Category: Short Stories

My fans have been clamoring for more of my work, so I thought it would be appropriate to toss up the opening to the next story I probably won’t finish.

I’m an open book. A tome with defensive wounds and ligature marks defacing its delicate binding. I know because there’s a chapter in there about law. It might even be an entire section. It opens with a photo of a framed Criminal Justice degree, the glass cracked in the corner and dusty from disuse. Below is a paragraph briefly chronicling an early love for cop shows and legal dramas. And even further back, two mushroom topped youths shuffle around a quaint stone cottage in the orange-tinged Irish countryside.

After several revolutions, they eagerly swap the titles of cop and robber, the number of loops different each time, but always reversing the direction of the chase, and always fingers for guns.

There was a unique cadence to their fun, an irreproducible melody borne by the impossibly naive certainty that time was on their side. Sure, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, but boy, with the grass against their backs and the summer Sun saying its usual farewell, did the echoing of each other’s tired but jubilant laughter seem near to the sublime.

Nobody ever reads those passages though. They’re comparatively dull…