Noon in Florida doesn’t waste a word — I put everything I had into making Noon in Florida great. It contains 12 stories — about 6,000 words — of my best flash fiction. Here’s the blurb: Noon in Florida delivers realistic flash fiction with no wasted words. By turns angsty, empathetic, and eccentric, these minimalist short-short stories center on…

Relationship advice from a friend and a racing camel — **audio available on Kris Keppeler’s podcast, click here!** “Tom Marley is a racing camel,” Ahmed said. “The fastest in all of the Sinai.” “Tom Marley?” I asked. “Not Bob?” Ahmed appeared somewhat surprised by my ignorance, but the stupidity of tourists is known the world over. Ahmed patiently explained that…

It all started with windmills — Balls to the wall has nothing to do with testicles. Neither does balls out. Both expressions mean working at maximum effort or speed, and the balls in question are part of a device invented in the 17th century — the centrifugal governor. Please, allow me to explain. Centrifugal governors had some balls James Watt designed…

Wine, dogs, and relationships — Nili hates it when I drink wine late at night. I do not go on walks. I do not help keep the bed warm. I sit in front of the glowing box for hours, doing nothing but drinking wine and watching the cursor blink. She is coming to check on…

A relationship and its aftermath in resume format — June to September 2011 First summer in Alaska. No rent. No darkness, either. Measured culverts above the Arctic Circle for the Department of Fish and Game. Slept on a foam mattress in the project RV between field sessions, an airplane mask over my eyes, my mind as calm and empty as the blue sky…

Prompted Flash Fiction — I was standing on the street corner outside the Crossroads Bar looking at the road signs when a man walked up to me and introduced himself as Dundee Ragland. When we got done shaking hands, I looked back to the road signs. …

Love, death, and cowardice — CW: Animal Death She’s my mom’s all-time favorite horse. She’s almost twenty years old and she’s down on the ground, rolling, when I get back from town. Right away, from the way she is moving, I see it’s bad. I have absorbed enough veterinary medicine in thirty years of watching…

Prompted Flash Fiction — You can fall off the edge of a word the same way you fall off the edge of the world. When you’re not looking. Or by slipping. But there’s no need to worry. Falling off the world’s like falling off a horse. All you gotta do is climb back on…

Reinventing Christmas where the desert meets the sand — “Does anybody here sell beer or do they just lock it up?” The woman who asks me this has just hiked down the crooked road scraped through the rocky desert from Baja California’s Route 1 to Marcelino’s nameless bar built of driftwood logs and corrugated aluminum on a nameless beach. …