From the car, I watched you. I watched you thinking I should have been named something as noble as Helen, something as beautiful, as brave. You had everyone—Helen Keller, Helen of Troy, St. Helen. Helen Hunt, like in Girls Just Want to Have Fun, the smart and wild one who knows everything, how to get away with anything. The best I could do was a seal—Sammy the Seal. A children’s book. All flippers and whiskers and funny honks. And even if Sammy had been a girl, like me, no one would of called her Samantha.

Cream City Review - fall 2007 issue

Life happens to me in threes: three straight Saturdays with a date; three dates before a woman dumps me. Three tries before I get something right. And always, always, three harrowing back to back disasters before life returns to normal.

Orchard Press Mysteries

The Key West P.D. informed me an hour ago that I was the last one to see Ken and Peggy Berger alive. They questioned me, searched my premises, then moved on to the cab. You see, I’m a self-employed cab driver based in Key Largo, but I run anywhere from Homestead to Key West, some one hundred odd something miles apart. Which happened to be my route the morning I picked up the Bergers. Their destination? The Key West Aquarium. That’s where they climbed out of my cab and disappeared into the thick Atlantic air.

Orchard Press Mysteries

Louise tightened her jaw muscles and glared at the sunshine flickering off the restaurant’s front door. A business trip. Freddy’s sales career ended twenty years ago. The only business he’d be doing was at the casino poker tables. That’s where he got the money to purchase the restaurant-- it didn’t come out of the nine hundred dollars and eighteen cents they had in savings-- and that’s how he’d get the money to “make it move.”

Muse Apprentice Guild - Spring 2002