Literary Fiction - Stories

Teacher Christopher Edwards believed his life began in the seaside town of Penmere. When memories return beneath the ancient Tor, he discovers another truth: he has lived before.

Across two thousand years, he and one other soul have found each other again and again, only to be torn apart. At the heart of the mystery lies one act of unbearable grief, when a priest's desperate refusal to accept death transformed love into an endless cycle of remembrance.

Christopher must decide whether the life he is living belongs to memory or to choice. For the first time in centuries, love may offer not a beginning, but an ending.

Begin Again starts with one coffee. That had been the whole plan.

Evan wasn't looking for complicated. He had enough of it—a life he'd never settled into, a house in Wicklow he didn't know what to do with, and a habit of leaving before anyone could ask him to stay.

Then he meets Cian, an Irish arborist who is steady, direct, and clear about what he wants.

One night becomes another morning, a spare shirt, and a man who won't pretend this is less than it is. The sex is easy. Letting Cian see him afterward isn't.

Evan knows how to leave before anyone matters. Cian knows how much of that he'll tolerate.

For many of us, our public personae and our intimate lives may be radically different; the gap between what others see and expect of us and the life we really lead may result in misunderstanding of who we are. Over two weekends, two weeks apart, this story follows three ordinary young gay men and their secret lives, their anxieties, their desires and obsessions, and, of course, their yearning for a long-term lover.

Oliver's marriage ends and his job disappears on the same Tuesday. So he flies to France, straps on a pack, and starts walking. Somewhere in the French Alps he meets Julien, a man carrying his own weight, and the two of them figure out—slowly, carefully—whether they've got room for each other.

Two grown men, a lot of hills, and the slow business of letting someone in.

At twenty, I wrote my thirty-year-old self a letter. At forty, I found it. And here's my reply, one the laws of time won't let me send, but one that I owe him anyway.

Yorkshire, 1901. A baronet's younger son learns the duties of an estate he will never fully inherit. A groom who survived the Boer War tends horses he has known longer than the young master himself.

Between them: the precise distance that rank requires, and everything that accumulates in the space it creates.

Loose Box is a quiet story about two men who never say what they mean — because one has no words for it, and the other already knows.

Kismet is a transgressive coming-of-age story set against the backdrop of a stifling North London summer. It explores the fragile boundary between childhood innocence and the electric, often terrifying, awakening of adolescent desire.

Today, with modern treatment and prevention, we often forget about AIDS and the toll it took upon the gay community. At the end of a long trip, Robert's final stopover is Minneapolis. There, he encounters a friend of a friend who had fallen to AIDS twenty-five years earlier. This is a sad story, and was difficult to write, and I've kept it on the back burner for over a year. Dedicated to a close friend who passed thirty-two years ago on his favorite holiday, Halloween.

This story completes a trilogy, following "A Class Reunion" and "Love, In the Ashes of Time."

We make myriad choices every day, in cooking, editing, life and much more. Here are three poems to choose from, or you can embrace all three.