The Scent of Apples

Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction

The Scent of Apples

Sand Hills  Magazine

Spring 2018

(Available in Print only. Order here.)

The Leper Colony

The Leper Colony

THRICE FICTION, April 2018

The letter said, “Madame Thi Lan is very ill. Be kindly advised of our necessary action to be
taken for gravely ill residents. This will be the only correspondence from this office to our
resident’s family concerned. Respectfully.” Having taken ten days by postal mail, it arrived from the village office that oversaw the leper colony where her mother had been an inhabitant for the past three years.

A Mother's Tale

A Mother's Tale

Louisiana Literature Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2

In the evening we sat on the veranda of the inn, the air now cool, and the breeze brought a scent of mud from a canal across the land. Mrs. Rossi reclined in the hammock, her loose shirt untucked, hanging down to her thighs, its whiteness a pale luster in the dark. Chi Lan and I sat in the metal folding chairs, looking toward the road.

Waccamaw Journal, Fall 2017

She sat by the window of her hillside stilt house with a puddle of afternoon sunlight in her lap, her hands resting on a spindle across her thighs. The wall clock chimed five times. In another hour, the fog would move in now that it was the month of March, and the warmth of the day and the last glimmer of sun would be gone. She would wake up in the early morning and the fog still hung in the valley and the cold made a film of ice in the basin out back.

The Blue-Ghost Fireflies

Red Savina Review, Fall 2017

It’s late in the afternoon when the funeral procession shows up on the road that goes past Old Lung’s dwelling. Standing outside his abode and watching the cortege move along slowly, the coffin bearers shaded by the setting sun, I remember years before watching men carrying new caskets to the front, time and again, shouldering the palls as they climbed the hill, the long line of soldiers bearing the coffins silhouetted against sunset, moving slowly up the hill slope that grew wild with passion flowers like yellow daubs of fresh paint. [The Blue-Ghost Fireflies, Red Savina Review, Fall 2017 ]