I’m happy to report that my story “Angel of the Resurrection” will be appearing in a future issue of The Gettsyburg Review.
http://www.gettysburgreview.com/selections/fiction/
An excerpt (the opening) appears below for your enjoyment. It’s a story about dating, death, and the angel Michael.
This first time, the man she was meeting arrived forty-five minutes late, hands shaking, and ordered a beer before climbing into the booth. He had neglected to wear his Detroit Tigers cap, the one she had seen him wearing in most of the photographs and the one he said he would wear that night, so for a moment she thought another man had pushed himself into the privacy of her small space: her glass of ice water, the article open on her cell phone, and her quiet little fears grown thorny and twisted during almost an hour of waiting.
While she waited, she had shredded her napkin into rice-sized pieces, which she carefully gathered up and gave to the waiter, who took them in two hands as if cradling water. He would not stop looking at her: that same look of pity and judgment she had seen before on the faces of men who liked to think of themselves as kind. Her last eight dates had been with men like that, watery-eyed men, victims of infidelity and divorce and, in one case, an elderly woman going the wrong way on the highway colliding with his wife’s station wagon. Each one was punctual. They’d been waiting for her when she entered.
So this one was different right from the start. Just a few weeks earlier, her pocketbook had been snatched out of her arms by a blurred shape in a black hoodie, and she had been knocked to the concrete, her bloody palms gritty with dirt. She thought of that pain again, the violation, and she raised her hand to defend herself. It took him saying, “Hi, I’m Daniel,” for the configuration of features to organize itself in her memory. Yes, it was him, but thinner and older than in the photos, his hair flecked with gray but his pale handsomeness still present in his hard jawline. He looked like an actor, one of the ones you saw in bad movies, untalented but with good looks, a square jaw and a casual grin. Something of the politician in that smile. In fact, he seemed ready to shake her hand vigorously across the table.
Most of them were actors and politicians anyway, the men who smiled, the ones who didn’t.
david nikki crouse 