Writers' Forum, Colorado Springs, Colorado. Volume 28, 2002.  
[short story] 

... After her mother’s funeral, Eunice sits on the concrete patio of Richard’s mother in a cheap nylon lounge chair and smokes.  She wears jeans.  Her hair is cut in a page boy.  Although she was unemotional in the hospital, she is inconsolable now and emits heaving sobs which she is ashamed of, and so keeps getting up and going behind the garage for some privacy.  Normally, she is much better at hiding her feelings.  Richard comes out of his bedroom and joins the two of them.  He is sixteen years old now, shy and moody, and has just masturbated to the Charles Atlas ad in an old comic book.  He is quiet and secretive and imagines his loneliness to be poetic.  He wonders whether he will die in Vietnam. 

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Chattahoochee Review, Volume XIX, Number 1, Fall 1998.  Nominated for a Pushcart Prize. [short story] 

1.  Her name is Rose, and she wears a house dress from JC Penney with red roses on it, and she walks up to the climbing red rose bush in the backyard with a pair of garden snippers.  She is wearing gloves, not because of the thorns, but because all her life she’s had a rash on her right hand which embarrasses her.  She thinks women are supposed to have beautiful hands, and she doesn’t, and so she seeks out any opportunity to cover them.  “Don’t take my picture,” she says to me, but I take it anyway.  She also thinks her nose is too big, too Italian, and later she puts a bouquet of roses on the Formica dinette in a scrubbed-out peanut butter jar.  Skippy.  I still have the picture from that day.  Would you like to see it?

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Contra/Diction: New Queer Male Fiction, edited by Brett Josef Grubisic, Arsenal Pulp Press; also published in Chiron Review, Issue #55, Autumn, 1998. [short story] 

1.  Do you remember the woman who was kidnapped from the Dayton Mall?
She was found in the sewer in front of Tom's house four years later, on Christmas Eve day while Tom was out shopping for a pair of garden gloves.  It was not clear whether her body had washed up from another location or had been deposited in the sewer the night of the murder and remained all those years, waiting to be found.  In the summertime, the kids playing wiffleball in the street used the manhole cover as home plate.  Maria, an old Italian widow who guarded the street from inside, behind her draperies, brought out a folding chair and set it up on the tree lawn so she could comfortably look into the open manhole.  Below, the men from the city explored the sewer.  As usual, Maria wore only her nightgown, even though a light snow was falling and her flesh was trembling.  "Honey," she said to Tom's lover, who stood there in his gray wool overcoat and expensive shoes, "I wanna know whata goes in my street, but I gotta sit.  My legs, they not so good, honey.  Such a thing!  And at Christmas.  This is a no picnic."  She crossed herself and took another bite of her homemade sesame candy. 

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Portland Literary Review, Spring, 1998. [short story] 

There are moments in your life when everything changes forever.  Sometimes you recognize a moment while you’re living it, but usually you don’t.  I’ve had three moments so far, and the only obvious one was when my mother died.  But even with that one, I had no idea how much her death would free me, propel me.  Her last words to me were, “Can you find my diary?”  At least, that’s what I thought she said.  She was very weak and hardly breathing. 

I was twelve years old the summer I bought that diary, maybe eleven, and it really wasn’t for her, but for Mary Pat and Cathy Culhane.  I bought it at Groner’s Drug from Mrs. Pitkin, a midget with frosted black hair who stood on a stool behind the counter.

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Reclaiming the Heartland: Lesbian and Gay Voices from the Midwest, edited by Karen Lee Osborne, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. [short story] 
 

The synapses in my brain are working overtime.
Connections are being made, memories uncovered.  Things are moving very fast now, I can barely keep up with the changes.  My windshield is dirty, and when I push the washer button to clean it, a charge of adrenalin surges through me and I feel my heartbeat high in my neck and under my tongue.  Back and forth, the wipers slash.  My neck, my tongue, the node under each of my arms.  I remember a day, I think in 1957, I was seven years old.  I was sitting in my Uncle Tony's Studebaker with my father.  Studebakers are history now, dead, you don't even see them in the vehicle graveyards along Route-68...

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