Short Story
Shadows in the Rearview
She came looking for a car. What she found were the wrecks inside herself.
A nurse’s aid searching for a used car finds herself trapped in a different kind of marketplace: one where every vehicle carries the ghosts of her past. The errand spirals into a reckoning with the damage she’s inherited, and the question of whether she can ever drive herself free.
Poem
Inheritance
This poem explores the emotional legacy of an abusive father and the complicated terrain of identity, shame, and survival. Through tightly controlled imagery and layered repetition, it wrestles with what it means to carry someone’s genes—and their violence—inside your own body.
Short Story
Waiting to Choose
Working the night shift at a grocery store, Elsa drifts through her days like a ghost, swallowing every insult and accusation, just as she once did at home. But when a strange brass bell appears in her locker—silent, heavy, inexplicable—it awakens something she thought was long dead: the power to choose, and the courage to be heard. Waiting to Choose is a story of trauma, survival, and the small, uncanny miracle that helps one woman reclaim her voice.
Short Story
The Unlearned Lesson
What do we owe the dying—and what do they take from us on the way?
In this story, a caregiver tends her mother-in-law through the slow unraveling of dementia. Between pills, baths, and endless questions, love collides with resentment in the long, halting shuffle toward death. A raw portrait of devotion and exhaustion, this story asks what it means to stay when leaving would be easier.
Short Story
Tell Me You're Sorry
What if the one thing you needed most from your father never came, even at the end?
Kelly has spent her life carrying the silence of an angry, unreachable father. Now, as he lies dying in a small Indiana town, she drives home with a single fragile hope: to finally ask for the apology she’s longed for since childhood. But when old habits of denial and avoidance close in around their last days together, Kelly is forced to confront the truth—that forgiveness may come without repair, and healing may mean grieving what she will never receive.
Tender, unsparing, and deeply human, Tell Me You’re Sorry explores the jagged terrain between parent and child, the ache of unfinished love, and the strength it takes to stop waiting for an apology and start reclaiming your own voice.
Short Story
The Apology
What if the only apology you ever received came in a language you didn’t recognize until it was too late?
When Kelly’s father dies, he leaves behind more than tangled finances and bitter memories—he leaves her with a choice. A mysterious CD worth nearly a hundred thousand dollars becomes the spark that reignites old wounds between Kelly and her sister, wounds carved deep by a father who never said, “I’m sorry.”
As Kelly struggles with guilt, resentment, and the burden of deciding whether to share the money—or the truth—she confronts a lifetime of silence. In the shadow of his grave, she discovers that apologies don’t always arrive in words. Sometimes they come disguised, waiting to be recognized before they can set you free.
