Short Stories
- In the Neighborhood: A young dreamer sets out to proclaim his love to a girl he’d only met once—and only to find out that he lacks the nerve to do it. But leave it to a night of misadventures on the wrong side of town to shake a man of words into a man action!
- It Could Happen to You: A summer infatuation sees a self-proclaimed ‘sophisticated’ young writer avowing his love to the one girl he’d always thought too ‘simple’. (an ode to O. Henry)
- Earnest Wish: A weary old man in search of peace lights the candles on a decorated birthday cake. He blows them out—and everything goes dark. Perhaps too dark… Will an earnest wish be granted?
- A Father for the Night: A young woman sits waiting, torn between longing and apprehension. But who is it she’s waiting for—a lost liberator, or some cruel tormentor?
Novellas
A U.S. congressman strives to reinforce the military draft. While the weight of this question hangs over the heads America’s young men, the balance plays out within a broken family—a stubborn, ex-military patriotic father who pushes his youngest son to become a soldier; his eldest son, shunned by the father for over a decade, whose life as an artist inspires the youth towards a different path; and ultimately the boy, who must make a decision for which he is woefully ill equipped.
Against this personal struggle, a national battle unfolds when the congressman’s bill finds opposition in the least likely of all places—an old warhorse who sees in it an affront to everything he holds sacred. Now the two conflicts go racing against time, and, as Life would have it, the micro and the macro may have more in common than any one of the players could have imagined…
Novels
Feel free to click below to read a brief logline and the prologue..
Dr. Herbert Hays closed the double doors of the closet, turned the key in the lock, and slipped it into his breast pocket, panting slightly harder than he should have; he had many closets, and most of them he preferred to keep locked.
His heavy coat, still frosty with the crisp autumn air outside, let off a thin mist as he turned to eye the familiar room; as though the Kremlin winter had followed him across the ocean and into this private sanctuary, dragging behind that wretched uneasiness he has not been able to shake off. Was it the cold that now made him shiver? Fatigue?
You’re getting old, he thought bitterly. Who’d ever thought up that foolish adage about time: ‘heals all ills?’ It’s actually rather adept at conjuring new ones!
His eyes found the science journal he had dropped on the desk when he first walked in and the cover story titled ‘Old Bones’, perhaps seeking reassurance in his recent success; yet none followed… It was a loathsome business, the autopsy, but it had to be done. He just couldn’t understand why, now, he still felt so goddamn tense. It was well enough to feel paranoid back in Moscow, where the Commies surely kept one of their rats on his tail. But he’d left all that behind when he stepped onto the plane, or so he thought. Yet here he was, in his own home, still dreading that lurking shadow…
’Dead men tell no tales’. There’s another adage, silly as they come; the dead seem to have more say than the living these days. And even if they didn’t—” He did not finish; a slight ruffle of shadows at the corner of his view stopped him short and his eyes immediately darted to the door – cracked open – yet he clearly remembered throwing the deadbolt on when he came in. A cold rush of sweat came over his body with the realization that he was not alone.
His gaze strained against the darkness, peering into the far corner of the room, and a rough outline at last yielded to their effort. “I was just thinking about dead dogs…” Dr. Hays snarled in doubtless recognition.
“Do you know why I’m here?” an abdominal voice, low and muddy, drifted from the corner. The voice lacked body and sonority, as if spoken by a ventriloquist. The shadow started forward, peeled off by the dim light, and unveiled the magnificent figure of a man — perhaps a god: his eyes deep and azure; his hair thick and golden; his features beautifully symmetrical. He could have been the work of a master sculptor depicting some mythical hero from the pages of Homer. But while the Doctor’s gaze held the definite recognition of a creator, in the place of admiration, an intense hatred burned between his eyes, focused on the metallic flash of a gun in the titan’s hand.
“You ingrate—” he started, but the crack of a gunshot cut him short; the visitor did not blink, did not waver, did not even let him finish his sentence, as if refusing him this most rudimentary recognition of humanity: speech. The sheer violence of the act suggested that this man, who now swayed before him, deserved no chance of begging or protesting, no reckoning, no repentance, not even the right to use words… all he could do was die. As something that never was; or rather, as something that never should have been.
The Doctor fell down to his knees, holding the smoking hole that tore through his chest as dark blood now came gurgling out. His eyes gaped in horror, rising from the hot wound to the cold barrel, now only inches from his face, and finally up to the steel gaze of his beautiful assassin. The titan’s expression remained frozen, emotionless; only in eyes blazed the savage intensity of an arctic wildfire.
The Doctor opened his mouth, but a second gunshot doubled him up on the floor before he could utter another syllable.
For a moment, the surreal scene remained still. The lifeless figure bowed over the dead. Then the abdominal voice again resurfaced, murmuring in a diabolical undertone: “At long last, much-enduring Odysseus had his homecoming.”
The man’s lips did not move as he spoke those words; not a muscle shifted. His face remained frozen. The words could have been spoken by the Night.
In another moment, the terrible agent was once again lost between the shadows: an apparition; a dream; perhaps a nightmare. If the executioner had been conjured by the doctor in a moment of delirium, the madness has outlived the delirious.