"Do not talk with anyone. You can make eye contact and smile. Keep walking around. I know this is awkward and unusual. It's a theatre technique." Selena stepped her right flip flop onto the student stage. It was a blue Hawaiian themed rubber flip flop with a big, white flower in between her first toes. Her toe nails the white rim of a pedicure. The center o...
The Star Dancer She was no longer bothered much by the leering faces of the men in the strip club for whom she would soon perform nearly naked. There were times when her mind turned the image of her audience into a mural, making her feel as if she were dancing alone before a depiction of the seamier side of life in early twenty-first century California. Bu...
"Stephen, you need to leave, you've been cast out," said Helene Jean, my mother and the Matriarch of my now former clan, the Roamers. I looked at my mother, and her eyes were as pitiless as the sun. I stood in my study, holding a copy of Wonders of the African World by Henry Louis Gates Jr. A big and tall, dark-skinned and bespectacled black man in his twent...
Madigan Ridge watched in a ghostly horror as her daughter slammed dead on into the frozen tundra below. In phasing through the ship following Sophia's descent she could not keep up, drifting slower toward the steaming pit she lay in. What was worse as she floated in the shadow of the Ganthorian starship X'Orr, now commandeered by the deceptive Orin Ridge she...
Bridget had just told Paul that his father was dead. The young, somewhat awkward and nerdy nineteen year-old could hardly believe it. Less than a week ago Josh, his father, and Bridget, his father's younger girlfriend, had gone on vacation in Mexico together. Bridget had returned two days early looking very pale and upset, bearing the sad news that his fat...
This is the story of how I came to be spirited away to a monstergirl village. It was a long, long journey over time, and with the gentle ministrations of a Dark Priestess, who saw it fit that I was taken as a boy to the monstergirl village and married me off to one of them. I'm now middle-aged, happily married with many children, and more humans and monste...
Circumstance occasionally lead an author to venture into subjects he or she would not usually visit in order to create a certain quality or mood he seeks to express, and such is the case here. This story deals in intentionally brutal and abject forms of sex, and readers who are offended by violence and the grosser excrescences of the human body are cautioned...
The building had her name on it. CLARE'S WORLD. Of course it did. It was her empire, built up from potholders sold at parties to a multibillion dollar "lifestyle industry." She understood people and knew how to get or make what they wanted. Her pots and pans were in the most upscale houseware stores. Her gardening boots were sold at Z-Mart. There were three...
Darryl sat with his blue scaled chin resting on his blue scaled hand and tried to not think about all the horrible things that had happened in his life over the past twenty four hours. It wasn't exactly a pleasant thing, to learn that your mother was actually fucking your family's ancestral enemies. And had been since well before you had been conceived. Oh,...
So, while working on Deep End I started work on a new story, a sailing story, of course. I don't like working on two stories at once - which is why I usually ending up doing just that - but this is a work-in-progress, too, and unfinished (boo-hiss). Still, have fun. I'll finish this before Deep End, I guess. The title? A song, of course. I like Sinatra's ve...