The Natural Order of Things, comprised of 15 interconnected stories, is properly thought of as a novel in the tradition of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio or John Steinbeck's The Pastures of Heaven ― but with a gothic sensibility. The novel concerns the adventures and exploits of a small group of students, teachers, employees, and priests at a Jesuit prep school in a dying industrial city. Its stories harbor star quarterbacks who sabotage important games, the head coach with a gambling addiction wagering on his own team, an elderly priest suffering from acute memory loss who dabbles in heretical beliefs, and others who swim against the tides of society's proscribed roles.  "The Black Death of Gentile da Foligno" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize by author Thomas E. Kennedy. Another story, "Uncreated Creatures," was nominated for a StorySouth Million Writers Award by the editor of The Stickman Review. A third story, "The Spy" won second prize for the Lorain County/Ohio Arts Council Award, judged by Nancy Zafris, editor of The Kenyon Review.

Publishers Weekly said of The Natural Order of Things in a starred review (October 15): Keating toys with narrative chronology in this debut collection of interwoven stories that follows the lives of several “reprobates who have descended into... Hades.” At the center of an unnamed, ruined city of American industry thrives, tumorlike, a Jesuit high school and the Zanzibar Towers and Gardens, a flophouse where both students and alums slum it with prostitutes. In the opening story, “Vigil,” students have gathered at the Zanzibar to celebrate Halloween and the next day’s big football game with kegs of beer they stole from a senile priest in the final story, “Gehenna,” that was delivered in the second story, “Box,” by the father of star quarterback Frank “the Minotaur” McSweeney. “I’m counting on you. We all are,” says the Minotaur’s father, but the day of the big game, as in all the connected stories, we find out just how big a letdown everyone in this life can be. Story by story, the collection circumnavigates suffering—someone lights the homeless on fire at night; a merchant marine boxes up a man to ship him overseas; priests humiliate and shame their students, while one teacher loves them too much—in a place where most of its inhabitants “would rather gamble on a human life than try to save one."

Safe and Familiar Faces

From the June 4th, 2012 edition of Piker Press:

"There should be a law," said Jim Kingsley without a trace of irony, "a law of nature as well as a law of man, something written into the fabric of the cosmos and human consciousness. People should get married only after they turn thirty. A simple, almost innocuous injunction, don't you think? Especially for men. They need a certain amount of wisdom before taking the wedding vows, certain kinds of experiences, awful experiences, to harden the soul before a long, brutal winter."

"A long, brutal winter ..." Grace repeated. "Is that how you see marriage?"

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The Arrangement

From the Spring 2012 issue of The Natural Tale:

"Of all the women on our block, whom would you say is the sexiest?" With perfectly phony, professorial diction I would sometimes pose this most taboo of questions during those painfully polite cocktail parties in the summer. Then I would stand back, hoping for a heated exchange, but the neighborhood men were far too diplomatic to give straight answers, maybe because they sensed that they could just as easily have found themselves in the same curious predicament I now find myself in, but I was something of a provocateur back then and, growing impatient with their evasiveness, I unashamedly proclaimed Suki to be the most attractive woman by far. There followed an uncomfortable silence, and from that point on the conversation lulled before falling finally into the intellectual void of more congenial topics like the weather and work.

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The Contest

From the Spring 2012 edition of Obsession:

We began playing our epic game when we were still young, not long out of college, and my opponent (for once I’ll abide by the rules of civil discourse and refer to her by the nom de guerre Camilla) proved to be the stronger player, at least initially. Back then her strategy was to make me jealous, and I must admit that, for a strategy so simple and obvious, it certainly had the desired effect. On Friday nights, when we still attended those rollicking parties together in the city, she would push her way through a crowded warehouse apartment, an imposing figure, tall, broad shouldered, almost Amazonian in her war-like gait, and without pausing to acknowledge our inebriated host, march over to a card table that served as an impromptu bar where groups of men circled around the alcohol like a herd of stamping, snorting, fly-swaddled wildebeests protecting a coveted watering hole. Only after fixing herself an obligatory pink martini and taking a few immodest sips would she then carefully assess the other players in the room and contemplate her first move.

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The Tao of Flitcraft: Some Thoughts on the Ancient Art of the Near-Death Experience

From the December 2011 edition of Blue Lake Review:

There is a private joke among my family (you’ll excuse the redundancy of the expression; the reader will understand that most family jokes are of the “private” variety, but perhaps given the grim circumstances there is special need for emphasis here): I am, they say, the proverbial go-to man when a misfortunate loved one is in immediate need of eulogizing. Certainly I’ve written my fair share of these dismal things except that there is something so manifestly unfair about the solemn, and often gut-wrenching, proceedings that it would probably be more fitting to say that Heaven has blessed me rather inequitably with the honor of having to compose so many of them. But let it not be said that Heaven watches over us without a sense of the sardonic: On Monday, June 27th, the day I normally celebrate my birth, in this case the dreaded 40th (halfway to the finish line, one foot in the grave), I very nearly had the dubious distinction, not to say plain bad luck, of having one of my eulogies read back to me, or at least read back to my horrifically mangled and unrecognizable corpse.

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No Deposit Love

From the 2011 edition of Emprise Review:

Friday afternoon, like so many before and after it, sees Bernie Kaliher broke and desperate for a beer. He spends an hour, maybe two, he’s not sure how long really, he no longer wears a watch, scrounging for loose change in the pockets of an old winter coat, digging beneath the ragged cushions of a sofa he dragged from a street corner three blocks away, reaching behind the silent refrigerator, it no longer hums, the electricity was shut off weeks ago, looking under the throw rugs, behind the toilet, inside the broom closet, his fingers creeping spider-like into every dark recess and mite-infested alcove and, though he pities himself for doing something so obviously futile, beneath the piss-and-sweat-stained mattress where instead of money he unearths an assortment of dirty magazines, hardened tissues, a sports page with a full-page color photograph of his players standing like an invincible Roman legion in front of the Jesuit high school. The bold letters read more like a benediction than a byline: “May the Good Lord–and this Coaching Genius–Lead These Boys to Victory.”

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The Spy

From the Fall 2011 edition of Beside the Point:

On the steps of his front porch, resting his head against the top stoop, George Fenner smokes his last cigarette and marvels at the shifting shapes of passing clouds. The early morning rain that came sluicing sideways out of the sky has given way to brief glimpses of rusty sunshine, but in the distance, far out over the lake, an immense wall of dark clouds pushes ever closer to shore, rumbling weirdly with thundersnow. To George the soaring cloud tops look solid and muscular like figures masterfully crafted from massive sheets of steel, a three-headed hellhound, maybe, bounding toward heaven, eager to taste the tender flesh of angels’ wings. The vision seems all the more real thanks to the mangy dogs that trot up and down the narrow brick lane in front of his house, lifting their hind legs to mark their territory, shitting on the sidewalk, pillaging trash cans, competing for non-existent scraps of food. George feels no pity for them. Like every creature condemned to live among these streets, the dogs must learn to accept suffering. Winter is almost here, spring a million years off. Soon there will be no escape from the punishing cold and constant hunger unless, of course, death whisks them all away to an even colder grave.

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Uncreated Creatures

From the 2011 edition of Milk/Sugar

Three years after his wife abandoned him (left in the early morning hours just before dawn, slid from under the sheets without letting the bedsprings creak, put the car in neutral, pushed it down the driveway and into the street before starting it), Devin Wentworth finally musters the willpower to attend a colleague’s party. Someone has just published a book or received a grant or had a marriage annulled--rarely is there a point to these kinds of things, any excuse to get drunk before the start of a new semester will do--and though he is a little uneasy about leaving the comfortable clutter of his books and the logic of his coffee-stained papers with their indecipherable marginalia, he is glad for the opportunity to socialize with old friends and to politely laugh at the same banal jokes they have been telling for years.

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The Distinguished Precipice

From the March 2011 edition Berg Gasse 19 Magazine

On the afternoon of his eighteenth birthday, Tom Wentworth is summoned to the principal’s office where there awaits a quorum of priests, eleven in all, faded men in high backed chairs whose arthritic fingers fumble with the books of matches piled high in ashtrays stationed at every corner of the room like bowls of holy water at the entranceway to the school chapel. The office is a precise space--tidy, carefully curated, scrupulously scrubbed and polished--and the priests sit hunched and pensive in the tapering shafts of prismatic light like stone icons, their eyes fixed not on the door but on the branches of the ancient elms and sycamores that scratch at the windowpanes like shunned souls contending with one another to claw their way into Paradise.

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Hack

From the January 2011 edition of The Sentinal Review

The Jesuits place a high value on the written word, so much so that they hire an outsider to run the literary magazine. Under the direction of Batya Pinter, The Millstone garners recognition as one of the finest publications produced by any high school, private or public, in the United States, its stories and poems one step removed from the divine Logos, its contributors destined to achieve great things, heirs to the throne of Carver and Cheever, tutelary gods that guide the pens of these fledgling scribes and lead them toward the sweet promises of alcoholism and sexual dysfunction.

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Gehenna

From the March 2011 edition of The Eunoia Review

This is what they do to him, to the old man, after a lifetime spent in quiet contemplation among books of eschatology. They parade him before the students on high holy days not unlike the mummified thumb or shriveled toe of a medieval saint or mystic, an artifact to be revered as a symbol of piety, celibacy, wisdom and dread. Recently forced into retirement, the old man is given the title “Instructor Emeritus,” an honorific bestowed upon those priests too ancient and addle-minded to continue teaching without embarrassment or scandal in the classroom. Though rare and often ritualized, these appearances are meant to satisfy his need to be among the students, his proverbial “lost flock” whose intellectual curiosity seems to dwindle with each passing year.

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Merde at the Place de la Contrescarpe

From the March 2011 edition of Unlikely Stories

After he makes bail and collects his personal effects from the capricious, crooked-nosed corrections officer working behind the bulletproof glass, Edward de Vere limps from the county jail and takes a seat outside on one of the benches that faces the broken fountain in the center of the sprawling, concrete plaza. It’s morning now. A cold wind lashes his face. Black exhaust from a passing bus stings his eyes. When the smoke finally clears, he sees the woman from last night gliding gracefully across the slick pavement. In her purple dress she looks like a phantom freed from cumbersome flesh, the agony of existence. He wonders if she has been waiting for him the entire time, keeping vigil out here in the cold. With a furtive glance over his shoulder to make sure the cops aren’t observing him, he stands up and approaches the woman. If they catch him speaking to her, they will almost certainly charge him again with solicitation.

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River Man

From the September 2008 edition of Inertia Magazine:

At precisely thirty minutes before dawn, shortly before the jackhammer of practical concerns starts to chip away at my brain, turning my thoughts to rubble, I leave my studio apartment near the college and, weather permitting, bike ten miles (squeak-squeak; must oil that chain!) into the valley of hardwood trees. There I follow a winding trail of crushed stone that skirts the wetlands and crooked river. Above the rim of the valley the leaden sky changes color with slow, operatic grandeur. The cicadas sing a scratchy aria sustained by the morning breeze. Hazy pink ribbons of passing jets unfurl on the horizon and look like chalk gently smeared on a blackboard, or blood seeping slowly through loosely wrapped gauze. Five hundred years ago, so the college professors tell us, the Iroquois raided this valley and slaughtered the Erie in a series of surprise attacks. Who knows why. For pleasure, for sport? People can be that way sometimes.

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Lethe

From the Summer 2008 edition of Brink Magazine:

Garrett waited until the last possible moment, when the weatherman with the lopsided toupée and Midwestern drawl warned of freezing temperatures, wet snow, the final hours of Indian summer; he waited until the neighbors, standing at their kitchen windows, watched him as children might watch their closets late at night, wondering what terrible secrets lurked within that menacing abyss, then, when caught staring, cowered behind the blinds and disappeared into the swirling dust motes of their silent and hermetic homes; he waited until the green moss undulating on the surface of the pool resembled an alien organism, eyeless and kaleidoscopically oily, that yearned to swallow him and slowly gestate his flesh and bones under the rotting autumn leaves that glistened in the dying light of that late October afternoon; he waited, in fact, until he was forced to withstand the booming boisterous notes from Big Ben Cowley, the tow truck driver who lived across the street, a great barrel-chested man whose belly was bursting with pierogies and kielbasa and countless jars of sauerkraut and pickled beets.

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In the Cutting of Carrots

From the July 2007 edition of Boundoff:

There is an ascending and descending order in the cutting of carrots. Think of a musical scale. The slicing of carrots can be a precise thing, like fingers gliding nimbly over the keys of a piano, octave after octave, shimmering glissandos, rolling arpeggios, a forward momentum, a driving rhythm, a skill that is unquestionably athletic as well as artistic. Any chef who has for a decade or more devoted himself to the cutting of carrots will tell you the same thing. I am not the only one. My colleagues are all in agreement on this point. Yet the diners who anesthetize themselves with a bottle or two of cabernet, the ones who devour too quickly and too merrily the salads and entrees prepared for them by these madmen with their strange devotion to gastronomic virtuosity, would never suspect that so much precision goes into so small a detail. But if you pause for a moment to consider the matter, if you think of your favorite novel or symphony or philosophical insight, you might find that the greatest accomplishments are really just reflections of some kind of madness. After all, who else but a madman would devote himself year after year to the cutting of carrots?

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Aphrodisiac

From the 2007 edition of Green Hills Literary Lantern:

As the loud music died down and fused into a moderate jazz tempo, easy on the percussion, heavy on the acoustic guitar, Nancy parted her lips and smiled in a way that seemed, at least to McDougal, more than a bit flirtatious. She stared at him from her perch on the barstool, the hem of her black cocktail dress creeping toward her thighs, her face partially obscured by the glowing red blobs of a lava lamp, her eyes lost in an otherworldly swirl of shadow and light. He felt obliged to stare back, to flash her some sign of his virility and desire, but he felt nothing for this woman, only a mild sense of revulsion that he hoped wasn’t too obvious (she reeked of vermouth and cheap perfume), but when she fished an olive out of her martini glass with her fingers and then chewed it with great deliberation as if searching slowly with her tongue for the pimento, he could no longer disguise his loathing and looked down to study the second hand on his watch.

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Same Old Story (10th Anniversary Edition)

From the Summer 2007 edition of Non-Euclidean Cafe:

Here at last was our chance to succumb to new temptations (if one must think of such things as being so unabashedly sinful, so improper, so lascivious and corrupt, as to call them temptations), a long evening dawdling in sophomoric reverie beneath a bridge in the bustling neon funhouse of the Flats, twittering mischievously as we passed around a flask, our parched lips ready to accept the magical metamorphosis that would inevitably ensue, our hearts beating with the anticipation of the Kingsbury Run Killer, a ghost from the city’s past, our eyes darting back and forth from shadows to bright buzzing streetlights, searching for a sign of the cops, stone-faced Celtic henchman rumored to lurk behind the deteriorating concrete supports near the edge of the Cuyahoga River. An excursion into the forbidden, an escapade into the realm of “low rent,” of something less than the middle class mediocrity to which we had become unwittingly accustomed.

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Dumb Lumbering Beasts

From the July 3, 2007 edition of Identity Theory:

Three men stood statue-like in an isolated corner of the otherwise bustling loft, gazing in mock adoration and secret scorn at the outlandish clay sculpture blocking their view of the rooftops, church steeples and crumbling smokestacks of Ohio City. The sculpture, by far the largest exhibit in the newly restored warehouse, seemed to wobble back and forth as if pushed by invisible fingers of heat. It leaned against the windowpane like some self-important plus-sized model posing for the paparazzi, its impressive girth preventing the pungent air of evening, both sulfurous and sweet, from sweeping into the cavernous space and filtering out the smoke of cigars and cigarettes and the poorly disguised scent of hashish.

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Eyes Wide Shut: Kubrick's Epic of Copulation

From Issue #7 of Mad Hatter's Review:

When director Stanley Kubrick’s final masterpiece Eyes Wide Shut was released posthumously in summer 1999 (shortly before rumors spread that Tom Cruise and a band of disgruntled Scientologists had him “silenced” for what they felt was an unflattering portrayal of their secret society) there was a public uproar over its paradoxically realistic and outlandishly stylized depictions of sexuality. Some critics brazenly dismissed it as “a sex movie made by a dirty old man,” though perhaps madman would have been more apropos, considering Kubrick seems to fit into that category of latter day prophet-philosopher-artist, not unlike Nietzsche and de Maupassant and Schubert, syphilitic geniuses one and all, ironic considering the psycho-sexual themes of the film. Of course there is no evidence that Kubrick contracted much less died of a venereal disease.

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The Desperation Follies

From the February 2007 edition of Undergound Voices:


Zihuatanejo, Mexico, a once remote fishing village north of Acapulco, has in recent years become a destination for savvy gringos who want to avoid the crowds in the usual tourist spots like Puerto Vallarta, Cancun, Cozumel and the all-inclusive resorts sprouting up along Baja and the Yucatan. But like those better known places, Zihuatanejo caters mainly to Americans who hesitate to leave the safety and comfort of their hotels and rarefied social circles to wander the narrow, litter-strewn streets of the barrio (think of crushed cans of Tecate and Modelo Especial in the gutters and packs of mangy dogs scampering through the evil-smelling alleys) where portly men in ragged clothes accost you at every turn to buy worthless trinkets. Little wooden lizards painted in the festive colors of the tropics, chess pieces whittled from soapstone that snap in two or disintegrate before you can capture your opponent’s queen, bottles of mescale and absinthe, overpriced Cuban cigars, costume jewelry made of copper and glass. And we must not forget the occasional dope peddler who, with the slightest shift of his eyes, tries to sell you “the real McCoy, and, ah, senor, maybe a pipe for you? hand-carved, eh? do you like the leering skull?” Yes, a sort of Mexican memento mori, a reminder to the hapless tourist that your trip might end in total disaster. “Smoke up, for tomorrow we die.” My trip did coincide after all with the Mexican Day of the Dead.

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My Summer in an Evangelical Gulag

From the January 2007 edition of Perigee

Lake Cumberland, one of the largest man-made lakes in the United States, stretches along the misty hills and valleys of the notorious bible belt of southern Kentucky near the Tennessee border. There the educated elite, barricaded inside fortified vacation resorts like medieval royalty seeking refuge from marauding barbarians, wile away the hours, boating and fishing and drinking bourbon on the rocks with a practiced air of ennui. Last summer I visited one such resort, and because I quickly grew weary of lounging beside a pool and chasing after my two-year old daughter (a Marie Antoinette in the making), I dared to leave our impregnable compound with its battalion of nervous security guards and journeyed into the heart of darkness where, among the winding roads and four-lane stretches of highway, there raged a cultural conflagration the likes of which I have never seen.

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Sati

From the January 2007 edition of Denver Syntax:

The cemetery came with the house — that was part of the deal — but the old woman assured me that there wasn’t much in the way of maintenance. “Mow the grass before it gets completely out of hand, pick the weeds if that suits you, put the headstones back in place whenever a storm blows through the valley or if those goddamn teenagers wander down the road and knock them over.” And she also told me, between long sips of Irish coffee and drags on her cigarette, that I had no obligation to provide guided tours should any visitors show up, not that I had to worry much about visitors since the old covered bridge that spanned the rapids had been washed away in a flashflood last summer. Now there was no direct connection with the main highway, only a narrow ribbon of gravel road that zigzagged its way along steep cliffs of mudrock and shale to the valley floor, then skirted the pestilential fens and bogs until it reached the vast meadow and the forlorn stone house that sat atop a low hill like an oracle waiting for a wizened seer to make grim pronouncements.

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Cyclops

From the Issue #4 2006 edition of Cerebration

White sunlight pierced the cracked, mud-encrusted windshield of the pickup truck, stinging my one good eye. The woods, green and lush and wild in the full heat of summer, became an impressionistic blur. With trembling fingers I adjusted my eye patch, desperate to see where I was being taken. Dirt and gravel churned beneath the tires of the truck as Hollerin’ Bob, laughing with raucous child-like glee, stomped on the accelerator. Thick rivulets of brown saliva trickled down his scruffy chin. The truck fishtailed and careened toward a ditch. Suppressing a sharp cry of pain, I searched the seat for the pocket flashlight, screwdriver, drill bit, whatever the hell it was that gouged the small of my back, but my fingers only scraped a thin layer of grime from the vinyl before finding my copy of Ulysses. I clutched the book to my chest as though it were a talisman because a small part of me still believed that the words of a great writer could protect me from the chaos of life in Gehenna, Ohio. I need only find the correct page and with the proper awe and reverence recite a passage in the plodding monotone of my perpetually glowering professors.

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Monsters of Antiquity

From the December 2006 edition of Smokebox:

Like most dreams this one begins in media res.

I was incarcerated in an old industrial complex not unlike those abandoned, asbestos-filled warehouses that crowd the neglected streets and labyrinthine alleys of my hometown Cleveland. Around the crumbling ruin of this makeshift prison stretched an imposing gray wall topped with glimmering razor wire. Rumors circulated that the wall had a secret opening, a small hole just big enough for a man to squeeze through and make his way back home to friends and family. At certain times during the day prisoners were marched outside and permitted to stretch in a narrow concrete pen along the wall, but no one dared search for the opening in broad daylight. Somehow I knew, with the inexplicable logic of all dreams, that this “exercise yard” was frequently used for other, more diabolical things. When the guards informed us that it was time for our daily “exercise,” many of my fellow inmates would turn pale, cling to their cots, kick their legs like small children, scream for mercy.

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Jazz & Cocktails at the Center of the World

From the November 2006 edition of Fringe Magazine

During a trip to New York City several years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

It happened this way. I was visiting my friends, Kevin and Kathlene, who like thousands of other ambitious twenty-somethings had moved to the city to seek out their fortune, and even though fortune was a little slow in arriving, had in fact been delayed indefinitely, they nevertheless assumed an air of sophistication and decadence. From a distance and in silhouette Kevin and Kathlene looked like those svelte, stiffly posed figures you see in Jazz Age advertisements, all sharp angles and long lines, a man and woman sipping martinis while standing at a penthouse window; a flapper in a sequined dress, a dandy in a tux, templates used by graphic artists who designed the programs for the latest Gershwin or Cole Porter musical. Girl Crazy, Oh, Kay!, Anything Goes. Whenever they were nearby I heard, or at any rate imagined I heard, muted trumpets, saxophones, syncopated rhythms, Strayhorn’s “Lush Life,” Ellington at the Cotton Club...

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Baptism

From the Fall 2004 edition of Kant Magazine:

After his obligatory eruption of rage in which he slapped his daughter not once but several across the face, after he hurled her against the bookshelf and watched as the encyclopedias rained down on her head, James McCarthy slumped into an armchair and began to formulate a plan, one so obvious in its logic and simplicity, that he laughed at himself for not having thought of it before. These tantrums of his never solved anything. He had a moral obligation to set things straight, and he would make certain that something good would come of this bleak situation...

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Review of Paul Auster'sThe Brooklyn Follies

From the spring 2006 edition of Ascent Aspirations:

Paul Auster, now regarded as a major American writer by many critics, ordinarily concerns himself with large, abstract notions of fate, destiny, chance, coincidence and other quasi-mystical matters typically categorized as existential in nature. Auster is, after all, fluent in French and has translated the work of many obscure French poets into English. He may also be the closest thing we have in this country to a café society intellectual. Like some of the better known writers of post-war Paris, Auster examines the dark side of human nature; think of Sartre’s No Exit with its famous adage “Other people are hell” and Camus’ The Stranger with its bleak insight “A man who has lived only one day can easily live for a hundred years in prison. He will have enough memories to keep him from being bored.”

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Ritualized Stupidity: American Schools and the Culture of Vulgarity

From the summer 2006 edition of The Rough Road Review:

Allow me explain why I believe the American education system, at least in its present form, is doomed to extinction (for members of the religious fringe who believe dinosaur bones were placed in the earth to confuse scientists, you may substitute the objectionable Darwinian term “extinction” with something a little more innocuous like “hellfire”).

In his latest tome The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, a book that is impressive for its almost Tolstoyan length as well as its seemingly inexhaustible catalogue of plot summaries, British author and journalist Christopher Booker analyzes hundreds of novels and films and comes to the sad if obvious conclusion that American stories are lacking in themes of individual self-development and growth; the heroes of such stories fail to become fully mature adults capable of functioning in society in humane and meaningful ways and who seem to seek, as the highest prize, “the approbation of the crowd.”

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The Bloated Tick

From the spring 2004 edition of The Oklahoma Review:

Every morning for the past five months the Gonk arrived early at the service garage where he stood behind an orange tarp and cut elaborate butterflies out of scrap metal with a welding torch. This drove us to distraction because we had no idea why anyone would want to come in early for any reason let alone to make butterflies. The Gonk smoked cigarettes under his welding hood. He scratched his balls with a chipping hammer. He mumbled things under his breath. He worked as though in a trance...

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Refuge

From the summer 2004 edition of Thunder Sandwich:

Through the high grass of the fallow field, two boys, ages nine and ten, marched in step while whistling a melody they'd heard over and over again on the radio that summer. The bright quarter notes sailed toward the sagging roof of an abandoned barn in the distance and disappeared through a window near the peak. One shard of glass dangled from the sill like the rotten tooth of a jack-o-lantern and glimmered in the late afternoon sun, momentarily blinding the boys whenever they looked in that direction. Jimmy, the oldest of the two, cleared a swath of weeds and wildflowers with a large stick that swoosh-swooshed through the air, one wide arc after another. Toby, the younger and more contemplative one, followed close behind, shooing away the occasional bee and dragonfly, his knees and shins crisscrossed with angry scratches crusted over with blood, his fingers stained with dark juices from having ventured into a thicket of bushes where he'd picked wild berries and placed them gently, one by one, into the small wooden box he now cradled in his arms...

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Artifact

From the Summer 2005 edition of The Plum Ruby Review:

On a sunny afternoon in late September, I, the librarian and curator of the vast and renowned Fitzgerald Collection, stood before one of the stained glass windows and watched a throng of businesspeople hurry out of their office buildings and swarm the little public park in order to secure their usual benches next to the magnificent marble putti that pissed high arcs of water into the fountain. Uniformly shrouded in solemn gray suits, pale and glassy-eyed from hours and years and decades spent inside a hive of cubicles, the men and women now stretched their legs and smiled as they nibbled on hotdogs purchased from the corner vendor, sipped lattes and designer waters, intermittently commented on passersby, and all but ignored the vast wall of clouds gathering on the horizon, great, billowing, lead-colored things that, at least for a moment, looked like mountains with craggy granite peaks and snow tipped caps before metamorphosing into a hundred other phantasmagoric shapes—anvils, mushroom clouds, the monstrous swells of an angry sea. Up until then the day had been a tranquil one, warm and pleasant, but as the clouds gained momentum and blew in off Lake Erie, sparrows suddenly went silent and fluttered out of treetops. A gust of wind stirred branches and rattled windows. Newspapers swirled high in the air and disappeared down the deep canyon of 9th Street, a cyclone of sordid celebrity gossip and astrological twaddle. Flower petals and candy bar wrappers and Styrofoam cups bounced along curbs and into alleyways...

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College, Consumerism and the New Conservative Paradigm

From the May 2006 edition of Raging Face:

America has become a conservative country and will probably remain so for at least one more generation. This has happened because the Republican Party has colonized not only Iraq but also the minds of an entire generation of Americans. The conservative paradigm about patriotism and manifest destiny in the Middle East has wheedled its way into the brains of people who are most susceptible to insipid slogans and sound bites, namely teenagers whose still developing brains somehow subsist on a steady diet of sugar, nicotine, draft beer and FOX's persistent and unapologetic harangues about milquetoast liberals and fags...

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Vigil

From the Summer 2004 edition of Exquisite Corpse:

For well over one hundred years the Jesuit school has been regarded by its students, administrators and staff as a powerful beacon of uncompromisingly high moral standards, a revered symbol of Catholic piety in a once picturesque quarter of the city, an area that has since gone to seed, a forlorn place overrun by liquor stores and abandoned warehouses and diners crowded with drag queens who squabble over the price of a cup of coffee, the old neighborhood as it is sometimes called, "old" because the houses all around the school are in various states of decomposition, their foundations crumbling, their rooftops sagging, "old" because no developer has come along to tear those houses down to make room for parking lots and shopping centers and all of the other conveniences of modern life...

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The Diploma Mill

From the Februrary 2006 edition of Identity Theory:

I am an instructor of English at a small, private college near Cleveland, Ohio. With its tree-lined streets, gothic architecture and sprawling quad, the college is an idyllic setting and one that disguises some unsightly truths. Like a Hollywood movie set, the college campus is all artifice, a make-believe world where actors appear for a short time, recite their lines, and then exit the sound stage of higher education forever. I say this because the longer I teach, the more convinced I become that, in general, a college education takes the form of a very predictable and tedious script in which students are asked to memorize material and then regurgitate that material on an exam, after which time they forget everything they’ve just memorized (“learned” would be too hopeful a word), only to repeat the cycle again next semester. After four years of reciting various soliloquies in a plodding monotone, students attend a graduation ceremony that in many respects mimics the Academy Awards except for the fact that everyone, no matter his or her level of competence, is given a diploma from the dean and an ovation from the befuddled professors who seem a bit perplexed by the whole event as if it were some kind of elaborate hoax. There are, of course, many reasons for their stupefaction...

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