rubin_18

                    The Green River Flood
                                           by RA Rubin

  “Your acetates were high,” Dr. Patel said. Sammy had walked into the clinic
after passing a little blood. “Watch your liver,” the doctor said. That was funny.
How can anybody see his own liver? Hey Liver, had five beers and two
Jagermiesters last night. Could ya flush it okay and get rid of those poisons will
ya? A middle-aged divorcee with alimony and a kid who had moved away,
Sammy felt himself growing old.
  That’s why Sandi became important. It was the immortality thing. She worked
behind the bar at the Stonersville Inn. The name of the bar was a laugh. It was a
watering hole really: drawing the lonely, the unconnected, the voyeurs. She
served Sammy without remark other than thank you and having another one?
Through the smoky light he had often noted that she was lovely, a very young
package. There was the problem. He figured her to be about twenty-two.
Sometimes she wore dark rimmed glasses that gave her a bookish look.
Sometimes, without glasses, with blue tinted contacts, she had an otherworldly
appearance. Blue-eyed brunettes with dark complexions fascinated him.
  Hurricane Harry had barreled up the coast that night, dropping a torrent of
rain. Behind the Inn the tame Green River had begun to rise. Near closing time
at Stonersville, the regulars remarked they would have to move their cars before
it was too late. Sammy’s car was parked a block up the road at Amber Kreggs’
house. She worked the third shift at Federal Express, so all he had to do was
walk or wade to make his escape in the morning.
  “Lonely places, empty bar,” Sandi said, as Sammy sat on his stool, watching
the storm through the screened deck door.
  Artie James drank alone at a table towards the bar entrance where he always
perched, taking in the sights, smoking cigarettes. Every now and then he’d go
to the head and snort some lines. Then he’d stumble back to his seat, blond,
greasy hair in ringlets as if he had just jammed with a bad hair band from the 80’
s.
  “We’re closing,” Sandy said. Artie got up sheepishly, shuffling between the
tables.
  Sandi strolled around Sammy, opening the screen. She carried her cocktail, a
Cosmo she had poured from a metal shaker. He had seen her drink at least
three in the last hour. He followed with his beer, spilling suds, for he was shaky
after a night of laughs with the regulars. Maybe he had been waiting for
something to happen for months, but for sure he didn’t want Amber anymore
and tonight he wanted no part of his furnished rooms decorated with pizza boxes
and beer bottles. And here was this sparkling vision of youth.
   “You don’t keep them long,” Sammy said. “Your boyfriends, I mean. You got
a new one every week, the poor dudes. They always look forlorn with their
elbows on the bar, staring at you. They’re trashed and barely walking before the
night’s out. Am I right?”
  She laughed, her glasses rising on her petite nose. “They don’t interest me
enough.”
  “They don’t interest me either,” he said. “Now I’ve been to war and back, ya
know, so how ‘bout you and me?”
  “You’re Crazy Amber’s.”
   “Yeah, Amber-- she stabbed that stumpy bastard, Derrick Smith a while back
at her place. She got off, charges dropped. Said it was self-defense. Her
boyfriend had been a drug-fried mess that she figured was cheating, but neither
wanted to press charges. Then the cops and the local DA bucked around, but
nothing came of it.” Amber, he thought, a beer belly chick who always wore her
boobs out there, probably used that knife to peel potatoes, but maybe not. His
girl?
  “Ya better be careful, Sammy.”
   “Ah, we’re through,” he said, “if there ever was anything and there wasn’t.
Anyhow, I noticed that space chick thing you got goin’. I think I like that in you
and probably so do your boys.”
  She shook her head, watching him out of the side of her eyes, sipping the last
of her cocktail, putting the glass on the rail. Though it was dark, Sammy saw the
flood had covered the adjacent parking lot. If they wanted to leave, they’d have
to wade through a couple feet of water to get up the hill to their cars. Sandi held
the rail tight. “I like you,” she said. “You remember to tip.” She acted trashed all
right, studying old Sammy. Maybe she saw through an alcohol daze that he
wasn’t a barfly. Maybe she liked the gray hair over his ears, his mature face.
  “You use an aftershave,” she said, “but like every man I ever knew, you smell
like beer too. And the funny thing is, you dudes -- I can’t feel anything. I’m not
gay, but there’s nothing.”
  “That’s not good, I think,” he said.
  “Now keep this to yourself,” she said, looking squarely at his face. “I have it
under my arm. My birth control I mean. No pills to forget. It’s under my arm. I’ve
been walking around like a zombie for a year. No babies for me. No cheating
bastards leaving a deposit. No rotten…”
  Then she cried and leaned into his chest. He held her, thinking himself manly
or a pathetic uncle. He embraced a thin girl, her boobs pressing his chest, not a
full bosom as his lady’s, but a girl’s chest, which made him nostalgic. The
surprise of her leaning overwhelmed him. “There’s a pedal boat tied to the
stairway,” he said finally, guiding her down the stairs. “We could get you to your
place.”
  “I gotta lock up. I already did the tape and drop,” she said, meaning she’d
cashed the bar register.
   When she’d locked the door, they reversed course together, walking through
the old building, blowing out table candles, wiping the bar with rags. With the big
front door locked, they looked about sheepishly. There were pedal boats and
kayaks floating up to the fourth step tied to a post in front of the deck stairway.
The only vehicle not removed from the parking lot was a Jeep, an old one, a CJ.
It had been abandoned for months. One of the customers had left it there,
having given up on the payments. No repo-man had yet located the now
drowned vehicle.
  She almost went over, catching herself, and then sitting on a puddle seat. She
shouted as he did the same beside her. Their pants were soaked. “Oh, this is
embarrassing,” she said, as they began peddling in the mild current. The fiercer
waters were beyond the village. All they had to do was pedal as if floating on a
pond to her place.
  “So you’re a zombie,” he said, picking up on her previous confession. “I mean,
I know the girls are using those little sticks under the arm for birth control, so
there won’t be any forgetfulness. I know what you mean.”
  “Don’t tell anybody,” she said, as he put his arm around her shoulders.
  “Of course not.”
  “I’m all over the place tonight,” she said. “I did some lines with Fran Bailey.”
  Sammy knew the girl.
  “We snorted it on the ladies toilet-top,” she said. “I sound awful don’t I?”
  “No. I mean at the Stonersville it’s not unheard off, but I can’t do it. It makes
me so thrilled with myself.”
  “I thought the Cosmos would ease me down,” she said.
  He passed a hand over his head, a gesture indicating she was too self-
absorbed to realize you could get fucked up forever. “How far is your place?” he
asked. The boat made slow progress up Green Lane. He was pedaling like
crazy as they passed a twenty-five mile-an-hour traffic sign. The slow cruise up
the lane seemed bizarre enough. The working cars and pickups were gone, but
in this neighborhood, the half-submerged, rusted wrecks, the Chevy’s and
Dodges in the back yards still remained. The waters flowed under the houses’
doorways, and through cracks in the windows and substructure. Waters filled
the cellars.
  “I’ve lived here all my life,” she said. “The kids I grew up with were crazy. We
had some parties where all the girls lost it. My friends, Darlene McCary and
Julie Perez, those chicks have moved on. Darlene has a kid and lives with a
black dude, Arlen, in Maryland.      I saw her five-year-old a few years ago at
Darlene’s; the kid, black as night with blond kinky hair, he looked sad, so very
sad.”
  “Did you feel down about a sad kid?” Sammy asked. “You felt bad, so that’s
something.”
  “At the time, that was a few years ago,” she said, “when I thought birth control
was a prayer and a cross. Sure, I hugged him for a moment though the kid
fought his way out of my arms crying, running out of the house.”
  Sammy pedaled, taking it all in. She was talking now, coming down a little
from the blow.
  “And Julie Perez. Oh, we shared secrets -- she had deteriorated like an
actress in a high school anti-drug short you’d see in health class, a meth-freak.
Last anyone heard she lived in Washington on the West Coast. Meth-freak
chicks are so easy, they leak.”
  Sammy was impressed.
  “You have a family, Sammy?”
  “Once. I went though the years sleep walkin’. I made a mistake. I made a big
mistake and I got kind of disowned.”
  “Too bad,” Sandi said. She had talked previously without any emotion as
though conversation about drugs, divorce and low-down life had the same rating
on a Richter scale: nil. “Anyhow, it’s Friday night. My mom’s probably sleepin’ it
off.”
  The funny thing was – she didn’t want to know what the big mistake was. It
was as if she had already read his mind. He’d cheated with his son’s school
counselor, Rita Rosen, a Jew… oh, hell, but Sandi wasn’t at all curious.
  She pointed ahead and they ported, Sammy tying the boat to a porch rail.
Sure enough, beer-bloated mom lay in a puddle of suds and rainwater on top of
the raised porch, beached so to speak, and Sammy followed Sandi, stepping
over the snoring mum.
  “Carla will sleep it off. Let’s have a drink,” she said, turning as he followed.
She was as unconcerned as though she had walked over a log. Sammy petted
two black labs inside the house. The dogs were overweight, heaving doggie-
chow bodies from wall to wall.
  He sat at the kitchen table, drinking vodka. She was going to drink him under
the table, but after a few he was awake enough to realize she had taken his
hand, pulling him into a parlor and up a staircase. Sandi was making yet another
attempt to act as if she were alive.
  Late in the morning, after they did it again, after Sammy supposed he had
duplicated the feats of her young lovers, he stumbled down the stairs to get a
glass of water. He could feel that dehydration head-banger coming on. He also
was thankful that her bedroom light had not worked, allowing various clutches
and sexual techniques to be unseen. It was pretty silly, this unease about his
saggy ass. He only knew what she felt like -- a princess nymph, but couldn’t
picture her for sure.
  In the kitchen he stubbed one of the dog’s water bowls, wetting his foot.
Hearing a commotion, he switched on the light. The blood curdling screams of
Amber and Carla twisting in a wrestler’s embrace, made his head ring like a bell.
Carla had Amanda’s wrists surrounded with two strong hands.
  “You bastard,” Amber said, screaming as Sam’s stood naked in the open door.
  Sammy knew he was the bastard.
  “He’s always complaining about alimony,” Amber said. She seemed to be
talking to no one in particular and then she pointed. “Well fuck you, Sammy.”
Then she turned to Carla. “You stinkin” bitch,” Amanda said, shouting at a
decimal level considered unsafe at the nation’s airports. “And Sammy – I gave
him all -- every man ….” Her sobbing was uncontrollable. Now he was pulling her
up and then they fell into the waters. He dragged her back to the top of the fifth
step, their bodies’ apart. The labs jumped, splashing between them. Carla had
collapsed on the porch to sleep after being interrupted.
  The firehouse boat motored to the stairway. Flashlights blinded him. These
were Amanda’s neighbors, laughing like hyenas, the Gallagher boys and Shifty
Genovese, the Fire Marshall.
  “For God’s sake,” Sammy said. “Take Amber home. Will ya, boys.”
  “We passed the peak now,” Shifty said, as his pipe jerked in his teeth, “but if
you’re gonna stay, and it looks like you are, why don’t you get Carla to the
second floor just in case or was that too demanding for your back, Sammy?”
  Sammy would have made an excuse for his lack of empathy; something about
how tanked he was and irresponsible; he wanted to set straight this talk about
Carla and himself though that was tricky too as he considered his new friend
upstairs, but he never got the chance.
  “Ya fucked Carla behind my back,” Amber said from the bow of the boat,
Shifty holding her still. She pushed black hair away from her face. By now,
Sammy had ducked behind the screen door. That’s when Sandi came down the
stairs, slapping his ass. He let out a shout. He saw her laughing, standing naked
when the flashlights lit up her headlights.
  “Who the fuck is that?” Amber asked as the boys rowed reluctantly away from
Carla’s house.
  “We gotta get her outa here,” Shifty said, shouting at the boys.
  The fog made it difficult, but Sammy made out Amanda searching in the dark.
He switched the porch light to darkness.
  “He’s doin’ both of ‘em!” Amanda jumped from the boat, trying to swim back,
but the Gallagher boys were too fast, too strong.
  He followed Sandi back to her bedroom, putting an arm around her waist, but
as she dozed off, she threw back his arm. He stared at the ceiling till the
morning, listening to firehouse sirens in the distance.
  The dogs startled them mid-morning, barking. Sammy and Sandi dressed. He
figured his old bones didn’t appeal as much after all the excitement. The beer
goggles can’t obscure the truth forever. He followed her downstairs and she had
that look: that what have I gotten into look.
  They met Carla in the kitchen. She was awkwardly filling dog bowls from a
fifty-pound bag.
  Sammy wanted to kiss Sandi before he left. She offered her lips, but suddenly
pulled back as though she remembered something. “Maybe ya better go, she
said
  “It’s all right, kid,” he said. “There’s no harm done and we’re friends right.”
  “Right,” she said, glancing back to her still inebriated mother.
   It was never exactly right for women. The sun glared in his eyes as he waded
a half-mile. He turned the corner towards Amber’s when he got a whiff of burnt
tires. The flood had receded. He shuffled quietly to his car, but his worst fears
were realized. When he saw the burned out Toyota, he spun around. The
Gallagher boys probably put it out hours before, but it still smoldered a little.
   When he got back to his place, he couldn’t rest. He tuned it over again and
again for hours as he gathered his trash and bottles. The old vacuum cleaner
still could pull dust from the floors. After scrubbing tile, sink, toilet, floors, he
showered, shaving, splashing Old Spice. He was going back to see if it had
been real. It was a two-mile hike from his rooms in Pump Town, but he didn’t
care. He crossed the trestle bridge for Stonersville.
  Carla met him at the door. She listed a bit, but seemed semi-coherent. She
invited him to sit at the kitchen table, offering a Green River beer. It tasted
horrible. “Is Sandi around?” He looked at the sky through the bare kitchen
window. It was mid-afternoon. Time flew when you were having fun.
  “You a friend of hers?”
  “Yeah, at the Stonersville.” Sammy studied her eyes, guessing he had been
erased from her memory.
  “Sandi owe you money?” Carla asked.
  “Nah, nothing like that. We’re friends at the Stonersville. Ya know, we laugh it
up till closing.” He wondered if this made any sense to her.
  “She said Darryl was back from San Diego,” Carla said. “Darryl’s a second
cousin. Was in the Navy.” Then she downed the can and popped another. She
sat back on her chair, kicking some empties on the floor, scattering the dogs.
  “I know what you’re thinkin’,” Carla said. “I was pretty once. Pretty enough for
whoever you are. My last boyfriend -- he held a gun to my head. Charlie saw it
on a Soprano episode where the guy holds the gun to get-off crazy ya know, so
he wanted to do it that way.”
  Sammy listened with a slack jaw, getting more than he bargained for.
  “So we’re doin’ it one night,” Carla said, “and ya know, it’s getting’ kind of
kinky when Charlie pulled the trigger. Click! So there’s no bullet in the chamber
and I don’t get my head blown to hell. I pushed the bastard off me. I took that
gun and cracked it on his bean, but his head’s so hard, it didn’t even hurt him. He
said he was insulted, real insulted. He dumped me just like that. Haven’t seen
him since. That’s why I drink so much. The things I did for him. One little
problem and bam!”
  “Anyhow,” Sammy said, trying to get back on track. “She’s off to see her
cousin, a second cousin?”
  “Yeah,” Carla said. “They’ve been tight since they were crawlin’. Sandi says a
lot of shit, but I know what’s been taking her down these last years. They’ll run
off and all and I’ll have nothin’.”
  Well lady, you ain’t the only one. The whole fuckin’ world is as empty as can
be for human kind, and the worst thing, we’re jammed together as if in a tuna
can. He was resisting this, but he did it anyway. “Look, Carla, I know you feel
bad about that Charlie guy, but really -- you could do better than a crazy…”
  “You think so,” Carla said, putting her beer down, suddenly fidgeting with a
strand of hair. “I can pull myself together you know. I’ve lost some weight—cut
down a little. I was pretty like my daughter once. I can lose weight, fix myself
up.”
  “I know you can,” Sammy said, leaning forward. “Try to see the good part, ya
know, the sunny side of shit as it may be. It ain’t all rushing into the arms of one
lover or another.” He was saying these truths to Carla, a woman he knew only
because he had slept with her daughter and now he was guilty as shit. Plus, he
ought to get a grip on what he was saying for himself. Sammy sold cars for a
living. Any salesman will tell you to conceptualize verbally in a little bombastic
speech to catalyze the sale or a lover’s desire. “And booze or whatever these
maniacs around here are doin’ in their parlors or toilets, it ain’t a real cover for
fear. Big fear I mean! The shit that chases you to hell and back in a dream that
never ends. Ya see?”
  Carla shook her head, bringing the beer can to her lips. “You’re not interested,
are you?”
  He wasn’t interested, so he ended up drinking into the evening at the
Stonersville next to Jamie Shotzellberger. Her old man owned a cruiser at
Avalon. That’s what she said when she sat on the stool next to him. “Daddy’s
got a fifty footer.” She looked okay and didn’t have to imply her old man was
loaded. She got down to business right away, drinking cocktails, spilling her guts.
  “He wets his bed,” she said.
  “Who does?” Sammy asked.
   “Ronnie, my son,” Jamie said. “He spends his weekends with my husband,
the louse and that bitch. I’m prettier than her. I’m prettier than…” She stared at
the bottles of booze behind the bar in front of a wall mirror. She could evaluate
her pretty blond hair and cute little chin between Old Granddad and colorful
flavored vodkas.
   She was leaning on him as the evening wore on. The regulars were all there,
checking in with Sammy. How ya doin, dude, a backslap. Then came a quick
introduction to the new chick, Jamie, wherever the hell she came from.
  “You’re a cool customer,” Jamie said to Sammy.
  “Take it easy with those things,” Sammy said pointing to the empty cocktail
glasses in front of his new friend. Some revelers in proximity perked up,
laughing. The chick was getting loud. Sammy buckled his seatbelt. She was
ordering shot and beer exotics, buttery nipples, apple martinis, blue whores.
  “You’re like him,” Jamie said, staring at Sammy’s skeptical face. His four-
o’clock shadow had darkened to midnight. “You’re watching around a room.
You’re that kind. You all are. Lookin’ at booty, you shit.”
  Sammy was worried now. When this had happened before, and it did all too
often, he’d throw a sulking lady into his car as if she were a deer carcass. He’d
deposit the comatose ones unmolested on couches or porch swings. Getting
them through their front door was another problem. Was there an armed
husband waiting with a massive dose of buckshot? It had been touchy over the
years, real touchy. Jamie slipped from her stool, her unsure feet stumbling
towards the ladies room. She gave him a look back, a real stare.
  Things were fine for a moment as he was alone to catch his breath. He sipped
his bourbon, things were fine, until Sandi walked in. A tall boy with a shaved
head and a blond goatee trailed her. “Hey,” Sammy said, stretching his arm out.
She saw him, came his way, sitting on Jamie’s stool, leaning over to give a hug.
  “This is Darryl,” Sandi said. “Darryl, this is an old friend, Sammy.” Darryl put
out a hand. It was a quick how ya doin. Sammy got the idea since her choice of
old hung on clouds of cigarette smoke. In a few moments Darryl was
backslapping the Gallagher boys at a table. She drank her favorite, the Cosmo,
so Sammy chatted her up a distance from her man.
  “He’s your cousin?” Sammy asked.
  “Yeah, sort of removed.”
  “I stopped by this afternoon,” Sammy said. “Your mom told me you went to
see him. You in love?”
  “All my life,” Sandi said. “He just got discharged a few weeks ago. We’ll get
married.”
  “Where’s your ring?” Sammy asked, staring at the hands that had caressed
his body the night before.
  “He’ll get one, Sandi said. “We’re going to Kay Jewelers at the mall tomorrow.
  “You gonna have kids?” Sammy asked. He tried not to breathe fast, tried not
to get off his stool and run over to strangle her damn cousin.
  “I’d like too,” Sandi said, whispering, then laughing. “So you be cool, okay?”
  Sammy was about to say bravely how cool he was and how great having kids
would be when Jamie came out of the ladies’ room as if shot from a cannon
directly to Sandi’s side.
   Bar violence erupted always, suddenly, fueled by adult beverages; the
younger kids turned to gape and laugh, the old hands, grizzled and beat from
dodging their creditors for a lifetime, fought to keep their mind off their troubles.
Sammy blocked a sidewinder of a punch aimed for Sandi’s jaw, but Sandi,
startled, dropped from her stool. Jamie had sticks for arms and was already
punched-out, done-in, as if she had fought Smokin’ Joe Frazier for fifteen rounds
in the Zaire tropics. She wilted, a dead geranium, pedals floating to the floor
beside her vanquished opponent.
  A mob, a circus really, surrounded them. There were loud curses and drunken
laughter. There might have been a needed explanation for Jamie’s misdirected
anger and Sandi’s bewilderment, but then Amber Kreggs made an appearance
at the Stonersville. First she laughed and the crowd drew back, leaving Sammy
between three women. He had already pulled Sandi to her feet and had an arm
around Jamie’s waist.
  “Who is this bitch?” Sandi asked, pointing to Jamie. “What’d I ever do to her?”
  “What the fuck is goin’on?” Cousin Darryl asked. Tripping over Jamie’s foot,
he grabbed Sammy’s shirt to keep steady. Then the kid started pummeling
before Sammy could offer an explanation.
  Amber Craig dived at Darryl. They tumbled to the floor. Getting to his feet,
wiping blood from his nose, Sammy made for the back door. The river was high
on its banks. A light drizzle tapped against the screen. He wanted to get the hell
out of there.
  “Hey, Sammy,” Artie James said.
  “Artie, I gotta go.” He said hurrying through the porch exit, hesitating at the
steps by the parking lot, fumbling in his pockets for a smoke. He saw flashing
lights in the distance and ran down the stairs into the rain towards the bridge.
  Artie James followed. “Here, here’s a Red.”
  They stood under the covered bridge where some of the bar patrons smoked
their weed. The parking lot was now lit up as if the carnival had come to town.
The rains were heavy while Sammy and Artie smoked, the bridge keeping them
dry.
  “How do ya do it?” Artie asked.
   “Whataya talking about?” Sammy asked, sucking the Marlboro as if he were
at his mother’s tit. What did this kid want? He watched a parade of rowdy bar
patrons in handcuffs doing a perp march out the front entrance to be
unceremoniously pushed into the rear seats of cop cars. Sandi went to one car,
while her boy was banished to another. Sammy approved of their separation,
but he knew the truth about himself and what the fuck did this kid, Artie, this kid
like all the drunken, brained addled youths of this world of a certain age, neither
boy nor man, what did they want to know?
  Amber marched uncharacteristically morose between two burly cops. Her
mouth had been bloodied and her bulging halter-top was stained with blood.
  Then they brought out Jamie. She shouted Sammy’s name. The cop could
hardly hold her as she wiggled. A lady cop pepper sprayed her. Jamie
screamed “Sammy!” Then she collapsed to her knees.
  “I mean you got women all over the Stonersville,” Artie said. “I mean I can’t
get hooked up no matter what I do and you’re about a hundred, ugly, beer
fuckin’ belly, and you got ‘em fighting on the floor for you!”
   It was a kid’s backhanded compliment, but Sammy took it wrong; took it for
all the suffering of humanity. What the fuck was that chick screaming his name
for when he only met her a few hours before? It made no sense. He grabbed
the kid’s shirt, pushing the wisdom seeker to the graveled riverbank. Sammy
ran. Jamie screamed his name for the hundredth time and he went right to her,
picking her up, shoving the lady cop, taking a baton on the back of his neck from
her hairy partner.
  Jamie started to backpedal uncontrollably, staggering till she dropped into the
river. The lady cop ran to the edge, as did many onlookers. Sammy stared into
the dark, jumping headfirst into the water, looking for a woman he knew a little.
He heard her flailing about. The current was strong and he half swam and half
drowned towards the bank under the bridge. Artie gave him an arm to pull them
both out. They emerged from the waters as if gruesome cadavers, dripping with
algae and grime churned up by the storm.
  “Thank you,” Jamie said, hugging Artie, then Sammy. The next thing Sammy
knew, he was being pushed into a cruiser beside his subdued, now peaceful
new girlfriend. When she held his arm, Sammy realized they had truly arisen
from a watery grave.
  The long train of misbehaving adults in a line of police cruisers waited
momentarily before leaving the lot. Artie knocked on Sammy’s window. “Hey
man,” Artie said, shouting, “you can throw me in the river. I don’t care. Tell me
the secret man.”
  The hairy cop’s hand darted from the driver’s side, pushing the kid back. The
cruiser pulled away. Sammy shouted through the pane though he was sure the
kid would have to read his lips. “Don’t piss them off!”

                                         ********************

Roy Rubin attended the University of Wisconsin-Superior during the
Psychedelic 60’s where he studied under the poet, Donald Justice and the late
contributing editor of “The North American Review,” Leo Hertzel. He was the
editor of the highly respected Literary Ezine, Prose Toad. His short stories
have appeared in Word Riot, JMWW, The 13th Warrior Review, and Literary
Magazine. Currently he resides in Amity, PA with Mary Anne.