Flash fiction published by Blue Lake Review. LINK
In Washington DC where I live, we have a statue of the famous flag raising on Iwo Jima in World War II. My wife Jane, who is a photographer, spent time taking pictures of the statue a year or so ago, and that set my mind pondering what that event was like. The story “Keeping Your Head Down” grew out of that.
Short story published by 101 Words. LINK
I’ve suffered a blow from a baseball like the one the story describes. The baseball’s red stitches imprinted red marks on my skin. The marks lingered there for a day or two. I was not a youth player. I was an adult Little League coach at the time. But the experience stayed with me and inspired this flash piece.
Berenice from the Stop ‘n’ Save
Short story published by Flash Fiction Magazine: LINK
Many a super-talented grocery store checker has offered me effusive and sincere greetings as Berenice does in the story. I began to wonder, who could be worthy of all that? So here we ponder what it might be like for Curtis, who doubts his own worth.
Short story published by Commuter Lit. LINK
I visited the windswept wheatfields of Kiowa County, Oklahoma with my daughter Skye, a few years ago. It is where my grandfather grew up, and that place inspired this piece. Seeing the near-silent landscape made me ponder who would stay there, and who would seek adventure and life elsewhere.
Short story published by The City Key. LINK
I remember the day the news broke that Hank Aaron had beat Babe Ruth’s record. I was 14. There was much inside-game controversy about what the record meant. Wasn’t it harder when Babe Ruth did it? Babe Ruth was white and Hank Aaron was Black. Race tinged those discussions. My characters, one white and one Black manifest that difference of perspective despite craving common ground.
Short story published by Syncopation Literary Journal. LINK
A guitar is a beautiful assemblage of wooden parts that makes exquisite sounds. And a guitar deserves to be treated well. Martin D-28 was not treated well in this story.
Outside McBride’s on the Evening of Prohibition
Short story published by Short-Edition. LINK
I have read a lot on the Prohibition period. I wanted to explore what those bar denizens might have experienced that first dry day, January 16, 1920.
Short story published by Lowestoft Chronicle, Issue 43 LINK
This tale spawned from my re-discovery of the Blood Knife in my parent’s kitchen drawer. It is a pen knife used by my grandfather to open packages. It wounded him seventy or eighty years ago, and got that moniker in the process. The knife helped me explored the Slacums and imagine all their shifting dynamics. I continue to write about them.
Short story published by Literally Stories LINK
I don’t know where this story came from, perhaps from the jokey title, which I think occurred to me first. But it emerged on its own accord in short order.
Flash fiction story published by BRILLIANT Flash Fiction, June 2017. LINK (Scroll down for my story)
This was my first published story, for which I am grateful. It’s based on a true incident, which I worked to understand and portray by fictionalizing. The hat in question was winged into the sea by my Grandfather, Charles D. Mahaffie, Sr., Oklahoma prairie born and raised, as he sailed for England to attend Oxford.
Anthologized in: Hunger: The Best of Brilliant Flash Fiction: 2014-1019, October 2019.
