Could it only have been two hours since Devon last pushed open the glass door? That was a lifetime ago. That was when Devon dreamed a dream. When he didn't hate banks and bankers and the soul-crushing thing called collateral. The loan officer chanted the word as if it were a talisman. With a savage …
Category: fiction
A Letter to Gigi*
Dear Gigi, I chose you after giving it about thirty seconds' thought. You're right up there with Hitler and Jesus and the young me, which is a rather strange party, I admit. Can you imagine the four of us playing Peanut? I just played that game for the first time, by the way. Never played …
CNF Published in The Forge Literary Magazine!
Besides being full of excellent stories that make you feel you're plumbing the Atlantic, The Forge is a visually stunning platform. I'm honored to have my creative nonfiction work "The Boots" published there today. The Forge editors were some of the nicest with whom I've worked. When my piece was selected, I was days away …
Continue reading CNF Published in The Forge Literary Magazine!
Unexpected Kindnesses
It's been 2+ months since my brain surgery, and I'm clawing my way back to the level of energy I once enjoyed—happy to be thus clawing. When I am tired and things don't get done, I smile and thank God I'm alive, that I'm here to sink into the couch after pulling a bit of …
Fiction: The Colonel’s Last Wish
In the bombed-out shell of a Starbucks cafe, he sat at a buckling and tilted table. What the colonel wouldn't give for a green-smocked barista right now. A US Army truck painted over with his familiar insignia passed by, likely headed to the dump. Halfheartedly, he returned salute, then covered his nose. The dead Americans …
The Most Dangerous Thing We Do
Once this kid—my passenger—grabbed the steering wheel and jerked it hard over while I was driving. Not just a little tug, mind you, but a full-on we-gonna-die! yank. The kind that elicited a blood-curdling scream and a shouted sermon. A 19-year old preaching car safety to a 15-year-old. This kid was all charm and immortality …
Last Touch
A tire spun, the one not furrowed by speed and thrust. Smoke wheezed from the buckled steel hood. Engine guts, half-erupted and splattered with oil, steamed in glossy, iridescent blackness. Beside his twitching foot lay an unwrapped breakfast sandwich. The smells of sausage, cologne, and sharp copper ghosted the car, floated out the broken windows, …
Fiction: Tight Flight
I pressed the call button. Pinned to my window seat by the slumped behemoth of a man, it was the only thing I could do. His flesh oozed beyond the arm rest, assaulting my left thigh with an intimate, maddening pressure. His body heat passed through his polyester pants, through my jeans and ignited a …
Christmas. Finished.
On linen and straw lay a birth and a death. God hedged by flesh shepherds, magi. ∞ It pleases us to imagine God just born, vulnerable delivery's slick dross clings the ache of mortality. ∞ It's comfortable: God on bovine-scented straw held in woman's arms and a lowly one at that. ∞ It's Christmas: …
KL Griffiths 