Short Stories

The short stories I write focus on humor and the absurd, often starting with a structural element or absurd detail, or a 'trick'.

INTACT-Honorable mention in Glimmer Train's New Writer Short Story Contest.

My ex-boyfriend is living in my brain. He moved in a while ago. Maybe a month. Maybe a week or two, I couldn’t say for sure. I am sitting in a comfy plush recliner in hospital room, with a drip in my arm. The nurse is wearing a yellow cardigan and everything feels a little too fuzzy. She says my name so softly. Imogen. Imogen. Then all I see are lemons. Mint. Rain. Peaches.

LITHOPAEDION

The rain was the problem. I just couldn’t see and really that sounds crass I know. That sounds ridiculous, like “oh the dumb bitch couldn’t see,” but really, it was the rain on so many levels. The rain was—as my mother would say—wet rain, and it hadn’t stopped for three weeks. London felt like it was going to fall into the North Sea. The Thames had burst its banks too many times for the East End fish wives to ooh and ahh. The English countryside had washed away and everyone was saying global warming three hundred times-a-fucking-day. Great, huge bulbous drops of relentless, bone-chilling wetness. London was a greyish, soaking slab of concrete. Drab. Droll. There wasn’t anything else to do. So it was raining and that made it hard to see. So whatever. My point is— I was desperate. I’d recently finished a semester for my masters and I was taking a small celebratory libation at The Chuckling Pig down off Green Street, that pub tucked behind those fancy shops on Old Bond Street, the ones with the shiny Christmas display windows. That was when I saw him. I’d said goodbye to my mate Rosie. He was leaning against the corner of the pub and the alley off Old Greyhound Street, opposite the Waitrose. The lights were all blurry in the rain but it was dark—except a yellow street lamp lit his serious face.

PERMISSION SLIP

It was my birthday, and that was why I was late for my first period class, Civics, with Mr. P. My Mom had given me my presents, cards, a cup of coffee, and a banana nut muffin in bed, all through bleary eyes. My Dad had poked in and out, tying ties and tucking in his shirt as we unwrapped gifts and opened cards. My comforter became a rainbow of brightly torn, colored paper and envelopes, like discarded wings from exotic birds. I got: a sweater from Jcrew, a gift-card from my Nanna to Red Lobster, some bullshit YA book from my Aunt Rachel and a pencil pouch from somebody I forget because they’re gift was so lame. The permission slip was still hidden in its St.Hayden’s High School embossed creamy thick envelope on my bedside table and I had almost forgotten to give Mom the permission slip to sign it.