Flash Fiction: "The Home Visit" published by The Ravens Perch
What you feel here is how it happened there. The grown son was in the garage tinkering with a car. He pretended not to notice me.
Read MoreMississippi Goddam
"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.
In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more. Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east. They all ran from it, they had to.
Read MoreIf It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful
Nominated for Best of the Net 2020
The look he’s giving Nancy says to me it’s more than land he craves. And not just her beauty, he told me in private, but it’s something else in her that he needs. “Not the way a drunk needs a drink, Father,” he explained, “or the way a child needs a mother, more like a sinner needs a priest.”
Read MoreMy Sisters Made of Light
Colorado Book Award-Literary Fiction, Finalist
My Sisters Made of Light is a novel set inside Pakistan’s human rights movement, 1957 to 1994. The story follows three generations of a Pakistani family as they make their way through life in the political, social, and religious maze that is their motherland. This novel pulls readers into the fascinating, heartbreaking, and often terrifying world of honor crimes against women in Pakistan through the life and family history of Ujala, a dedicated teacher. When Ujala decides to follow the path her mother has prepared for her, she pushes aside fears to help other women escape from impossible situations.
AN EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL:
In 1958 the air was still sour with the stench of the slaughters that had occurred eleven years earlier when the British ran like dogs and India cracked. The blade that slashed the map also partitioned the bodies of the people, etching fear in their bellies and revenge in their hearts. Ten million people migrated. Lines and lines of Hindus from the Indus River Valley, in what would later be designated “Pakistan,” packed their lorries, rode bullocks, and walked, to cross the border into India. Lines and lines of Muslims from India carried all that they owned to be part of the new Islamic nation. Rioting occurred first in Calcutta and then spread to Punjab. The refugees scouted the routes to avoid one another in the passing. If a trainful of Hindus was murdered by Muslims from Lahore (and they were), then a trainful of Muslims would be murdered by Sikhs and Hindus from Amritsar (and they were). Entire families were butchered and their body parts were delivered by horseback to their villages. The people emptied baskets of breasts and pails of penises onto the ground—even the stubs of baby penises with scrotums like tiny figs. The soil was soaked with all the lost futures, and when it was done, when the trauma finally subsided to abide in the bodies of the people, they had to plant seeds in, and eat the fruit of, the same earth. Sikhs and Muslims alike knew the taste of each other’s blood well, and they kept to their own.
Kulraj and Nafeesa in London. Romeo and Juliet in Verona. A Muslim and a Sikh in Pakistan. All of history conspired against them, but no matter. They would find a new way.
Read MoreCough Drop Joe
This “family fiction,” won the 2019 Black Sheep Award of the Colorado Genealogical Society
In those days I’d take the train from Union Station in Denver, my home town, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where the reporting work was. It took a couple of days, but it gave me time to do some writing in the dining car that had a quiet bartender, and to watch the country roll by. There were hobo camps along the rails--you could tell by the smoke. I could take a close up look at them and then roll on by, settle back, open a book or pick up a pen.
Read MoreInside the Shawl of Midnight
Novel-in-progress
What must it be like to have a sister, to be close to a sister, to share everything, then to lose her, to not want to believe that she is dead, to be separated so long that you might pass each other on the street and never notice? To lose her so long ago you only wonder occasionally if she is in good health, if she still lives. You forget what her voice sounds like, or believe you have forgotten because you cannot bring it to mind. What did she sound like? But then a miracle happens and years later when you are no longer young, no longer full of the possibilities of youth, but instead you are coasting on the remains of a lifetime of experience, and you hear a stranger’s voice ask, “May I help you?” and you know at once whose voice it is. You know the shape of the face, the dimple, the particular smile of those particular lips. And you recognize the light in the eyes of your sister.
Read MoreAisha's Daughters
Finalist, F(r)iction Spring Short Story Contest, 2016
I passed the entrance to Chitral Gol, the wildlife sanctuary where snow leopards hunt horned goats. A tree sparrow and a whistling thrush sang on the holly oaks on the cliff. In a field of snow-covered rhubarb, a pair of partridges called back and forth in staccato, as if I were a wild cat they were warning other birds. Crows swarmed as one body, cawing their criticisms wildly. Who is she? What is she doing? Why is she alone? Where is her husband?
Read More