My short story "My Problem With Zombies" will be published in October 2013 in Bete Noire magazine.

                                        Published by Hilliard and Harris
Available: HERE


Bookstores that carry The Big Bad

Tina's Cafe and Bookstore, 305 Church St. Naugatuck CT
Written Words Bookstore 194 Leavenworth Rd. Shelton CT
Bank Street Book Nook 50 Bank St. New Milford CT
The Relay Bookhouse, LLC, 102 Greenwood Ave. Bethel, CT 06801


Here's a little bit of the first chapter of The Big Bad

I drink too much. Let’s leave it at that.

I came to, unsure where I was. Someone was playing pinball inside my head and getting a record-setting score. My eyes were as thick and gooey as pancake batter and burning pitch filled my gut. My mouth was so dried out I didn’t even think about lighting up a smoke.            

            Beyond the bed, I spied a double window, the vertical blinds drawn around an air conditioner. Dim rays of daylight seeped in, highlighting the blurs around the room. An empty desk and a chair by it. An open closet a galaxy away. A bureau with stuff stacked on top. A mirror above that reflecting the ceiling fan over the bed. Looked a lot like my bedroom. I was home. Good.       

            A body was next to mine. I touched her arm, my fingers tingling like they were still asleep. My hard-on was aching more than any part of me. I got between her legs, parted her, and put myself inside, feeling detached, as if it wasn’t me but someone else. She was neither wet nor dry, just lying there like a blowup doll. I couldn’t make out the face or hair color and her skin felt cool when I put my chest on hers.

            "Lift them legs, honey," I said.

            She ignored me so I started pumping and her pretending to be asleep excited me and I couldn’t hold back. My orgasm exploded through my entire body. I rolled off, weak and tired, my heart thumping, and my headache worse.

            "That was great," I muttered.

            She didn’t say a thing. No big deal. Just some whore anyway.

            I needed to piss but I always liked a cigarette after good sex. The pack was on the table pushed against the mattress. I reached out, but stopped right off. Something was by the foot of the bed. Something that shouldn’t have been there. I had no idea where I left my gun.

            Squinting made the pain wrap around my skull, but I was able make out a long line of deep green, twisting like a spring to a flat red flourish. What the fuck is that? D.T.’s screwing with you? Why not, Nick? You drink like it’s the last day before Prohibition begins again, and this time the bastards mean to keep it. 

            I rubbed my eyes, getting a damp filmy crap on my fingers. I stared at that two-tone soup trying to figure it. The red had a darker red outline, and the top and sides made little half-circles. The green section had offshoots that tapered to a sharp tip. Tiny drops that I hadn’t noticed before fell from the tips. They looked like red tears.

            And then I knew what it was: a tattoo of a rose. The stem began just above the bump in an ankle, snaked along a thin calf, and wrapped around the knee to an open bud along the inner thigh. Instead of thorns, daggers that dripped blood. Nice work. The rest of her was leaning back in the shadows.

            "Hey," I called out.

            No response. What’s with the fucking mutes?

            As my sight adjusted, her form emerged from the darkness. She sat in a chair I had next to the bureau. She wasn’t very tall, but what body she had was lean and tight. The tattooed leg dangled over an armrest and the right leg was spread wide apart, her pussy hair shaved into a thin golden strip. Her blond locks covered one breast, the other defied gravity like only an implant can. She might have been twenty or eighteen. Or even younger. I was never very good with ages.

            Her head was at a crook, resting against the wall. Her eyes were closed and a dark coating had run from both nostrils into her opened mouth. She falls asleep in a chair and gets a bloody nose, I thought.

            "Hey, you," I called again.

            Still nothing. I grabbed the pillow from behind me and tossed it, hitting the side of her face just right. The top half of her body slid like a lump of butter into the bureau, her head striking it with a mushy thud. That ain’t good, Nick.

            I didn’t need to look at the woman lying next to me, but I did anyway. Another young blond with a do-me-hard body. I didn’t notice any tattoos, just some flakes of brownish red crusted under her nose. Vacant eyes, the kind of sky blue color that draws a man in, stared past me at the ceiling fan.

            I leaned back against the headboard and lit my cigarette.