Short Stories
These stories are part of my daily writing practice.
They are often the first space where ideas take shape before growing into full-length novels.
Each piece stands alone, but many share the same interior tension and emotional precision that define my longer work.
The Weight of Other People
Nolan left Pittsburgh for Lisbon three years ago. The city fits him in ways his old life never did. But the friends he left behind still text — about furnaces and divorces and cholesterol and promotions that went to someone else. They never ask how he's doing.
The Weight of Other People is a story about the slow, unsentimental work of recognizing when loyalty has become extraction, and the quiet courage it takes to set down what no one asked you to carry.
The Party for One
Kieran Calloway has spent his life showing up for everyone else. The friend who remembers your birthday, sends the text three weeks after the crisis, arrives on moving day with boxes and tape.
At forty, single, and living alone in an apartment no one has ever been invited inside, he decides to throw himself a party—and discovers that asking people to show up for him is the hardest thing he's ever done.
The Man by the River
Every evening, Benjamin goes to the river. He brings cold coffee, a worn photograph, and the kind of silence that only forms around things you can't say out loud.
The Man by the River is a story about what stays after love leaves — the rituals we build to hold the shape of someone's absence, the distance between who we were and who we became, and the quiet stubbornness of still showing up when there's no one left to show up for.
Once Upon a Time
Daniel fell in love the way most people do—fast, certain, and without reading the fine print.
One night at a gallery opening neither of them wanted to attend, he met Liam—bright, restless, impossibly alive—and for three years, everything made sense. Midnight diners and rooftop kisses. Kitchen dancing at two a.m. The quiet architecture of a life built for two.
Then distance did what distance does.
Now it’s July again, and Daniel walks the same streets alone, learning that grief isn’t always about losing someone—sometimes it’s about losing the version of yourself that existed because they loved you.
A story about the light people carry into our lives, the darkness they leave behind, and the small, brave act of turning the lights back on.