counting on rain

  I’m not ready to write about the loss of my son, Scot, so this is not that post. But time does not give us the luxury of a pause button so we can grieve according to our individual needs. It presses on, relentless. We’ll all find our way through the forest eventually, but meanwhile, Scot’s wife Abbie, and daughter, Luna, are going to be struggling in real time with the sudden demands of rent and bills and just figuring out what to do next. I’m posting this to give you an opportunity to help. You can mail donations to Abbie Parolini in care of me: Steve Parolini, 2734 Mirage…

He is sitting in the dark, talking to a friend. The friend, a woman, is hidden in shadow, hinted at only by the flickering light pouring from the movie projector. The projector is making a rhythmic clicking noise, not unlike the one he is talking about as he points to the screen. “Ruined a perfectly good Mickey Mantle baseball card,” he says to the friend. Her name is Miranda. “Would have been worth a ton today if I’d kept it in a plastic sleeve in a box in a safe in a closet in a well-guarded house,” he says, the smile obvious in the sweetness of his sibilance. He concentrates…

[Note: This short story was written by Raspberry L. Granby (the protagonist of my novel Stolen Things) a dozen years or so after the events in that book. There are no spoilers – it’s a standalone story – but if you like the way she sees things, you might want to learn more about the events that helped shape her narrative voice. Click here for more info on that.] Right by R. L. Granby He had four names and didn’t like any of them. His first, Horatio, was a family name – his great great grandfather’s – the one who spent the first half of his life in prison, and the second half as an itinerant preacher.…

My dad died last night. He would have been 91 later this month. I could fill a thousand blogs with stories about him and all of them would leave you feeling better about life. He was a superhero. We have a very narrow picture of superheroes today. Marvel and D.C. would have us believe that superheroes are larger-than-life characters with snappy costumes and snappier dialogue who always leave a trail of destruction in their wake as they save the day from a greater evil. My dad was a different kind of superhero – the quiet, humble kind who always left a trail of goodwill. When he walked into a life – and he walked into so…

We painted ourselves in shadows and lived in the cracks between things. Between back doors and black alleys. Between rooftops and the never-blue skies. Between numbness and frostbite. Always between want and death. Sometimes the want was death. We knew each other by our hiding places, or by the company we kept. Choir Loft. Glassworks. Underbridge. Belfry. Attic. Closet. Rat. Crow. Worm. Or by the lies we believed. I was called Maybe. I didn’t choose my name. None of us did. Glassworks chose mine. “Yer always sayin’ that word, like sumthin’s gonna change fer the better,” he said, spraying tobacco through blackened lips with every word. Someone else’s tobacco, always. He scavenged…