Tag: Family Fiction
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The Crossed-Out God
Unpublished short fiction Tobias was born on a boat in the harbor. Back then there was just one God and God was the largest thing. Tobias’s grandfather was a boat captain, and the giant God was in the sea around them, but also in the sky and the birds and the boat. As a boy,…
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The Quilts
Unpublished short fiction The mother went from life to fetid squalor on the day the son turned ten. A short illness was expected, punctuated by certain inescapable death. The son believed her even then the villain of her own pestilent narcissism. But then death never came, and forty years on, he sits cheerlessly by her…
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What Do I Feed This Baby?
Unpublished short fiction My wife found out she was pregnant using a home pregnancy test and we were excited. Three days later, before she’d even gone to see her doctor to confirm it, she went to a party to celebrate her friend’s adoption of an infant, which was brought back from Thailand. It was a…
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We Are All Made of Water
Unpublished short fiction So my parents settled in tiny, flat Gulfwind, Florida, a sleepy town a hundred years past its booming industrial peak. They said they liked the sleepiness and the community and the proximity to my dad’s employer. Then I was born with a dark cloud over my head—an eight pound, eight ounce baby…
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The Auto-Heimlich
Forthcoming in Lake Effect Almost every memory I have of Grandma Jo, going back to when I was a little boy, is of her choking. And I don’t mean that in a euphemistic way; I mean Grandma Jo was always choking—wheezing and struggling to breathe, turning blue in the face, waving her arms to get…
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The Broken Path
Published in subTerrain Grandpa died face-down in a pot of chili. It’s a family legend. They told that story every Thanksgiving and all the children loved it. I was four when Grandpa Jim passed away but what I remember from that day is seeing my own father sobbing into a couch cushion, not knowing why…