Tag: Fiction

  • Our Dog Smells Bad

    (This is a Flash Fiction piece that I am releasing to the world…)

    No matter what we do, the dog always smells bad. And when I say, “smells bad,” it’s a smell combination of a “wet dog,” and corn nuts. We bathe her with expensive shampoos and conditioners, one’s specifically for serious, industrial grade dog odor. It only holds for a day or two. Then she returns back to her stink. Sometimes with a smile.

    We asked the vet about it, and she said that some dogs smell – it’s just who they are. But she ran a couple of tests anyway, to make sure there wasn’t an infection or something worse. Nope, the dog was fine. Her teeth and gums were fine, bloodwork was fine, pee and poop was fine. No signs of infections or parasites. No cancer, no ticks, no fleas, nothing. The vet suggested that we change her diet, maybe that would help. And to be safe, the vet thought it best to shame us – “This is who your dog is, maybe you should learn to accept her.” I accept the dog, just not the smell.

    She’s a mix of shih tzu and something else small. Maybe a chihuahua, maybe a wiener dog. We rescued her from a puppy mill, or at least that’s what we were told when we adopted her. She was a sad sack of a lost cause – a little under fed, and not looking happy to be rescued. While the other dogs wagged their tails, and jumped for attention, our dog just lay there on the cold linoleum floor – looking like she’d given up on life. She didn’t exactly exude the traditional joy and happiness that a dog brings to your life. She was giving off a “I’m going to get picked last” vibe. What can I say; I was always picked last. It just seemed fitting. 

    We wanted an animal in our life; my wife wanted a dog, and I wanted a cat. The animal adoption event at the Paramus Petco only had dogs, though the Facebook posting said cats would be available. But when you walk on the lot, you gotta buy. We just assumed that the bad smell was due to neglect. How were we to know it was a factory setting. We made sure we added pet shampoo to our overflowing cart of pet supplies at the store.

    She was nervous to come home with us; shook the whole way. The wife wrapped her in a blanket from the trunk to see if that would calm her down. It didn’t. She shivered but didn’t make a sound. At home, we fed her and bathed her, and let her explore our apartment. We sat on the couch and watched her sniff around wondering what she would do next, which was to take a big poop in the middle of the living room. In hindsight, we should have walked her when we got home.

    Walking her was an enlightening adventure. We discovered that our dog hated all other dogs. Our little dog displayed a level of animosity and rage that I didn’t think was possible for an animal. She would growl, hiss, and bark. Spit would fly out of her mouth, and her fur would stand up. Possession might be a good word to use – as it was like the Devil entered her body. And it didn’t matter what the other dog’s reaction was, our little guy still wanted to kill them. Once, she pulled so hard on her leash, she almost chocked herself out. So, walks became a game of avoiding other dogs.

    Before you ask, yes we tried all the training tricks to get her to be more comfortable around other dogs. We tried treats, and positive reinforcements, a firm hand, and all that other dog whisperer shit. Nothing took. We had a neighbor in our building who was a dog walker. She was positive she could train our dog. After three days, even she gave up. And she couldn’t figure it out either. Why was the dog so nice to people, but when another dog came around, she devolved into a demon? It’s just who she is, we told the neighbor, and we accept that this is who she is.

  • Flash Fiction Review: “Bed Rot” by Sarah Chin

    (The flash fiction story “Bed Rot” by Sarah Chin first appeared on November 14, 2025 at Okay Donkey.)

    If you read enough flash fiction like I do, you notice that a couple of subjects are rather popular with writers; death, pets, and breakups. This isn’t a complaint, as I understand why – the three I named bring up strong emotions in people. Breakups are an especially tricky one, as the writer has to thread a very fine needle – don’t want to be too angry and come across as bitter, and god help you if you are too whinny. The best breakup pieces, I find, work in a healthy amount of humor to balance their pathos, which is why Sarah Chin’s “Bed Rot” is such a fun and honest work.

    You can never go wrong with a good opening line, and here Chin delivers a sentence that at first hints at a promise of possibility only to end with the foreshadowing of what is actually to come. Word choice, and sentence length is used here to create a staccato rhythm that keeps the piece moving in spurts and prolonged moments. This creates a feeling that nothing is centered or even fully processed; that what the speaker is experiencing still has a level of shock to it, but also balanced with a desire to try and stay in control of their emotions.

    Another aspect of the piece I enjoyed was following the path of thoughts the speaker has, and the logic it traverses going from subject to subject. From tulips, to the other woman’s name being Amsterdam, Martha Stewart’s idea of women and flowers, from the shedding of the brunch date outfit to be comfortable, and a little tulip madness thrown in. Peppered in each subject are dry comments, and observations that are sharp-tinted with a hint of anger, but tempered with humor. Nothing spins out of control, though it feels like it could, yet never does.

    “Bed Rot” does stick to a structure which dramatically works very well. Each subject change, and snarky comment is building toward the climax of the speaker expelling this relationship and its confinement to her. What she is left with is a raw, more authentic self, thus completing this journey, and leaving us with the understanding that she will continue to grow and be fine.

  • Short Story Review: “Safety” by Joan Silber

    (The short story “Safety” by Joan Silber appeared in the December 8th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Illustration by Chris W. Kim

    You know, every “time” is a “historic time” but some are more historic than others. I will agree that we are in the middle of one of those historic times, and if I am lucky enough to have grandkids, then I imagine they will ask me “WTF was everyone thinking, grandpa?” The good news is that over the past three or four months, I have started to see works of art in different media start to tackle the events of deportation, disappearing, and what effect these policies will have on America. I am going to throw Joan Silber’s “Safety” in with all of these works, though uneven, I applaud what this story attempted.

    Overly Simplified Synopsis: Two girls become friends growing up in New York, one Muslim the other Jewish, and both decedents of people who immigrated to the US to escape dictators. They go their separate ways in life and reconnect in New York, where the Muslim friend now has a child and a partner who is a comedian. When the comedian is on his way home from a gig, he is disappeared by the Administration.

    There is an ease to this story, and a simple directness to the writing. What it does well is create a picture of the modern melting pot that America is – people of different backgrounds are still coming here, and their children are still connecting with people that are different from them, and finding a commonality in our shared humanity. Silber does well in creating a context for the Muslim family regarding escaping the Nazis, being forced to migrate by Stalin to Uzbekistan, and the trauma of family separation.

    Yet, through it all, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this story was pulling its punches. There is a huge amount of drama here that is being sieved through a philosophical existential filter, but it never seems to amount to an emotional climax. For example, think of how these families lives’ have been influenced by authoritarians – from being pushed out of home nations, to being pushed together in America – and how these families have made new lives for themselves. And when a new Authoritarian pressure is applied, the characters seem more resigned, as if ordained to this fate, rather than free to exist.

    Ultimately, I appreciated this story, and Silber, for taking a swing at an issue that needs to be swung at. “Safety” uncomfortably reminds us that history does repeat itself. That immigration, deportation, and citizenship (both in its legal and the social definition) needs to be discussed and debated again, so we can finally find a way to break this awful cycle.

  • Short Story Review: “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff

    (The short story “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff appeared in the November 10th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photograph by Bryan Schutmaat

    “Mother of Men” by Lauren Groff is a good story, except for one thing. And I’ll get to that.

    But before I get to that, this story made me think about the world my mother lived in. She was married with three sons, and though she told us she loved it, she did have to deal with three stinky boys, who became men, and all the baggage that came with it. Later in life, when me and my brothers got married and had our own families, did it start to dawn on us how much of her life was confined with masculine demands. In that context, much of what is expressed in this story by the narrator rang true to me; that men are always in her house, how her boys were now men, and the need for her home to be a safe place.

    When the stalker is added to the story, and thus kicking off the plot, the menace that this man places on the narrator, is not only an immediate threat to her, but also to her home, and these men in her life. And this stalker is truly a threat, because he does have a gun. This weapon also functions as a reminder that violence and men are never too far apart from each other. Her husband has a baseball bat, her sons offer their own cocky protection to their mother, and the narrator even tries to enlist the workers from her home renovation for additional security. All of this raised interesting questions of violence and safety, of masculine and feminine roles, how a mother goes from protector of her sons, to needing protection from them. Even the title of story, which is also the title Catholics use in reference to Mary mother of Jesus, wasn’t lost on me, and added another layer to the piece. Great stuff.

    And then the climax happened. The stalker enters the home at night, the narrator is unable to take action, so her son asks the stalker to leave, which the stalker does. And it felt completely incongruent to everything that had come before in the story. This climax broke Chekhov’s Gun Rule, which means if you introduce a gun in the story, you have to fire it at the end. There was an expectation of violence, threat, even menace in this story, and to not deliver a resolution to that expectation left the ending of the story feeling hollow. And I did spend time thinking about this climax and the choices that were made, but I kept coming back to the same conclusion – the gun needed to be fired.

  • Short Story Review: “Unreasonable” by Rivka Galchen

    (The short story “Unreasonable” by Rivka Galchen appeared in the September 29th, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.)

    Photo illustration by Stephen Doyle

    A couple of years ago, my daughter got invited to a classmate’s birthday party, and as good parents, we attended with her. As the wife and I mingled with the other parents hiding on the periphery of the party, we struck up a conversation with a father who was a scientific researcher on fruit flies. It took a few minutes to convince him that we were actually interested in what he did, because as he put it, “No one thinks fruit flies are interesting.” But once he started talking about his research, he got excited and animated about the topic. It was a great conversation, and it reminded me that if someone is passionate about what they do, when they talk about it, it can be very interesting.

    It was this conversation that I kept thinking about as I read Rivka Galchen’s “Unreasonable.” The narrator/protagonist of this story is a bee researcher at a university, and in essence, she’s telling us about her life and about bees. These two tangents work exceedingly well at complementing each other as the narrator’s tone is measured, funny, scientific, and relatable. I was struck at how seamless the story went from one area to the other, exemplifying how much the research and her life were intertwined, and impossible to separate from each other. But what truly reminded me about the conversation at the birthday party was how excited and passionate the narrator was about bees. Maybe it wasn’t a volcano of exuberance, but it was an intense interest and knowledgebase, just like that fruit fly researcher. Their excitement, made you excited. I don’t know if Galchen is a bee enthusiast or not, but if she isn’t, then lots of respect to her for creating this character.

    The other aspect of “Unreasonable” that I enjoyed was how the narrator, perhaps a bit subconsciously, viewed her life through the lens of bee behavior, and the study of bees. It’s pointed out in the story that male bees only have one function in the hive, fertilization, and that they don’t do anything else. I couldn’t help noticing that this fact of male bees is used almost like a prism towards the other male characters, exemplifying how some of them shirk responsibility, are adolescent, or are oblivious to the world around them. Then there is the use of tracking bees in the narrator’s research, and also how tracking is used in her personal life; how she tracks one of her daughter’s movements on an iPad, and how the other daughter used a bee tracking device to follow an ex-boyfriend. There are other examples in the story, but I think you get the point. It almost felt like a fun parlor game connecting the two worlds together.

    I liked “Unreasonable” and enjoyed how this was the type of story that kept rolling and moving, and left me wondering where it was going, but was happy to have that feeling of unexpected surprise. This was a fun place to inhabit with the narrator, and experience her world, because it’s exciting to be around a person who is excited about what excites them, and let’s it swarm into their life.