FICTION

A magical gif of a hand holding up two cards, surrounded by yellow candles, orange ribbons of fire, pink fluffy clouds, and a purple background.

Sparkling Creature, a novella in four parts forthcoming from The Rejoinder

NADINE, a novella in four parts published in KHÔRA

Kalki on the Prowl, a short story published in The Spectacle and Shortlisted for the Kajal Mag Short Fiction Competition, March 2024

All Fresh Starts but No Clean Slate, a short story published in Denver Quarterly, May 2023

Clarity, a short story published in Catapult, January 2023

You Too Can Have a Pass Rate Like Mine, a flash fiction published in Hex Literary that was nominated for Best of the Net, January 2023 and selected for the 2024 wigleaf Top 50 longlist

Bad to the Bone, a flash fiction published by Rejection Letters, January 2023 that was selected for the 2024 wigleaf Top 50 longlist

Nights Without the Moon, a flash fiction published by New Delta Review, December 2022

Last Night in Celebration, a short story published by Maudlin House, September 2022

The Flock, a flash fiction published byThe Fourth River, September 2022

Cicada, a short story published by So to Speak Journal that was the runner-up of their 2022 Contest Issue in Fiction and was nominated for 2023 Pushcart Prize

NADINE, PT 1. (an excerpt)

NADINE, a novella in four parts published in KHÔRA

Image by Michel O’Hara, Figure 2: Paris, 2016, digital photograph, 2016.

Image by Michel O’Hara, Figure 2: Paris, 2016, digital photograph, 2016.

If Nadine had known that the tyranny of normalcy could unravel over the course of just one day, she might have savored this last morning of illness.

She woke up with a throat full of phlegm. The run-down feeling in her seemed to have settled deeper into her body over the course of the night. She had been recovering from a cold for weeks now, and her skin had turned ashen from the illness. Dev thought the best remedy was bedrest and no social interaction. Something about the passiveness of his remedy irked her, but he was a Very Important Surgeon so she considered his advice with great weight. For now she’d taken to copiously ordering new moisturizers online. It was a good middle ground, because she could just sit in bed and let the packages arrive while still feeling she was using her brain toward something.

Her other thought had been to get some natural sunlight. Just a quick soak outside her door. Unfortunately, it had been gray skies for weeks. She checked the weather app daily in case it let up, but the only colorful thing lately had been the app itself. It had been saying the strangest things. The first time she noticed it, she had been in the middle of a raging fever, so she chalked it up to a hallucination. When the strange reports continued, she deleted and redownloaded the app, scoured her bills for scam activity, and even gave her phone a few smacks. In the end, she decided the weather station must have hired one of those melodramatic subway poets to write beta reports, and she had gotten an early rollout.

Today the app said: Flurrious cloud cover will succumb to histrionics by the end of the day. Shafts of shy sunbeam may sporadically prickle through, depending on lunar regressions.

Nadine went to the door, hoping the lunar regression was aligned favorably, but instead she saw a woman standing on her lawn, peering up at the histrionic cloud cover. There was something familiar about her that made Nadine shudder. Maybe she was one of those women who sold CutCo knives around the neighborhood, like a sadistic adult girl scout. That thought spooked Nadine. She quickly shut the door and…

CONTINUE READING