Fiction
Excerpts
From “Homecoming” (2024)
When Yari heard it coming, he closed out his email and put his phone in his pocket. The old truck approached shimmering on the horizon, an antique of a machine. It labored and rumbled to a stop before him, idling and throttling with the guttural tone of a lion. While the driver took a drag on a cigarette, the passenger kicked open the creaky door and stepped out. “Mind ridin’ bitch?” the man asked, nodding toward the pleather bench seat.
The low winter sun shone bright in their eyes. His old friends wore cheap gas station sunglasses, but Yari sported a designer pair he’d bought some months before in the city. They drove down Main, the street rimmed with decaying buildings. Peeling stucco and faded paint. Dead Bermuda grass some awful color neither brown nor green. A thin haze hung over the valley and yellowed everything. Nothing had changed in two years, at least not for the better. He wished to be anywhere but here.
From “He Goes East” (2023)
He drove east in the low winter sun. Trees loomed over the interstate thick and claustrophobic. Beyond Raleigh, the forest thinned to great swaths of farmland, dotted with hogs and permeated by the smell of ammonia. Billboards advertising shooting ranges and finger-pointing lawyers stood tall, tapering into the horizon. By the time he arrived, the shadows stretched long toward the west against the coming cold and blue.
“All right now,” his grandfather said. The old man moved slowly down the staircase on the front patio of his craftsman home, holding the railing for balance. The boy shut the car door and they embraced there on the cracked concrete driveway, shadows of naked branches cast upon them like etchings of random disarray.
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