Steve Young

Steve Young has an MFA in Fiction from Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has published fifteen previous short stories including in recent issues of the Saturday Evening Post, The Wild Word, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Woven Tale Press. Two of his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and BASS. Young grew up in Vermont and is an award-winning radio journalist (over 150 stories filed with NPR). He now lives and writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He plays jazz piano, is half-Japanese, half-Irish and is sight-impaired.

Mugwah, The Winged Tortoise of Love

The last time she saw Tommy Greene was in a laundromat in downtown Essex Junction, where he gave her $180 in cash in a plain white envelope. She drove her car in to meet him through a cold, drenching, late-winter downpour. The grayness and the raw, chill rain had infected the little college town that morning like a virus; the streets and sidewalks were waterlogged, the storm drains overflowing, the stores and cafes, with their pale-yellow beacons of light, lost and abandoned in the torrent.