Short Stories

Bill, a quiet maintenance man, endures the summer heat in Texas under the incessant reign of his unhappy wife Francine. As Francine begs and pleads for Bill to fix the appliances around their house, Bill begins to do so, realizing in the process that the murder he has been planning for his wife won't be complete until everything is repaired. As Bill quietly mends the things around his home, Francine's attitude improves, leaving Bill in a predicament: kill Francine or be an obedient husband?

​This story was awarded 6th place in the 88th Writer's Digest Annual Short Story Writing Competition in the Genre Short Story Category. 

A young man is selected to a job he does not quite understand. He doesn't have to understand it to know it pays well, and in a time of war, and with a mother to feed and house, that matters more than anything. The job is simple: walk the halls of a rectangular building carrying the keys necessary to open the doors, and if the door's letter and number are called, unlock it. But when the doors begin to get called more frequently, the young man begins to understand the horror of his job and the impact it's having on his life back home.

The Keys was awarded Honorable Mention in L. Ron Hubbard's Writers of the Future Contest.

Loyal subjects built their Queen Water Nymph a floating castle, and in return the queen promised to keep their lake clean and to select a spouse from one of their four villages of blacksmiths, farmers, stonemasons, and artists. That was a hundred years ago, and since then petty wars have raged between the villages, but the true contempt is for their queen, whose castle will soon fall without the promised selection of a mate.

But really, my wife Amanda asked for something funny and fantastical and this is what she got.

John 'Pepper' Pepritelli is no stranger to an overnight incarceration, but while waiting for his loyal lawyer to arrive, Pepper meets an old friend who changes his life forever.