Inside Looking Out
Selected short fiction and personal essays.
Links below will open into the full stories.
Short Fiction
Deep End Dance
Oz rests in a bleak city that only pulses late at night when gunshots, drugs, and crime rule. That said, it’s also an oasis - a refuge from the snarling engines that zoom past after midnight. The famous thirty-five acre clinic features verdant, fragrant grounds and is enclosed by a stately eight-foot redbrick wall. The flowering bushes, bur oak, elm, gingko, magnolia, sour gum, and Kentucky coffeetrees are beginning to color at the edges.
It’s a late summer day - a strange one filled …
Toast
I delivered my first and last speech at Toastmasters in mid-December, just before I left to have jaw surgery. It didn’t go exceptionally well – the speech, I mean. “Okay,” a comely yoga instructor whispered to me as I rushed past her on the way out after my brief talk. “You were able to get out several words – that’s a start.” Another member e-mailed me the next day: “Hey, I didn’t understand what the hell went on but we all struggle coming out of the blocks sometimes.”
Essays
A Good Soak in Dublin
Taking a warm bath with my new wife on a rainy day in Dublin felt sweet. It had been twenty-three years since my last bath with a lady. At that time, I was a few weeks from graduating Skidmore College, and my body was a fit 175-pounds, but even so that bathing experience was a rare occurrence. Around this time, my mind was beginning to splinter and disintegrate with bipolar and the varied miseries that come with it.
As I struggled over the coming years, I didn’t lose my interest…
Shades of Yellow:
How to not walk away
West River Memorial Park, near the New Haven–West Haven border, features an impressive, World War I statue in bronze and granite carved by Karl Lang in 1936. Timothy Francis Ahearn, the sturdy doughboy hero, has thighs like a Heisman Trophy winner with a tapered trunk and muscular arms. When I was returning to life in 2007, slowly kicking back into gear after a ridiculously long struggle with self-harm and bipolar disorder in the mid-2000s, I visited the park frequently.
My Decade on Broadway
Ten years is a dreadful amount of time to spend cooped up with very ill people, especially if you’re sicker than most of them yourself. I know that mentally ill is the more accepted term nowadays—the one that NPR uses—but nuts or whacked seems closer to the bone, to the truth that people feel down deep about those who are unstable.
Or, should I say, the truth that I felt…
Henry, Kabir, and That Little Book
It wasn’t the fluid groove of the sentences, or any finesse on the author’s part—frankly, the tiny book featured far from perfect prose. But the simple, aw-shucks style struck a chord with Henry, made him smile, and feel eased, or at the very least, lifted. The story worked because it didn’t pretend to be anything other than unabashedly sentimental.
Take that line: “Every love story is beautiful, but …
