Stories

This is a collection of my short fiction. It's mostly lightweight and meant to be amusing. Not the stuff of thought-provoking, great literature or college classes. And, often, guys misplace their clothes. This collection parallels that of my short non-fiction on this site -- Collections. Enjoy.

NumbaCruncha begins with a chilling peek into the near future, then takes a thousand year leap to Oasis, a future city-state in which the human aptitude for duplicitous and unjust social schemes has reached its logical culmination in a flesh-crawlingly evil dystopia ruled by the most unpleasant gang of conmen and women you're ever likely to encounter. A couple of young scientists who have recently invented a new means of transport, decide to do something about it, despite the tremendous odds.

Meanwhile, out in the forest, the secret weapon designed by intelligent, decent men a thousand years previously, is patiently waiting.

Events on a small New England college campus, following an exceptional one. Gil Andrus and his husband, Pete Sordan, follow through the usual faculty politics and the unexpected mystery. And Don Burris, the detective from The Pendleton Omens, reappears.

Note: this book shares roots and occasionally overlaps with my other book, Quabbin, which is also set in Waldron, Massachusetts, though in a national clothing company. But they're different books with different sensibilities.

The tale of a high school student desperate to make his mark on his peers. He wants to come out, and he wants to come out big enough that no one will forget it, but somehow it always goes wrong.

A lighthearted story of friendship, family, and of course, courage. It's a tad cliche, some things in life are meant to be.

Jimmy thought there would be plenty of time to decided who would ring his bell. He felt no compulsion to date, male or female, he was happy. Until the new student became a friend just before graduation.

Harry Sussman is a perfectly nice guy in his early 30s. He's a successful architect who lives in western Massachusetts. He's intelligent. He's stable. He's reasonably good-looking. He just wants to meet a nice guy to marry. Now how hard can that be?

It's 2010, and Peter “Trout” Spencer is thirty-two, living a gloriously gay one-night-stand life. That is until an instance of mishearing by his grandmother at her eightieth birthday party throws his world off kilter. What she hears as “I’m going to get married in June,”—to someone called Wendy—is in fact, “I’m going to get Marisse and June,” his stepsister and her girlfriend. When she offers her six bedroom Hamptons house as a wedding present, Trout has a dilemma; in the world of fake news, could he be forgiven for seeking out a fake wife?

Jack Shaw has a problem: he hates being Jack Shaw. He pulls his best friend Dawn into a solution, and both wind up in tough positions. What, if anything, can lead them back?

593 Riverside Drive is a kind of drawing room comedy about the difficulty a woman living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in 1925 has in getting a divorce and the narrow-mindedness of one of the male lawyers in the subsequent trial. Still, there's a lot of humor in the rudeness, especially when Uncle Herbert's around. The book will serialize on Fridays, probably through November -- WELL, THAT HIT A MAJOR SETBACK WHEN I HAD A TRULY UNEXPECTED STROKE ON OCTOBER 2ND. NOW, I'M HOPING TO FINISH EDITING AND POSTING BY THE END OF FEBRUARY 2024.

My story of soon 85 years of a tempestuous life, a try to understand myself where I come from, an attempt to draw lessons for others from my experiences, my joys and my woes. All life is beautiful, provided it is not useless !