Inside Looking Out
Selected short fiction and personal essays.
Links below will open into the full stories.
Short Fiction
The day my son Max Flew
“I’m in my late fives,” my son, Maxwell, declares to me. His birthday is coming up and he insists it must be at Wendy’s down the street, but he plans to defiantly wear a Burger King crown through the whole celebration, in protest of how that fast-food joint has fallen away in recent years. Max is my flesh and blood and all he wants now is stability for his Poppa. Simple needs, really. I find that stability by writing tales from my own splintered and fractured past.
Deep End Dance
Oz rests in a bleak city that only pulses late at night when gunshots, drugs, and crime rule. That said, it’s also an oasis - a refuge from the snarling engines that zoom past after midnight. The famous thirty-five acre clinic features verdant, fragrant grounds and is enclosed by a stately eight-foot redbrick wall. The flowering bushes, bur oak, elm, gingko, magnolia, sour gum, and Kentucky coffeetrees are beginning to color at the edges.
It’s a late summer day - a strange one filled …
Foiled
I’ve lived in Courage House for ten years, a group home in a sketchy area of New Haven that reeks of General Tso’s Chicken, bleach, and wet dog. Everyone within the walls shoots for grit in the face of anguish, but like the wilder world, we have our own slip-n-slides among us.
Take Jeb from Delaware - eye contact sends him scurrying to the closest corner, but he wouldn’t hesitate to lift …
Still-Life
When I was thirteen, I fell for a magnificent older woman - let’s call her Lilac. She brought wondrous and bold light into my life with wild colors and her kisses that—to me, at least—tasted like the most exquisite ice cream. Mint-Oreo crushed with toffee and graham cracker bits. But Lilac – oh, she was sweet and kept her chestnut hair in a bob, and her lips were always a pouting poppy red. I see her in her classic parlor, a view I’d absorbed a hundred, maybe a thousand times, surrounded by lots of earth tones with her eyes resting – definitely not closed or shut. Resting.
She had curves and ample hips, an angular face, a long…
The Shoeless Principal
My neighbor was talking loudly about the Bible and wondered how far back golden retrievers could be traced in the history of humanity. Stan Lucca—a man I’d never met before—was telling his girlfriend that most experts refuse to consider the primal bond between the lovely golden canines and Jesus Christ, and he didn’t think that was fair or equitable at all. Sure, he said, people blabber on about St. Francis and his devotion to animals, but not enough about Jesus and my favorite breed dusted with the rays of the golden sun.
He was arguing with his girlfriend while…
Toast
I delivered my first and last speech at Toastmasters in mid-December, just before I left to have jaw surgery. It didn’t go exceptionally well – the speech, I mean. “Okay,” a comely yoga instructor whispered to me as I rushed past her on the way out after my brief talk. “You were able to get out several words – that’s a start.” Another member e-mailed me the next day: “Hey, I didn’t understand what the hell went on but we all struggle coming out of the blocks sometimes.”
Essays
A Good Soak in Dublin
Taking a warm bath with my new wife on a rainy day in Dublin felt sweet. It had been twenty-three years since my last bath with a lady. At that time, I was a few weeks from graduating Skidmore College, and my body was a fit 175-pounds, but even so that bathing experience was a rare occurrence. Around this time, my mind was beginning to splinter and disintegrate with bipolar and the varied miseries that come with it.
As I struggled over the coming years, I didn’t lose my interest…
Mental Health Molasses
It seems like mental health clients can't get out beyond the slog of our own psychic universe; like there's an unbreakable plexiglass dome around us, something torn straight from a Stephen King novel in 2009. We get stuck in this thick, self-loathing molasses up to our thighs as we rush toward life or love but something provincial keeps tugging us back. In and out of inpatient hospitals and day-treatment facilities, a raven caws, “Help them, David, why not help them with what you’ve already learned?
Shades of Yellow:
How to not walk away
West River Memorial Park, near the New Haven–West Haven border, features an impressive, World War I statue in bronze and granite carved by Karl Lang in 1936. Timothy Francis Ahearn, the sturdy doughboy hero, has thighs like a Heisman Trophy winner with a tapered trunk and muscular arms. When I was returning to life in 2007, slowly kicking back into gear after a ridiculously long struggle with self-harm and bipolar disorder in the mid-2000s, I visited the park frequently.
Just Melancholy Stuff
I heard Don McLean’s American Pie on the radio yesterday as I wolfed down fifty glazed Munchkins at Dunkin Donuts in Springfield, Massachusetts. Hearing the song in its entirety for the first time in years, plus feeling bloated, mixed in with sad thoughts of an old friend, made me think of Barry and myself attending McLean’s concert at a Northampton playhouse in 2004.
It was right smack in the midst of my long struggle with depression and self-injury. I was a massive…
My Decade on Broadway
Ten years is a dreadful amount of time to spend cooped up with very ill people, especially if you’re sicker than most of them yourself. I know that mentally ill is the more accepted term nowadays—the one that NPR uses—but nuts or whacked seems closer to the bone, to the truth that people feel down deep about those who are unstable.
Or, should I say, the truth that I felt…
Henry, Kabir, and That Little Book
It wasn’t the fluid groove of the sentences, or any finesse on the author’s part—frankly, the tiny book featured far from perfect prose. But the simple, aw-shucks style struck a chord with Henry, made him smile, and feel eased, or at the very least, lifted. The story worked because it didn’t pretend to be anything other than unabashedly sentimental.
Take that line: “Every love story is beautiful, but …
Don’t Fear the Freudians
“May I confess something sordid, Dr. Able?” Jillian asked as she walked into my office.
“I have no more absolution gift-cards left in my wallet today,” I said.
“Don’t be coy, Doc,” she said. “I need a wise friend who’ll guide me past life’s potholes, quicksand, and thin ice.”
“I was trained for all that,” I said. “I can weave tidbits and scraps of Dr. Freud’s life and discuss his theories and lessons and help you tremendously.”
Gup, Spiders, & What Might Be Next…
Gup saw his life as one giant Jiffy Pop treat with its foil frying pan and Kodachrome cover-photo of smiling kids erupting into brilliant, popped-up kernels of corn. My maternal grandfather possessed a keen mind and a sharp Irish wit and stood five six on his tippy toes. When my sister was petite, she couldn’t pronounce the term Gramps so it came out GUP so everyone agreed on it. GUP had a fading, slicked-back Brylcreemed hairline and worked undercover for the IRS with a shiny badge he liked to show off, and each breath he drew was a half chuckling, half wheezing gig.
