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The Surrogate

Women sit around the rim of a waiting room, elbow-to-elbow: short, tall, dark, pale. A stack of National Geographics elevates the table; an old-fashioned clock annotates the silence. The air smells of latex. The carpet is rough with sand.
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Flash Fiction Magazine, January 2022

Godomatic

I met him in a parking lot. He was unattended, headlights lifted up to the sky, wheels slowly turning, going nowhere. As I leaned over him to place my hands on his body, his hood ornament snared my cross, and his wheels stopped spinning. It was not raining, but his wipers drew slow half-circles on his windshield, spreading the fluid that spurted from his ducts. I knew then he had found God, that he could become one of my flock. After all, he was one of our creations, and we were children of God.
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Flash Fiction Online, August 2020

Fossils

She spent so much time with her dinosaurs that she gave them names. The specimen we worked on had first been discovered as a fragment of femur; hence he became Seymour the femur. “Seymour,” she would say, “You are a most beautiful puzzle.” “Aha, Seymour, you’ve been keeping secrets!” and, reverently, she hummed to him, blew dust from his grave, and imagined aloud what his life would have been like. He was a sauropod, his genus as yet unidentified. Each time she uncovered one of his fragments, she made a clucking sound with her tongue, and I imagined his neck ratcheting up further in the sky, piercing the clouds we begged for, for respite from the heat.
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Fleas on the Dog, Issue 6, May 2020

The Last Polar Bear

From her home, all that she could see was water. On calm days, the ocean almost resembled the land, an unending plain of not quite blue, just as she was no longer almost white. Her pelt had yellowed and began to ripple, to mat. It seemed to crack when she turned; it swayed from her sides as she paced the edges of her home, considering the water, diving in, then briefly returning. She hated her home, but if she hated it too much, it would leave her. If she stayed on it too long, she would burrow it down to its core.
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Flash Fiction Magazine, May 2020

Four Sons

As the sun dropped from the sky, the ship began to empty out.  I wondered, briefly, if the dock might give way beneath the urgency of those who had come to meet their loved ones, but then I remembered that joy was light, not weighty, that if anything the land might rise beneath their feet.  I watched them from a safe distance—we all did.  The children had settled between us like little ducklings, their feet kicking below, skirting the tops of the grass.
Buy the book: 27 Stories, The Winter 2018 Owl Canyon Press Hackathon Contest Winners

Owl Canyon Press, April 2019