Nikos the Barber

Best of Ohio Short Stories Volume II | Presented by Columbus Creative Cooperative

When my friend Simon’s hair needed cutting, we always made the long walk to the one-chair shop owned by a Greek named Nikos. The shop was squeezed in at the end of a small alley. He cut hair well, but we went there for his stories. [...]

Cooper

SNReview Autumn-Winter 2014-15

Cooper went off to the bathroom to identify the crawling thing that had went me shrieking into the living room. It came straight at me, Cooper, I swear. It was a horrible, bizzare-looking thing. And huge!” I wondered if I should have sent him. He was getting so weak that an extra trip to the bathroom required more energy than he had to spare. [...]

A Little Visit to Hell

Boomtown | Explosive Writing from Ten Years of the Queens University of Charlottes MFA Program

My husband is Swiss and a mathematician and I am neither. Sometimes I think the success of our long marriage is that we are entirely baffled by one another. He likes my country and I am convinced that Switzerland rejects me and everything I stand for, so, at least until his retirement, I live in the United States and he lives in Switzerland. [...]

Just paint it red and forget about it

Collection of short stories | The Gloriana Press

No matter what the dog tries to tell you, it was she and only she who chewed the head of my garden saint. Oh, she’ll make some effort to shift the blame, but the evidence points a clear finger in the direction of Norah, the black Great Dane. [...]

I invade Poland

The 1993 Ohio State Alumni Magazine | Essay Award Winner

I used to love spy movies. It was so easy to imagine meeting haggard men on street corners in the freezing dawn and whispering coded messages into hairy ears. I could see myself wheeling a baby carriage filled will microfilm into a dank little church where it would be processed and concealed in nun dolls for shipping. I would be at the center of all this intrigue, wearing a gabardine trench coat. [...]

A Place in Hell

Collection of Poems | Pictures by Susan Sturgill

May I suggest

a place in hell

Where bad developers

should dwell

Beyond their fortune’s

ministration

Forever housed

in their creation. [...]