All three of us are in the dining room, sitting at the small round table, but I’m the only one who has a vice-like grip on a half-eaten pork chop. And it’s clear that this is making my two roommates rather uneasy. Or, perhaps it’s the fact that I am shaking this piece of meat wildly at them as I shout belligerent threats that’s making them nervous. In any case, they are both still giving me that steely eyed stare that they’ve been giving me for the last twenty minutes, but behind that I detect a certain air of fright. What the hell is he planning to do with that…

I guess the first thing you should know about me is that I didn’t find the clitoris until I was well into my thirties. In my defense though, before then I had been granted precious few opportunities to search for the darn thing. I guess I’m what you would call a late bloomer. In all things, really. Not just the sex stuff. But that’s okay; I’m fine with that. And that’s beside the point, anyway. The point is, as a man in his thirties, it was rather shocking to me when I found it. Throughout my rather solitary twenties I overheard endless conversations from women complaining about men not being…

It was at the security checkpoint that Charlie felt that funny feeling in his stomach. It happened just before he removed his shoes and just after he took out all the items in his pockets and placed them in one of those grey plastic bins on the black conveyor belt that fed the x-ray machine. He saw his cracked phone lying next to his worn leather wallet and his cheap blue headphones in the bin and remembered he hadn’t heard from Jessica in two days. By the time both of his socked feet were making friends with the rough airport carpet below, he knew he might be in trouble, and…

This short story was publish in Scarlet Leaf Review.

Davis Tillman was not surprised when he awoke to the sound of furious car horns coming from outside his bedroom window. Nor was he surprised when he heard threats of violence also coming from outside his bedroom window. For Davis Tilman lived in a cheap duplex at the corner of Virgil and Conti, widely known as the worst intersection in the entire city, especially in the morning.  It didn’t used to be like this. It used to be a fine intersection, if a bit narrow and pothole-riddled, situated at the border of Lakeview and Mid-City, two large, respectable, neighborhoods in the city. But then the city decided to shut down…

Kevin rested his back against the wrought iron fence and stared up at theorange and red swirls in the sky. He frowned. Next to his feet on the crackedsidewalk lay his backpack. He had grown tired of carrying it when the waitexceeded 30 minutes. Hands in his pockets, the right desperately clutching his phone. Vibrate, he pleaded. Vibrate, you stupid bitch phone. But the phone remained lifeless in his pocket. Kevin continued to stare up at the fading sky and weighed his options. He could call someone in the group. Jacqueline, maybe? He had always gotten along best with her. Well, besides Josh. No, he decided after a moment. They…

The claws of the overgrown hill tore at Nathan Stern as he made his way up its rather steep slope. They tore at his exposed legs, his uncovered arms, and at his dwindling sanity. Like the good little soldiers they were, his feet continued to climb, ignoring the pain that came in hot and disappeared in a flash. In the moonlight, the treacherous hill glistened like a silver nightmare. Which is exactly what this is, Nathan thought. A nightmare. A very real, yet impossible, nightmare. One that started less than an hour ago, when he woke up in bed and found he was unable to move.   As he climbed, he…