Category — Short Stories

A short short published in Meridian.

Fine Young Woman
Meridian: The Semi-Annual from the University of Virginia

While your daughter’s in the bathroom, I wipe your counters clean. To keep from looking at you, I wipe the butcher’s block, the stovetop, the rusted metal around the faucet. In your kitchen, this is what you say to me: “What a fine young woman you’re becoming.”

I cannot turn around. I say “Thank you,” to the dirty water in the sink, to the bits of grease and bone between my fingers and say “Thank you.” In my head, what you have just said to me beats like a pulse, “What a fine woman you’re becoming.” Fine woman. That’s me?

Your daughter, ever since I can remember, I followed her into everything — soccer, swimming, gymnastics, Brownies. I signed myself over for her. Because I wanted to be near her. Because I wanted to turn into someone like her. In our Brownie A-line jumpers and brown acorn caps, you said, “Turn around. Spin for me. God, Heartbreakers, you.”

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This was my first published short story.

Miss Richmond’s Beauty Secret
Jane

Miss Richmond says, Jesus, please.  I’m working here.  This is my job, okay?

When I walked into the chorus room at Kennedy High School, Miss Richmond was spraying her bangs into place.  Miss Richmond doesn’t like anybody except for her hair.  The other Miss Virginia contestants were stepping into their swimsuits, swabbing Vaseline on their teeth.  They hung their pageant sashes on the music stands, over the sheet music to Whitney Houston’s, “The Greatest Love of All.”

Miss Richmond says I’ve humiliated her, I’ve hurt her feelings, I’ve stabbed her in the back.  Isn’t that enough? she asks. 

I sit down on the risers while Miss Richmond adjusts the straps to her periwinkle two-piece.  It’s a strip of spandex that twists in the middle, like a crescent bun. 

Miss Richmond says, But aren’t you something?  Look at you.  What’d you do to your hair?  Comb it with a pork chop?

We laugh at this, nervous.  Miss Richmond bares her pearly white teeth, her radiant smile.  Her pageboy, as usual, looks perfect.  Each blond, blow-dried hair a perfect, 90-degree angle.  Miss Richmond and her hair, story of my life.

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This was published in Blackbird, a cool new literary magazine based here in Richmond.  There is also audio of the reading.

The Boss’s Boyfriend
Blackbird 

I thought, One night. Big deal. In and out.

You’ll regret it, I said to myself, but then shuffled that thought to the very back of my brain. It’ll never last between them, I thought. She’ll chase him off, she’ll frighten him, she’ll lose him in a week.

I took the train west to Evanston, to the stop where the mothers get off and wives, where the wrinkled brown man in the newspaper stand winked at me when I climbed down the stairs. Crossing the street, I held my gloves over my ears and my hair jerked in the wind. I walked two blocks to Stephen’s house, reciting the address—Ten Two Twenty, Ten Two Twenty—until I found his large brick townhouse with a gravel driveway of pointed, gray stones.

That first night I said just once, and the next I said just once more. I’ll go back to the ones I’ve known, I said, the ones I loved before. Shaved heads and ropey arms, boys as skinny as girls.

I forgot that’s how it always starts. That you know it’s a lost cause, but still you wait. Even with a man, I thought with a man it would be different. But this place is just the same. You get in and bide your time and tell yourself, He’s falling. He’s falling and just doesn’t know how to say it. 

Read the entire story on Blackbird…

Fans of Whores on the Hill might like “The Girl Who Drank Lye.”  It appeared in Mid-American Review.  Check out this excerpt.

The Girl Who Drank Lye
Mid-American Review

Mary’s left arm was shorter than the right one, Stephanie had asthma, Alyssa’s mom was straight from Korea, I wore corrective glasses, but Shawna was the girl everybody remembered.  Shawna was the girl who drank lye.  

Shawna’s picture was in the McGraw-Hill Health Science book, page sixty-five, down on the right.  Shawna’s dirty blond hair was feathered back and sprayed in wings flanking her face.  She smiled gap-toothed for the camera.  The picture didn’t make much of the black circle scar around her neck.  It was just there, as it was in real life, like a necklace of thin, black twine around Shawna’s sloping throat.  Being the girl who drank lye was like having “BADASS” tattooed across your front gums.  Everybody knew.    

“Do you think I give a shit?”  Shawna asked.  “I drank lye.  Now pony up and hand over your lunch money, bitches.”   [Read more →]