“C’mon, do it. Just once.” We were half-a-day into a two-day road trip to my parents’ house in Iowa for the holidays. We had been listening to a smutty book for the past hour, and we were both wound up. I put my blinker on and slid into the passing lane. “One time. C’mon, it’ll probably wake him up. You could be a lifesaver.” “Fine.” Donna untucked her shirt and rolled down the window. As we came even with the cab of the...

PAK! I opened my eyes to a sharp cracking sound. I wasn’t sure if I had dreamed it and was trying to remember what I had been dreaming when [PAK!] I heard something hit the window again. I carefully peeked out, making sure not to move the curtain. With no lights on, my brother, on the lawn below, couldn’t see me looking down. “Charlie, wake up! Charlie, you douche,” he hissed. “Wake up!” I thought about going back to bed....

I told them I was too old to be scared. My older cousins, herded into each room of the High School of Horrors, laughed, screamed, laughed again, but the masks and strobes terrified me. Rushing from one room, cardboard coffins spilling vampires onto my screaming/laughing cousins, I got snatched. I wailed, struggled, but a black-wigged teenager yanked me into her standing coffin while my cousins fled. “Quiet, kid. You’ll go...

Two days after a storm ripped away most of our roof, we moved into a room in the next town over at the Gardener Inn & Motel. The insurance company said it could be anywhere from four to twelve weeks before we could move home again—depending largely on when they could get a crew to replace our roof and make the other repairs necessary. Since we were one of many families that suffered damage from the storm, I worried that t...

“If we ever do this again,” I thought, as I scanned the lobby, “I’ll find a hotel where I can be alone somewhere other than my room.” ( . )( . ) Lillith had insisted on coming to a restaurant in a little inn in the next town over from ours. When we first moved here, we used to come here from time to time, but we had grown a little stale on the menu and we hadn’t been back in years. This afternoon, though, Lillith had text...

We were on our way to see a band my wife loves. I didn't know much about this band, but she was excited and I was desperate for a night out. What with work and the kids dropping in for the odd weekend at home and all the other things that consume our weekends, Julia and I hadn’t had a date night in several months. So I jumped when she suggested we go into the city to see if we could score last-minute tickets to see The Dr...

How are you coming along with the grading? Faith’s text floats on the screen. I debate not answering. If I get into a conversation with her about the fact that I am making very little progress on the stack of final papers...well, I will make even less progress on the stack of final papers. I don’t like grading. It’s certainly not the reading that’s the problem. I love to read student writing. And I love offering up sugges...

The highway rest-stop looked like a polar refugee-camp. The plows had their hands full with I-95 and hadn’t been through here in several hours. There had to be fifty or more cars left haphazardly in the parking area, some partially blocking the road, many completely blanketed in snow. On the other side, the truck-parking area was also a snarl of trucks, most idling. We were on our way down to Florida for some January r-an...

“Ouch! Take it easy!” Faith hissed. She reached back and rubbed the welt from the crop. Her dark nails were striking against her bare flesh. “I think you're supposed to start light,” she whined. “Now kiss it to say you’re sorry.” I did kiss it. In fact, as I dragged my bottom lip over it, I flicked it with my tongue. It was very warm and the heat on my lips caused me to automatically run my hand up the inside of her thigh...

I took the elevator up from the conference level feeling pretty smug. As conference presentations go, this had been a pretty good one. I had a big crowd in my session and my paper was very well-received. For once in my life, no old guy raised his hand and said a version of “I very much appreciated the aims of your research, but…” and then went on to say just why he thought it was trash. Indeed, it felt like they hung on m...

“Don’t get mad,” was the first thing she said when I answered my wife’s phone call. That’s one command that has the certain and opposite effect. Immediately, my blood pressure squeezed up and I clenched my jaw. I had had a week. My car wouldn’t start on Tuesday morning and I had to have it towed to the mechanic. One of my students handed in a paper on Wednesday that was mostly plagiarized and then had his mother call to s...

A woman stood on a railroad bridge in northern Alabama, looking down into the swift water twenty feet below. The woman’s hands were tied behind her, her wrists tightly bound with a cord. A noose encircled her neck and was attached to a timber near her left foot. A series of loose boards laid across the timbers of the bridge served as a platform for her and her executioners. Behind her, the young captain in his blue unifor...

If Faith hadn't insisted on totally unpacking the car and arranging our things in the little cabin we had rented for a week, we could have at least had a half hour stroll on the beach before the storm started to blow in. It was late September and, looking to save a little money, we had found this “charming” little “beach cottage” on Airbnb for what we thought was a steal. It was charming–old fashioned, tiny (just a bedroo...

I had never had a hotel call to tell me they were willing to pay if I wanted to switch my reservation to a competitor. It happened about four months ago. A lady named Melissa called and said that, due to a major booking, they were offering to find new rooms at nearby hotels for people who had already booked a room on our weekend. “There’s a Hyatt just a mile away that we can book for you on these dates, sir.” That was sur...

The windows in the car nearly steamed over on the drive back to the hotel. I actually had to push Faith’s hands away from my pants more than once for fear that I would drive into a parked car. She finally slumped back into her seat and pretended to pout. “Fine, but drive faster.” After so long fantasizing about being with other men, we (meaning she) had finally crossed the line and she didn’t know what to tell me first. A...