fiction

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

- Tim O’Brien

As the page titles states, the below are a collection of essays and stories – most of which were written in college. The one exception is You, a short story I wrote in high school that was a finalist in the Franklin High School IB program short story contest. The stories below are a combination of fiction and news style stories, so the word “story” is pulling double duty here. Simply click the image or “read more” button to view the full piece.

YOU

It’s raining out. You’re sitting at the desk in your brothers room typing on the computer; an assignment for English. It will make up 70% of your grade. Through the shutters you see the outline of an abandoned house and an old tree. It’s older than the neighborhood is. The sounds of cars pass by at an average interval of seven seconds. You know that because you always received an “A” in every math class you’ve ever taken. You think either the sky is orange or the window is dirty…

The Setup

I got the door mom don’t get up. What’s upper dude?

Aye. What’s up?

Chillin’, chillin’. Been looking for my camera, but…

Yeah bro that’s too bad. You know where you lost it?

Yeah it stinks bro, my parents are pretty upset too; but no, if I did…

And Now?

I never would have guessed I’d be where I am now. The United States always seemed so foreign to me. Less than a year ago I was still calling the Pale of Settlement my home. It seemed as if I would always be living in the Pale, under the rule of a tsar. The tsardom wasn’t even all that bad until…

Shadows

It started out as something I feared. The whole idea of how it got to be there. Born in the darkness, revealed with the increasing daylight. Not to mention the fact it looked spooky. I couldn’t get the image of a silhouette shifting from shadow to shadow out of my head, unseen, their mark being left along the way. It wasn’t long before it all began to…

Philanthropy in 2013

To say Danny Lieberman was currently living a subtle life would be to flat out lie. At one point in time he was living his life with some degree of subtlety, though not by choice. There once was a time when Danny was staring down a mountain of college loans one hour and doctors and orderlies the next hour, as his mother was sick with cancer.  Things, no; life, wasn’t working out…

To Each His Own

5:00 pm. That’s when I reenter the real world. 5 pm is when everything that’s not going right for me suddenly resurfaces. Working in a steel mill you have no time to think about how the outside world is treating you. Take a mental break on the job and life will be that much more difficult with only one hand. If there’s a silver lining to this business…

nanny, an elegy

We all knew her as Nanny

The mother to my own

Summer trips to Wisconsin never growing old

The countless lunches at Bay View

Deli and afternoons spent in Uncle Tom’s

Shop, the smell of wood varnish still lingering strong…