menus,  the soup or salad this time, the eggs or the  figs, our time foretold in the burlesque of trees, in  the updraft of their skirts, shoulders  stressed with burgundy and orange, hands  adorned with torn cowboy leather,  apparel flung apparently as windshield drapery,  their lividity dispensed into storm…

Each leaf is traced in bone and silver by 5 a.m. The shadow of their collective drapery spreads across porches like bayou moss. Dogs bark from near/far and their timbre echoes between the trees. Windermere Street  is old, or feels old, and the houses, post-war and tired, are unhappily wed to crabgrassed and feathered dandelion lawns. You just know that a broken picture window or a busted water…

Revolutionary War song The sign said, Abandon all yer hope, and the shack behind it said the same thing. The place was a simple timber frame with a dirt-packed floor and a plank porch. It was shaggy but sturdy, and looked abandoned, like a place of refuge rather than a home. He heard piano music spill out the doorway, Twas early day as poets say, just when the sun was rising, A soldier stood…

This story was originally to be included in Asunder, baby, but I switched it out for something else, and I can’t remember why. Maybe because of its quiet circumspect tone, and I thought it might get lost. I hope you enjoy it, and thank you for reading. — Steve i. Francesca will miss the lake, but only in summer.  There is loneliness here now, an airiness between the burden of making toast and…

Many, many thanks to Elizabeth Gauffreau for her kind and thoughtful review of ‘Asunder, baby.’

Just a little bit of the next thing. Thanks for reading. Shiloh could be a pretty town in summer, Liselle said, if it weren’t for its tourist trap aesthetics. It was like a, whatchamacallit, one of those plants that draws in flies and then consumes them slowly, dissolves them down to their core enzymes until there’s nothing left, not even a lacy bit of wing. A Venus flytrap? Yes, she said,…

The title Asunder, baby came from the mystics, I think, and this is its story. I try not to dwell too much on the cellular structure of creativity because that would blow the whole thing away. The word ‘asunder’ just popped into my head one day because it sounded, you know, dramatic. Then ‘baby’ fell behind it, a little lopsided, and there it was. Titles can be tough, but this one didn’t even…

The title Asunder, baby came from the mystics, I think, and this is its story. I try not to dwell too much on the cellular structure of creativity because that would blow the whole thing away. The word ‘asunder’ just popped into my head one day because it sounded, you know, dramatic. Then ‘baby’ fell behind it, a little lopsided, and there it was. Titles can be tough, but this one didn’t even…