The short story I read last week is now up on Bang Out’s site, so now you can read it too. It is called “Five People Describe Burning Up,” in keeping with the heat theme. Excerpt:

1. Debbie: I’m coming home from school when suddenly my best friend Trudy says, “Your feet are lighting up when you walk.” I look down and see that flashes of blue are coming out the back of my shoes whenever I move. “Cool,” I say and start skipping so that the blue lights follow me to my house, and Trudy is laughing and saying, “That’s so weird” over and over again. I feel like Tom Hanks in the movie “Big,” when he lights up the giant piano with his feet, and I’m pretending to play “Heart and Soul” in the driveway when my mom comes out and starts screaming. “Debbie,” she says, “Take off your shoes.” But I’m laughing, because the blue lights are coming out of the side of my feet now, and I feel like I’m wearing jet packs. My mom shakes me and says, “Don’t you know fire when you see it?” and I take off my shoes, which are hot around the edges. The fire is still coming out of my feet, snapping like the ends of a lighting strike, and I’m not smiling anymore. Mom tells Trudy to run a bath, and I think about how they have been teaching us in school that if the sun exploded, it would take 9 minutes for us to know about it because it’s so far away. It would take 20 minutes for the fireballs to reach us.

Read the rest here.

Not really. That is not me. But it is funny.

This Saturday, I am going to be reading a short story for the BANG OUT Reading Series in San Francisco. The theme is HEAT. I will be reading with 6 other people, and I believe it is free. Bargain!

The reading will be at Amnesia Bar, 853 Valencia Street, from 7-9 p.m. I hope you can come.

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Superstition Review, the online literary magazine at Arizona State University, has published my short story “Rabble of Butterflies,” which you can read here. Check it out!

And while you’re at it, also check out the rest of the awesome fiction in Superstition Review’s Spring 2010 issue.

The Pacific Sun just ran my essay on going animal tracking with the Marin County Tracking Club. Excerpt:

You haven’t lived until you see a group of adults eagerly waiting their turn to smell animal poop.

Oh yeah. I went there. Want more? Read it here.

My short story “End of the Line” is in the 2010 issue of So to Speak. Published by George Mason University, So to Speak is a feminist journal of language of art. “End of the Line” is about an old woman, Mrs. Dumas, who accidentally takes the wrong bus and gets lost in the city she has lived in all her life. Here is the beginning of the story:

Mrs. Dumas stood in front of her bedroom mirror admiring her red velour pants and green sweatshirt. Why, she wondered, would anyone want to wear those dreary blacks and grays? She hadn’t worn those colors since Harry Jr. left home, not even at Harry Sr.’s funeral. Bright colors just made everything better.

The cat rubbed against her leg, leaving orange-marbled hairs on the red velour.

“Liebster,” she said, scrubbing the cat with her fingers. Then she looked again. “Oh! You’re not Liebster, are you?” She adjusted her glasses. “Bunchkin?”

“Meow,” said Bunchkin.

If you get a chance, order a copy and take a look!

“Pie Man,” a piece of microfiction that I wrote, is in the current issue of Rumble Magazine. Check it out:

Pie Man

The rest of the Tiger Woods Issue.

ETA: This is not about Kyle and me. This is a fictional piece about fictional people.

Happy Halloween! Take a look at my most recent article for the Pacific Sun about the last public hanging in Marin County. It resulted in a near-riot as a bloodthirsty crowd watched the hanging of a Chinese man. Sample:

On the first day of September, 1893, Lee Doon was condemned to die for killing a white man. Doon, who was Chinese, was the cook for San Rafael resident Tiernan Berry, who also hired an Englishman named William Shenton to paint his house. At the end of the first day of painting, Shenton called Doon out of the kitchen and ordered him to clean up his paint buckets and ladders, apparently believing it was the Chinese servant’s job to pick up after him. Doon refused. The next day, Shenton repeated his order and when Doon again refused, an argument broke out, during which “the painter became verbally abusive to Lee Doon,” according to an article by the Marin County Historical Society.

Doon claimed that Shenton attacked him and began beating and kicking him, according to the Supreme Court decision on the case. Either way, things got so heated that Doon rushed into the house, grabbed a pistol and shot at Shenton four times, hitting him once in the back. He was seriously wounded and died not long afterward. Doon was arrested, underwent a trial and was sentenced to death by hanging at the Marin County Courthouse located at Fourth and A streets in San Rafael.

More here.

I have an article in the Pacific Sun this week. It’s about how the town of Tiburon is looking at putting cameras on the roads going into town to scan the license plates of all its visitors.

The fortress of Tiburon may be putting a new guard at the gate. An electronic one.

The affluent municipality of almost 9,000 people is considering putting cameras on the two roads going into town to scan the license plates of all its visitors. Police think that the cameras will help them track down criminals. Since most crime in Tiburon is committed by people who live outside of town, if something happens, the police could quickly get a record of the cars that have passed through around the time the crime occurred and narrow it down to the likely culprit.

If the town council passes the measure, Tiburon would likely become the first town to record the license plates of every visitor. The measure is stirring up controversy from those who feel the idea of a camera tracking everyone’s movements is too close to Big Brother from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

“It’s totalitarian,” says security expert Bruce Schneier. “It sounds like something the Soviet Union would try to do. It’s the surveillance of everybody. It’s not ‘follow that car,’ it’s follow every car. The East Germans tried to do this same thing, but it eventually failed. Technology makes it easy.”

More here.

I have another book review up at Popmatters. This time it is on The Mayor’s Tongue, a first novel by Nathaniel Rich. Excerpt:

This April is the one-year anniversary of debut novel The Mayor’s Tongue, which would make its author, Nathaniel Rich, 28 years old. Rich’s age and his considerable connections—his father is a New York Times columnist, his mother works in publishing, he’s an editor at The Paris Review—tend to come up when people discuss his novel. To some, its publication suggests favoritism or nepotism or ageism or other ugly “isms”.

But none of that really matters if Rich can write—and he can.

More here.