topic: BORDERS medium: TEXT as shared at a PenTales event themed “Great Expectations” Listen to the Story! As an annually optimistic person – that is to say – I am optimistic in September, every year, and then I go back to being a negative, fatalistic person for the rest of […]

topic: LOVE & HEARTBREAK medium: TEXT Do you know what he said? This was on the second day. We were in Lyon, and I left him for five minutes while I went to check in, told Jessie to watch him, and so she’s moping in the back of the car […]

topic: CRIME & PUNISHMENT medium: TEXT   A large palm tree stood near the entrance of the garden. Beneath the tree was a vast carpet of flowering plants, but there were gardeners of an Indian or Pakistani origin busily transplanting the small white flowering shrubs for a similar red flowering […]

LOVE & HEARTBREAK Matthew Seamus Fantsy grew up in a leafy neighbourhood of Boston. His parents were right off the boat, they had come to America like so many generations of Irish before them. Their brogues became softer and softer with the rising tides of their real estate business. And […]

topic: CHANGE medium: TEXT as shared at a PenTales event themed “Royalty” Listen to the Story! I should have known it would end like this. Him: world famous; me: unknown, forgotten… well, whatever. Que sera sera. I just want to have my side of the story told, draw a line […]

topic: CHANGE medium: TEXT, AUDIO This story was shared at a PenTales event themed “Royalty” Listen to the Story! I arrived at my grandmother’s on New Year’s Day to find books piled up in the bath, tin cans arranged in snaking lines on the kitchen floor and children’s toys decades […]

LOVE & HEARTBREAK The bright, beautiful duchess of Aquitaine Was married to the king of the Franks, and then They went off to crusade, Coward Louis, dismayed, Was forced to come back to France again The marriage of Ella and Louis, Was annulled due to consanguinity, Protofeminist Ella Simply grabbed […]

topic: LOVE AND HEARTBREAK medium: TEXT as shared at a PenTales event themed “Love and Heartbreak” It was 1987. a Swiss boy named Simon knocked on our door. He was 5. His family just moved to the neighborhood. his mom and dad were both newly appointed foreign correspondents to the […]

He’s the big affair I cannot forget. Only man I ever think of with regret…” —from You Can’t Take That Away from Me VALEDICTION Although I know I only make you ripe For another woman’s harvesting, I am glad in this: I have tasted your first blush. And in our […]