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A Christmasy piece of flash fiction this week, a doodle, some whimsy and some humor. And, yes, I keep trying out new templates for the blog. Bear with me—sooner or later I’ll settle on one. For a while, anyway.


I wrote this flash fiction piece as part of a writing exercise. The idea was to write several stories with the theme of “Where were you last night?” I’ll probably share some of the others down the road.

“Where were you last night?” Her voice slurred the words, ran them together,mangled them so they came out “Wawuryousnight?” He felt torn. He hated her for the drinking, for the lack of self control. He hated to be around her when she was like this. He glanced at the bottle of sloe gin on the table, noted it was almost empty. But he also understood, even though he didn’t want to because it was in good measure due to him and his job that she drank. He knew she hated the forced isolation, the extreme weather (it was always freezing here and she was born and raised in Miami, for Chrissake!)  There were no other women around, just the male workers and she had nothing in common with them.

“It was December 24^th, dear, remember? I was delivering toys.” Santa sighed.

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“If Only I Could Draw!”

Cartoon #31: Setting: produce section of a supermarket. Scene: display of lettuce with sign that says “Iceberg Lettuce”. Disappearing stern-first among the heads of iceberg lettuce is a small model of a passenger liner with “Titanic” on the bow.

Cartoon #42: A sailor has climbed the rigging up to the crow’s nest on a three-masted sailing ship. He looks in and yells down to the captain, watching from below, “There’s a bunch of crows in here!”