Game Over

William pressed his wife’s hand tightly. “How’d I do?” he asked her as earnestly as he’d ever said anything in his entire life. Audrey bowed her head to push back the tears, gathering herself to interact with her husband one last time. She looked up at him and smiled sweetly. “You did good, honey. You …

Are You Sad About the Cow?

NYC Midnight 2016 1st Place Story in Flash Fiction Challenge   “It’ll be fun,” I consoled my husband as we parked the van. “We won’t even tell them it’s vegan.” “What’s a vegan?” said one of them.  To mothers, even the good ones, all your children’s voices tend to blend together. The amalgam just sort …

Teaching the Russo brothers to stop pulling their punches: 2 easy fixes that would make the very good Captain America: Civil War a great film

Boy, you talk about having some fun. I walked out of the theater after Captain America: Civil War with a smile on my face. I was so satisfied with the experience that I was proud to take home my authentically plastic, massive movie theater Civil War soda cup. Being a married man, I’ve learned to …

Taking Zack Snyder to Nolan & Abrams University: 3 easy fixes that would make Batman v Superman a great film

Bless his heart, Zack Snyder really went for it with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The film attempts to confront the complexities of morality, justice, revenge, and iconography, all through the lens of a feud between two widely beloved defenders of justice and good. If that sentence was exhausting to read, then imagine the …

Cam Newton is an immature egotist, and so am I

It was a bold move, strutting onto the biggest sports stage in the world wearing them. But then again, describing any one thing Cam Newton does as bold is like going to Mexico and still calling it “Mexican food.” Everything Cam does, every word that comes out of his mouth, every twinkling smile, every dab, …

R-Words 2014 Season Recap: A Time to Kill

****** As published in RVA Mag ****** Humans tend to suppress difficult times in their memory.  Places, people, and things connected to these dark times, when encountered, tend to precipitate flashes in our brains, bolstering the suspicion that, yes, I was surgically engineered in a lab as a military weapon where they wiped my prior memory. …

A Dan Snyder X-Mas Carol

******* Now a Kindle eBook on Amazon.com ******* It was an abnormally cold night, even for FedEx Field in December. And unfortunately for one Daniel Snyder, the offices were no refuge from it. Ticket sales were down.  Robert Griffin III jersey sales, once the cash cow of the franchise, had halted.  The team name was …