Category: Fiction

My copy of Beacon Quarterly #14 arrived in the mail yesterday! It features my short story “The Dweller”, which is about the Health Museum and a lamassu.

Palomar Takes a Bath

Here is a passage from a story I was writing in 2018, for my own interest and pleasure and never for publication. Palomar is a composer and musician. In this excerpt, he takes a bath. The water shook itself over his feet. Silent feet. All his body silent, awoken from a dream of huge music, […]

My short story Valley of the Kings is now live on Beacon Quarterly’s blog! It’s about occultism in the Los Angeles suburbs. Thank you very much to the Beacon team and especially to brilliant editor Kailla Coomes.

Bedding Ritual

She went to see the man. She went to the hotel. He regarded her dress with delight. “You look poppish!” he said. Their first languages were not the same; in her mind she cycled through meanings: “puffy”, “like a puppy”, “like a doll”. He said, “Like a 60s pop singer!” After a while they lay […]

Kim Gets the Fear

Here is a section from a light novel I wrote in college and never intended to publish. The novel is a ghost story about a man called Joachim (“Kim”), invited to the countryside where he grew up for a reunion by his childhood friends. Inside the grocery they filled a cart with plant-based foods. Kim washed […]

I Am a Fish in a Vessel of Water

  I have some ghost stories to tell you until Halloween. This one is about colonial America. John made the arrangement in quiet and not long ago. Christmas came like his wife’s cold toes in the night and with irritation he moved from it. All the winter passed under the shape of his project. In […]

The Big Rock

  The Fairy Tale Review didn’t want this piece and I don’t think it’s marketable elsewhere, so I am sharing it here. I hope you enjoy it. It’s based on my favorite fairy tale, The Hen Trips in the Mountain. The Big Rock The eldest sister went looking for her mother’s hen. She went into the mountain. […]

Great Lakes

Wendy and Wendy’s cousin decided to poison Wendy’s mother. It was nearly Easter and the windows were shut against the cold but the curtains were open. The sky was long and pale blue. The mouth of the fish stick box was warped from the freezer. The fish sticks clattered onto the baking pan and threw […]

Dinner

They were starving in a luxury hotel in Madrid. They were starving to death. Below the window there was a brilliant purple geometry, a cafeteria lighted with a little bit of neon around the edges, where the young business people ate at some hour. She looked down on it, holding the several heavy curtains aside. […]