This story is in the Growing Up New Jersey collection, a series of vignettes slouching their way into becoming a book. See more vignettes in this collection at the Short Stories &c. link above. Give a kid a tape recorder, you know, one of those devices that took little plastic reels of magnetic tape and had a microphone you held in your hand, and it was just an invitation to head down the rabbit hole. I had one of those…
This story is in the Growing Up New Jersey collection, a series of vignettes slouching their way into becoming a book. See more vignettes in this collection at the Short Stories &c. link above. “Try it, don’t take it.” That’s what the man renting the bicycles on the boardwalk at Atlantic City said as I straddled the wonderful piece of machinery he handed off to me. An adult might know what that meant. The man renting the bicycles for sure…
This story, like many in The Last Word collection, is based on a true incident. See more stories in this collection and others at the Short Stories &c. link above. The car was surprisingly intact when the explosive ordnance disposal team arrived. It was a high-end Mercedes, a black executive limousine for someone of standing in the corporate world. And it was armored, intended to protect the occupant from an outside attack. That probably accounted for how relatively intact the…
This story, like many in The Last Word collection, is based on a true incident. See more stories in this collection and others at the Short Stories &c. link above. The jungle was not quiet that morning. I don’t remember it being quiet, not quiet like maybe it would be, as they dragged the two of them to the center of us. The boy was just 16, the girl not even. They were surrounded, encircled by the rest of us,…
This is my entry in another of Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction challenges. The challenge was to write a short story around the idea of an invasive species. You can see the challenge here. The idea for this story has been bouncing around in my head for a very long time, and I have a book-length treatment in mind for it. The challenge gave me the impetus to begin telling the story with what appears below. # # # You can…