Abandoned Fiction

A congregant asked me how I most want to be remembered, as a rabbi or a physicist. “Remembered,” I said, “Why, am I going someplace?” …

With the Compton youth baseball and softball programs … once more short of funds, Mike Lerner’s mind went into overdrive …

Caroline and Peter were the type of people who wanted their house to smell good. Scented candles were out. Aromatherapy was out. …

I was famished when I got home. So I wasn’t pleased to find a man in my bedsit. ‘Mr Godber? Your landlady kindly let me in. …

The inside of the church on Manhattan’s Lower East Side was damp and smelled like scented candles and old leather. David stood in the back

It’s the bagpipes — droning, keening, high-pitched. The sound should be annoying, and yet everything in me wants to cry along. …

It was a quiet morning in the Year of the Rooster. The old fortune teller Hiromi Shoju sat still in the doorway of his house. …

I am not a superstitious person by nature. Nor am I religious. But I do believe that in our everyday lives, occasional, mundane events…

James and Yvonne have a son, almost as old as their relationship. … Bobby sits now in the back seat … ensconced in his phone.

…someone had written a name… [had] written it there, on the corner brick. “Trey Matthews,” a boy of 13 who had been shot in the…

Most of the jobs on Craigslist were looking for girls willing to sell their bodies. “Exotic bottle service girls, girls needed…

The longest I have spent in my mother’s company is by her death bed, her face stock-still, her body cold, like it has been left to soak…

The beach is empty. All the tourists are gone; their towels and totes and pails and shovels are gone too. Only a small girl is left…

Through the open sliding glass door to her apartment’s third floor balcony, Mary could hear pigeons cooing faintly and occasional traffic …

Paper to have been submitted by Professor Josef Austin of Harvard …to ‘IEEE Transactions, Medical Devices’, but withdrawn…

The aged senior shuffled slowly through the deserted alleyway. Smells of rotten garbage permeated the dank air. Night had fallen early…

Ah, yes, one more drink to warm the heart and fortify the soul, as my dear, departed wife used to say. My dear Julianna…

Three times a day, twenty-five plates and fifty pieces of cutlery had to be laid. Inevitably … All the plates, except for one, were thick …

Red was the color of the gash on my knee after Rico pushed me outside our school campus. I stumbled over the sidewalk and scraped my knee…

Three stories — The Professor and the Gangster, The Bingo Game, and Ice Cold.

They were in love and bed was their preferred destination. Work, friends, hiking, cooking had all given their life meaning and perspective

Two short stories — “How to Feed a Muse” and “Up”

The bars over the smoked glass window rattled and shed flecks of dirty paint as he slammed the door shut. Why I ever painted it Sam…

The boy’s wrapped himself up in the glass curtains. Resembling a giant cocoon, he dangles in that tight gap behind the living room couch…