Vale Short Stories

This story made the editor cry every time he read it. Most stories about Alzheimer's and dementia end with a depressing note, a bleak hope, a grasping at humanity as everything, eventually, fades. This story features a grown man whose dreams of tomorrow and his liturgy of life root him in the very reality of his existence, giving hope for all families who have ever had to deal with this disease.

Originally published in The New Haven Review, this story features a young married couple who struggle through the rough landscape of Southern Illinois in the late 1950s. They argue over the purchase of a five-dollar-a-month Sears and Roebuck kitchen table, but it ends up saving lives.

A blue-collar hoarder sorts through the treasures of his lost past while his kids play on the scaffolding outside. He keeps ignoring the tremors in both the memories and the present.

Mom and dad wanted him to write the next great American novel, so he had a typewriter gathering dust in a closet. They wanted him to compose a symphony that would get him to Julliard or at least U of I. They wanted him to DJ the local radio and work his way up to NBC or even the Tonight Show as a comedian. They focused on so many routes to his future fortune (which would be theirs as well) and future fame that he ended up rebelling his way into mediocrity. But he could drive a truck, by God. Wasn't that worth giving your life to? Blood and all?

As aliens from the future try to deny the reality of the Joplin falls due to its prevalence in 21st-century art, Stacy uses everything in his power to defend the river and the falling water.

Who in Galactic Central Command gives a rip about some lug nuts and a requisition form? I mean, who really cares that a systems engineer ordered 160 of them? Except those lug nuts changed everything and now he's called before a court marshal under accusation for treason, mutiny, theft, and murder. All because of those 160 lug nuts. What's so important about a bagful of hardware?

Out of time and place, Wreaker walks into a coffee shop on Long Island. They do not take gold bullion for payment. They do not hand pluck their tea leaves from the tree of life. Their tables can't even support the weight of Öfugr, his sacred ancient weapon. So how will he ever get his coffee? 

I woke to a mass of men writhing and broken, moving as one in their attempt to reach that great circle of light. They looked like ants, but ants without exoskeletons: their soft bits shredding, their hard bits breaking, to make a sort of chicken-leg jello out of humanity. The cries of pain and cries of triumph mixed. But one man keeps saying, "2π28.57mm. 2π28.57mm. 2π28.57mm.” Pointing at the circle of light. Claiming he cut it. Cut what? And why?