COAST FICTIONS
Short Stories from the Pacific Northwest
Rinehart’s Beach
Fall 2011. The Contemporary West
I shot the otter during the evening tide, and he thrashed in kelp, and when the moon finally rose, and he didn’t washup, I figured his mate had carried him like a pup…
The Howls Behind the Waves
SNReview Summer/Spring 2013
I knew my mom died having me, but Auntie never said anything about my dad, and I about hoped out my heart, hoofing it beside the surf, expecting a letter from him. Every day the mail was due, I climbed Náah Rock and looked up the beach…
Otter Jack
Gloria Mundi Press website 2002
Any other day Valerie came running through the stumps, knocking down fireweed and foxgloves, I would have thought a yardline had snapped or a rigger had fallen or some, new, chain saw had run itself across a faller’s leg…
Salvaging
Bancroft Library listed Salvaging in Finding Aid to the Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies Records 1972-2012
A window crashed apart, and fire leaped through the shards, leaped up the frame, and I waited behind Auntie, watching through the doorway as little flames raced across the front-office floor, and she bent to her switchboard…
Removal
Poydras Review Winter 2012
Keekwillie played behind a hanging mat, smelling camas cooking in sweet grass, the hunt in his head so real he didn’t hear the rain against the cedar-plank roof or the bustle outside. He pretended he was a spruce cone in the little canoe…
So Hard Pull the Insides
Alligator Juniper Spring 2003 – Finalist, Alligator Juniper National Fiction Contest
Even though the salmon were coming like hell, and I was sliming like mad, I got a full look at her as she climbed the ladder to the gutting table. She turned out to be the most stoic beautiful woman I ever met–I was twenty-three…
Creator Bird
Raven Chronicles Vol. 13 No. 1 2007
As soon as the tide got low enough, I snuck away from Ma and Pa and the fish nets, and I crossed the mudflat and saw my creator bird. I climbed way up Oystercatcher’s rock and laid me down, and she bobbed frantic on her ledge beneath me, flashing flaming-red rim…
Tide and Sorrow
Ginosko: between literary vision and spiritual realities Spring 2003
Though the World was very new, Raven watched the beach from a spruce that was old and dead, towering as bare as a bone atop a cliff. Raven knew hunger, and he felt lust, but no tide had washed the shore yet…
How the World was Stolen
Mobius: The Journal of Social Change Winter 2003
Sun as she set toward the sea made the song inside him strong, but Tune was hard black rock, basalt, and his song did not come out. His member swelled for ten thousand years, stretching across the ocean…
Cycle of Life: a novella
Falling in love with endangered lives
I leaned my bicycle against a big yellow backhoe, and flute notes whirred up the scale, airy and then musical and reedy and fast, ringing with the same frenzied chords…
