My Writing In the World - One Parent Survives

You can pre-order Shallow Waters: Special Halloween Edition now. It’s got 18 Halloween themed pieces of flash fiction, including my story - One Parent Survives.

It’s short, but one of my better stories. I wrote it after attending a birthday party for one my daughter’s playmates when she was three. I tried to capture the insanity of a toddler party. I also folded in a story my father used to tell about a Halloween party for my mom’s teacher friends that he once attended.

My dad wore a sheet with two small holes for his eyes. Traditional ghost outfit. He didn’t know my mom’s colleagues, so he didn’t say much. Party guests started to assume he was someone else: Jeffrey, the handsome (and single) science teacher. He stayed silent. It amused him. And then someone goosed him. When he shouted, his assailant (the unmarried math teacher) and everyone else at the party, realized that my dad was not, in fact, Jeffrey, the handsome (and single) science teacher. Laughter and apologies abounded.

Every Halloween season for years later, up to and beyond my parents having kids, my dad and my mom joked about the time that because he was mistaken for Jeffrey, someone grabbed his butt through his ghost costume.

Obviously, my story gets darker (it is a horror anthology). Shallow Waters: Special Halloween Edition will be released on Halloween, October 31, 2022. I hope you buy it: preorder, day of release, or next year, whenever. Or you could sign up for Kindle Unlimited and read it that way.

However you get your eyes on it, !!!please, please, please!!! leave an ALL CAPS REVIEW and mention my story by name.