Short story writing and creative fiction, essays and non-fiction stories.

“I walked her down the aisle today – happiest day of my life so far. It doesn’t seem so long ago that she was climbing up onto my knee to make a nest with her special blanket, ready for a bedtime story.

“Time flies – doesn’t it? You blink and twenty years have passed, like that. Just look at her now; she’s a beautiful young woman.

“Always was the apple of her Daddy’s eye.

“I said to my wife when we found out the news – I’ll do anything to be able to see her married. Well, you do - don’t you?

“And it’s been worth it. Oh yes! All the operations, and the tugging around; the waiting to hear if it was my turn. When I was on my last legs, and no sight of a donor, they put the idea of this new experimental op to me; it wasn’t what I wanted – far from it. Well you don’t want intimate contact with a pig – they’re unclean animals. Dirty. And there are all sorts of religious red lights. But these specially modified ones they grow nowadays are the best match for human tissue, they said. My best chance.

“So I signed the forms and went in for the op; 18 hours on the table, I was. Groundbreaking work I was told – made medical headlines around the world. But that’s not why I let them do it; I don’t care about being a footnote in history.

“I just wanted to see my girl on her big day.

“And it was worth it. I’ll sort out what’s what with the Almighty - later.”
Read the rest of this story »

Posted in Fiction | 3 Comments »

The banquet room was dark and crowded. The walls stood dim and abyssal, wrapped in waves of glossy fabric cascading across the rippled periphery, ocean blue and glacial, like the walls of ice box covered in cold satin, glazed in indigo.

Maggie, noticing that her reception was enjoyable for all in attendance, and having just arrived from the ceremony, made herself look in the direction of Paul, who since the service had been sitting in the corner of the clubhouse’s dining room at a table draped in power blue tablecloth. He was talking to a girl with blonde hair, her breast welled-up tight and cleaved taut above a push-up bra, like twin canned hams, catching the errant attentions of several young men not bothered enough to look into her eyes. Paul’s posture was lax, shoulder blades pressed against the back rest of the chair in which he slouched, legs crossed beneath the smoke slowly streaming off the end of a cigarette he held away from his face like a dirty diaper. Maggie turned and inhaled as deeply as her tight corset would allow, and then, squinting her eyes, looked around the room at the lively swarm of guests she had invited to celebrate her marriage.

She paused for a moment, then instinctively, she turned to where Paul sat, puffing and chatting with the blonde, watching the guests on the shiny, lacquered dance floor in the middle of the room.

“Why hello,” Maggie said, grabbing Paul’s wrist. “Get up,” she said. “I want you to dance with me.”

“Hello there. And why is that?” he said, bashfully, having been caught off-guard.

“Oh, because – you look so handsome.” And Paul rose, offering no resistance as he followed her from the table to the dance floor across the room, at the same time managing to quickly milk the remaining embers from his smoke before stashing the butt on the tray of empty champagne glasses, all in stride.
Read the rest of this story »

Posted in Fiction | 3 Comments »

Sometimes the name they give you is all wrong. My paternal grandmother’s name was Nava, which, in Hebrew, translates to “beautiful.” In the biblical Song of Songs, it says, “Thou art beautiful [nava], O my love, as Tirzah, beautiful [nava] as Jerusalem, terrible as an army with banners.” By the time I met my Nava, she wasn’t quite beautiful, or terrible. She was essentially a shriveled up little raisin in a modest, tweed skirt and thirty-five-year-old glasses. She was certainly sweet and cute, and raisiny, but I’m not sure she was beautiful. I suppose at one time she was—her husband certainly thought so anyway.
One day my father and I were talking about names, for some reason, children’s names; what you name your children. I asked him if, when my mother was pregnant with me, he’d ever brought up the idea with her about naming me after his own father. He exploded at me.

“Gabriel! What are you, fuckin’ stupid?!” he asked, rhetorically, I hope.

“Well, Dad, I mean, you…” I began.

“Look Gabriel; having a child is a huge responsibility, okay? You can really fuck a kid up right from the beginning if you call him the wrong thing,” my father explained to me. I protested.

“The ‘wrong thing?’ Dad, you know, he was your father.”

“So?” he frothed. “He’s still my father, and you are my son, and it’s a terrible name so why would I do it to you? MoRAD?” he roared, punching out the last syllable each time like a veteran heavyweight. “You think I wanted to name you MoRAD?! Next you’ll say I should have named you after me. Efraim,” he said contemptuously of his own identity. “Another fuckin’ retard name!”

My father, finished for the time being, got up from the dining room table, randomly announced that he was going to “The Camera Shop” and left.

I didn’t know what the hell was the matter with him. His bombastic, Israeli rants are a product of the desert from which he came, and are just meant to be endured and accepted. He blows up all the time, like a rear-ended Pinto, but locating the catalyst usually proves a superhuman investigative feat. I didn’t figure this one out for a while.
Read the rest of this story »

Posted in Non-Fiction | 9 Comments »

When your personal income for the year is $542, with $500 of that total coming from a tax write-off for donating a car to charity, you obviously have time to consider the world around you. You read a lot and start to notice patterns emerging in the culture you inhabit. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can wear you down. It may be better just to focus on yourself – as Warren Zevon sang shortly before his death “It’s the land of the brave and the home of the free…the less you know the better off you’ll be.”

The cover of the magazine staring back at me is completely filled with a photo of Britney Spears face. The heading on the cover says Britney Spears: Inside an American Tragedy. Think about that for a moment – the reality that, at the point of your most difficult personal struggle, a time of immense need, you could look at a magazine (circulation thousands) and seen a crappy picture of yourself with a denigrating label. I’m waiting for the day someone’s face fills the cover of Time magazine with the heading $542 this year: An American loser!

Reading through the article, a typical pattern repeats itself, over and over and over: dominating people who care only for their own interests and advancement enter Brit’s world and suck her dry, sending her farther down a path of self-destruction.
Read the rest of this story »

Posted in Essays | No Comments »

It was reasonably late in my life that I discovered there was a name for my fear of crowded places. And more specifically, the term agoraphobia, upon stumbling over it recently in my Spanish-English dictionary, gave validity to what my family had always considered a silly and embarrassingly illogical concern.

Agoraphobia- Fear of crowded, public places like markets (or in my case, beaches).

I was fortunate enough as a child to entertain wild and dreamy ideas when it came to planning holiday vacations. When asked where this year’s Christmas break should be spent with my brother and parents, I’d regularly contemplate the most recent grand prize Bob Barker had given away on The Price Is Right. “How about a relaxing tropical escape to luxurious Graaaaand Cayman?” I’d say, using a cheesy, almost salesy intonation to my voice. Usually no one listened.

Holiday breaks allowed us to see new places and experience new things; a sense of novelty that inspired us to let down our guard and, as a country singer might put it, try ‘n live a little. Honey coated cereals, for example, not permitted otherwise in our home, were allowed in the mornings of vacations via small cardboard packages that limited our Fruit Loop or Apple Jack consumption to a muted sugar high. We rented convertible jeeps that we wouldn’t be caught dead driving in the States, for their poor safety ratings and we stayed in houses with pools (a huge insurance liability back at home). We went out to exceedingly expensive restaurants that would normally be the butt of our jokes and we wore polo shirts and flower prints that were about as unnatural as the suntans we displayed on our legs and necks.

Even as a young child, I enjoyed, in a sophisticated sort of way, using this deviant theme of doing things outside the box, to safeguard my fears. I never liked crowded beaches though I can’t really say why.
Read the rest of this story »

Posted in Non-Fiction | No Comments »