Short Story

The garish signage along the road offended him the most. Driving out of his leafy suburb, all Joseph Ward saw was a scrawny forest of concrete and metal stalks holding glaring billboards, miles of cable, and faded plastic light boxes. If there had been another route into the office, he would be driving it.

As a missionary living in Shanghai, my father never imagined his daughter in show business. My mother, on the other hand, aspired for me to become a glamorous movie star once we returned to the states.
“I’ll not have my daughter as a show pony,” Daddy huffed. “It’s not dignified.”

Ever since Ariel visited the archway on the road, she had become completely different, like a woman possessed by a new spirit, and Massimo was grateful for it. He had intuited how precious that space she possessed after her mother died…

Jesse hadn’t been home in fourteen years. He left the night Pat died and hadn’t spoken to his younger brother since. That is until about three weeks ago when Aaron called and asked him to visit. He even bought his ticket.

Marvin came back home from school looking troubled.
“What’s up, man?” Claudia said.
“Hm, I don’t know,” he said, “I just don’t know what the point of everything is.”
Claudia didn’t expect that. Ten-year old Marvin sounded like a nihilist. Wasn’t it a bit too early for that?

Jacob Shigomitsu rubbed a shoulder blade against a rough-barked ʻōhiʻa tree as he worked the kinks out of a lariat and contemplated what to do with his mule. The mule swiveled its enormous furry ears toward Jake and stared back from between the rusty bars of the small pipe-panel corral.
It certainly wasn’t your average mud-gray, slab-sided, undersized Hawaiian scrub mule.

Where have you gone, my dear Ada, apple of my eye, mother of my child, keeper of my love?
Tonight, I returned home to inhuman stillness and silence. When I unlocked the front door and stepped inside, I immediately noticed the house was missing your quiet presence, absent your soulful essence.