Fiction
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Tina's Island
This story won the Vermont Emerging Writers Contest in 1997
I'm watching an old Gilligan's Island rerun when Mom yells at me from the kitchen, "Tina, I'm making a G&T. Would you like one?"
My mom has this idea that as long as she drinks with someone else, she's not an alcoholic. She told me that once. Alcoholics are only people who drink before 5:00 in the evening or drink alone. I don't drink much, but she only needs someone to share the first one of the day with her. She pretty much handles the rest of the night's drinking on her own.
I've been through Batman & Robin, Lost in Space, the Adams Family, some public television show on fishing, "Catching the Big One." And now, Gilligan's getting into trouble. But that's what it's always like on this show. Gilligan gets everyone into trouble, and then gets everyone out of trouble, too.
Mom's standing in the doorway. No drinks in her hand, just standing there, pulling at her fingers.
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The One
This story was given a staged reading by 'Literally Speaking' in 2005, and a slightly edited version was published in 'Room' literary magazine in 2008.
There was the one with the dark head of curly hair who sat behind her in sophomore Dickens seminar and scribbled notes that she could tell had nothing to do with what the teacher was saying, and when he eventually slipped one onto her desk one day as he walked out of class it turned out to be a very short story about a young woman with a long waterfall of brown hair, remarkably like her own. There was the one who played guitar in a rock band that covered only Grateful Dead songs, and would look out at her from the stage, catching and holding her eyes while he played in a long, trance-like stretch and who told her later that her braids just did him in.
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Someplace Other Than Here
This story was a finalist in Fiction Magazine's Unsolicited competition, 2003.
When I asked him why he hadn't talked to me, asked me for my phone number, he told me about the 6-second rule. His boss was scared of getting sued. Told the guys that they couldn't look at any woman for more than six seconds. He'd let a guy work drunk before he'd let him stare at a girl going into a building they were working on. But he did look at me. Never for long. Just steady and frequently. For weeks, every time I drove in and got out of my car, I'd look up and see the bright blue of his eyes...