2025
Echo Syndrome
Small Wonders issue 20
When my daughter climbs in the car, there’s three of her. They shouldn’t all fit in the passenger seat, but they overlap each other to save space. Together they reach for the seatbelt, their movements almost in unison but not quite; their asynchrony makes me slightly nauseous, and I swallow hard before putting the car into gear and inching out of the school parking lot.
One of them tells me about the B+ she got on her Calculus test. Another puts in her earbuds and hunches down, nursing some hurt that she’ll never reveal to me. The third opens the mirror on the back of the sun flap, adjusts her lip gloss, and practices her pout before extending her arm to take a selfie. None of them seems more real than the other; all are hazy around the edges, and slightly see-through. At a stop light I take a breath, a question on my lips, but when I turn to look at them, a fourth has emerged. She doesn’t move or talk. She just sits there, staring at me, with disconcertingly unblinking eyes, daring me to speak.
Written on the Subway Walls
The Sunday Morning Transport
When machinery cleaved rock and stone, I was born. When steel scraped against soil, creating open space where there had been only darkness, the earth whispered, Look!
I came into being then: a furrow in the ground. A trench. A pathway opened to the chill blue sky. The earth shifted and sighed around me, and named all that I was seeing, which had not existed in the darkness before my birth. Air, it whispered. And birds, and clouds. And then, soon after, water.
It rushed in: a flooding tumble that filled me like oxygen, like lifeblood. I remember its caress. The boats buoyed on top, weighty and wide. Lake Erie reaching out with distant, icy fingertips; the mighty Genesee shouting greetings as my canal improbably soared through the aqueduct above it, a flying waterway carved from stone. I remember touching both lake and ocean, sweet and salt.
2024
The Stolen Sabbath
The Cosmic Background
The Colonist
Trollbreath, Issue 2
The Stories I Tell Myself (essay)
Apparition Lit Issue 28
The Witch Trap
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 48
2023
When the Moon Wakes
Stupefying Stories, October 3 2023
The Last First Flight of the Phoenix
Wyngraf, Issue #4
Little Fish, Big Fish
Flash Fiction Online, August 2023
Where the Wind Blows
Flash Point SF, August 25 2023
Atticat
Spirits & Ghouls: Short Stories
The Day of the Sea
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July/August 2023
Beverly's Sonata
Not One of Us, Issue #75 (Free to read/listen at PodCastle)
Reprinted in PodCastle 815
2022
Between the Storms
Worlds of Possibility
What the Water Left Behind
Into Chaos
A Recipe for Crocodile Tears
The Dread Machine, Issue 2.3
Spindle House
The Future Fire, 2022.63 (Autumn 2022)
The Weight of It All
Fantasy Magazine, Issue 83 (September 2022)
Between the Lines
Factor Four Magazine, Issue 15 (September 2022)
Fragile
Wyngraf, August 2022
Lisa's Garden
Kaleidotrope, August 2022
Ninety-Five Percent of the Ocean
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May/June 2022
Reprinted in Inner Worlds Issue 5
The Topography of Memory
Fusion Fragment, Issue #10
Opal, Everywhere
Not One of Us, Issue #69
2021
Til Human Voices Wake Us
Mermaids Monthly, Issue #3
The Taste of Centuries, the Taste of Home
khōréō, Issue 1.1
Reprinted in Immigrant Sci-Fi Short Stories
A Gardener Teaches His Son to Enrich the Soil and Plan for the Future
Triangulation: Habitats
Reprinted in Small Wonders Issue 3
2020
The Cat Lady and the Petitioner
Translunar Travelers Lounge, Issue 3
Reprinted in CatsCast Episode 1
Mirrored
Flash Fiction Online, May 2020
Reprinted in Hidden Realms Short Stories
Reprinted in Small Wonders Issue 14