My New Goods: 3 Stories

Three new stories, two published in the last few days (one online, one in print), and a third (online) last month.  Most recently published is "Far Star Girl," although I wrote it a while back.  Editors at Seventeen Magazine once told me they'd wished they could publish this story. (I've heard that before. No, I mean it. And I never quite understand, but anyway.)

"Curtains" is a far newer story, written in the past two years.  I'd  tried to quit writing fiction (the above paragraph might explain why) but there I was, writing again, first "Lillia," then "Curtains."

"Far Star Girl" is in Pangur Ban Party. Editor DJ Berndt goes the extra mile to create spiffy e-books.  First paragraph:  

She thought maybe an angel had called out her name. She wasn't sure. She was waiting for her older sister to return with Jujy Fruits and bonbons. The theater, neither light nor dark, was to Cassie's ten-year-old mind, an appropriate-enough setting for a visit from an angel. Cassie knew better than to mention her divine suspicions to Dot who was five years older and sour.

Also new is "Curtains," in Belletriste Coterie, a new print journal edited by Kimberly Lojewski and team.  The narrator observes from after life. First paragraph:

So you might have heard in 1962 Fidel Castro let Nikita Khrushchev store missiles on the island of Cuba which isn't all that far from the U.S.A. which I am in more of a position to know than you are. Other stuff happened that year like John Glenn going around one of the planets, earth or moon or sun, I've never been sure which even though, again, I can see more than you can. And those people back when James Meredith decided to go to college in Mississippi, I saw them on t.v. and their faces looked like dried apple cores going moldy. I was twelve. I'm thirteen now because I'll always be thirteen because I died in 1963 because my bike flipped because I barreled down the hill, loop-de-looped and landed in a ditch. The hot asphalt guy helping the ditch-digging guy didn't hear the steamroller guy shout. The hot asphalt guy isn't up here yet and I've done everything I can for him (which isn't much of anything but it is something) because he was really sorry about the whole thing.

And here's "Lillia." (In Devil's Lake, published by the University of Madison-Wisconsin.)   I wrote the first paragraph when I lived in Seattle. where the story is set, around 1995. Then I tucked it away only to chance on in a recent tidying frenzy. The editor accepting this story, Marian Palaia, was sharp and supportive.  Here's the first paragraph:

There is nothing I love so much as a fat person, or admire. The largeness of their soul demands abundant sufficiency of casing and, further, because they are so grand of psyche, so much more than those who are skinny (not I!), they need—require—that formidable heft to anchor them to our earth. I fence-sit (or would), between unmistakable plumpness and hands-on girth. Lillia Fly-Eagle was a big one too, and for that I loved her, briefly and dearly.

 Honestly, people. I want to publish a collection of short stories.  Maybe these recent pubs are promises it will happen.(Or not.)