US Represented

Fiction

Fiction

Body Found in Monument Creek

The body lay in the creek amid the swirling and sloshing of broken sticks and plastic bottles that had accumulated between two large rocks. There was no blood, no sign of foul play – just the body of an older white or Hispanic male in a brown jacket, underdressed for the mid-March weather. He lay

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Cole

It’s an old railroad style house fronting a thin street, not far from the train tracks and stockyards. Cole comes out the front door for a moment to check on his motorcycle. He won’t be staying long, but it’s dusk and he knows the neighborhood. The icy wind stings his face like bees. He’s visiting

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Ray

“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Ray dutifully reminded himself as he watched his left shoe, and then his right shoe, pass each other on the sidewalk below, looking from his vantage point like compact autos negotiating a tiny two-lane road. If one could even call it that, given a buckling surface strewn

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The Haunted Bookshop I: Innocents at the Bookshop

In John Dunning’s Booked to Die, men abuse and murder women and each other, brothers and sisters cordially loathe each other; Cliff Janeway, book-loving cop protagonist, beats his antagonist nearly to death – justifiably, of course, for the antagonist is a bully who likes to beat up women. Just another few days in America, full

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The Haunted Bookshop II: “Christianity Fails Again”

Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop begins with the mysterious disappearance from the Bookshop’s shelves of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, that bringer of the reign of Christian righteousness and short hair to a people who, after a taste of perfection and a lot of death, decided they preferred neither.  The book disappears, reappears, disappears,

Read More »

Body Found in Monument Creek

The body lay in the creek amid the swirling and sloshing of broken sticks and plastic bottles that had accumulated between two large rocks. There was no blood, no sign of foul play – just the body of an older white or Hispanic male in a brown jacket, underdressed for the mid-March weather. He lay

Read More »

Cole

It’s an old railroad style house fronting a thin street, not far from the train tracks and stockyards. Cole comes out the front door for a moment to check on his motorcycle. He won’t be staying long, but it’s dusk and he knows the neighborhood. The icy wind stings his face like bees. He’s visiting

Read More »

Ray

“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Ray dutifully reminded himself as he watched his left shoe, and then his right shoe, pass each other on the sidewalk below, looking from his vantage point like compact autos negotiating a tiny two-lane road. If one could even call it that, given a buckling surface strewn

Read More »

The Haunted Bookshop I: Innocents at the Bookshop

In John Dunning’s Booked to Die, men abuse and murder women and each other, brothers and sisters cordially loathe each other; Cliff Janeway, book-loving cop protagonist, beats his antagonist nearly to death – justifiably, of course, for the antagonist is a bully who likes to beat up women. Just another few days in America, full

Read More »

The Haunted Bookshop II: “Christianity Fails Again”

Christopher Morley’s The Haunted Bookshop begins with the mysterious disappearance from the Bookshop’s shelves of Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, that bringer of the reign of Christian righteousness and short hair to a people who, after a taste of perfection and a lot of death, decided they preferred neither.  The book disappears, reappears, disappears,

Read More »