Humanity: Raw & Unfiltered
*Opening of a short story entitled ‘Camille’ focusing on a perceived vampire of the Victorian era, Camille Monfort. Men flock to me as hungry birds, ravenous for otherness, an exotic morsel to devour. I’m a unique flower, one that grows on mountaintops, cast away from all others that pale in Read more
The narrow office is dim, like the interior of a grocery store freezer, but instead of a chilling curtain hanging in the secluded air, a thick, musty, scent drips off the books that stretch from floor to ceiling. One small window in this same closet, behind the desk, is cracked Read more
The air smelled of exhaust, of snowfall, of woodfire stoves. Julie held herself stiff, breath appended in her lungs, as she raced into the swirl of snowfall, the shavings sharp and virgin as diamonds, the shavings lashing the air, as the old Ford spat and chugged, coughed and spat and Read more
She first sees him on a Tuesday night at the rooftop bar of the Ace Hotel. He’s wearing dark blue jeans, a white button-up shirt, and black boots, and he and the bartender, an attractive woman in her late thirties with a black rose tattooed on the side of her Read more
I’d arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1979, after completing graduate work at the University of Minnesota and deciding that I wouldn’t survive another midwestern winter. So after a three-day road trip in my ex-husband’s Chevrolet Impala that included striking a deer in South Dakota, Read more
Austrian winters cut deep, brandishing exposed skin with bitingly cold plumes, descending from mountain tops. The only feasible way to survive a rural Austrian winter in 1820, especially the duration of its bleakest months, December to March, is to obtain a box-bed. A simple box-bed. Raised from the floor, enclosed Read more
The trouble started the day she was born. Before that, really—as soon as the sonogram showed up. She was a she, and he couldn’t register that. He was proof that even some of the smartest gator-poaching hicks remained fluent only in the language of macho: talk of bullets, ballistics, and Read more
Hiding. Always hiding. He keeps to dark corners of woodland, ghosting trees, with sharpened blades for claws. Often fractious, taking to gouging lines of discontent within woody bark, leaving imprints of dissatisfaction in his wake: macabre tattoos that speak of moroseness and an unspoken curfew. His having, and then, not Read more