My Published Stories
"Fiction is the microscope of truth."
Lamartine
(Links to these published stories are available here when copyrights are returned to me.)
Julia Somebody
The Writing Disorder (Fall, 2022)
“Nathan, where are we?” Julia asks, looking at a purple and orange dangling participle swaying from an unfocussed noun. They are standing at the base of the penultimate paragraph on page thirty-five. They had only recently met on page thirty. Nathan looks worried. He knows where they are and wants out. “In a novel, I’m afraid.”
Secrets
The Main Street Rag (TBD 2022)
He wondered a lot about Sarena and he fell asleep to the pleasant rhythm of her voice; the way she’d say Leonard, not like the accusation in his mother’s voice, more like a spiritual incantation, something you’d say while lighting a candle.
Pipkin
Bacopa Literary Review (Nov., 2022)
Published by the Writers Alliance of Gainesville for inclusion in its Bacopa Literary Review, an annual international print journal.
In the evenings after work, Lawrence Pipkin, thirty, takes regular and solitary walks around his north side Chicago neighborhood. He’s what Baudelaire might have called “a botanist of the sidewalk.” It’s a two-mile loop from his parent’s three-bedroom apartment on Carmen Avenue. His course never varies, no matter what the season, no matter what the weather and because he traces the same path year after year, he notices things others don’t. Now, as he crosses the small bridge near his apartment, he notices a body floating face down in the drainage canal.
The Teller
Rivanna Review (June, 2022)
He continues west until they reach Knobs Noster State Park. He pulls off and stops in a wooded area. The leaves, she notices, are variegated shades of brown and yellow, the blue water placid. He unties her hands and removes the dynamite sticks. “I’ll call the chief and tell him where he can find you. And I’ll leave this phone here. It’s no use to me. You can use it to call them if there’s a problem. Oh, and don’t worry about the dynamite sticks,” he says. “They’re phony.”
The First Day
Sledgehammer Literary Journal (February, 2022)
He finished his drink and drove to an apartment he kept near Lincoln Park. He’d purchased the apartment years ago for his mistress, Lucinda Markum. She had been with him for eight years, starting two years before his wife died. After his wife’s death, Foxcroft wanted Lucinda to move into his house in Lake Forest. She declined, saying it wouldn’t look right and it wouldn’t feel right. He promised to find them a new home, but before he could, she left him for a younger, even richer man.
Old Times
Tiferet Journal (Fall-Winter, 2021)
This story was selected as the Fiction winner in the 2021 Tiferet Writing Contest
Barry turned eighty in April and the thought of it is consuming him. The entreaties by Helen that it’s only a number don’t satisfy him. He worries over every pain, every missed appointment, every lost word. He feels guilty continually asking What? His mail is filled with ads for senior housing, men’s diapers, and free hearing aid tests, as if they know something he only fears. He tells himself to stop dwelling on it. Don’t live your life thinking every minute about your age. But that’s what he does. He’s read that an eighty year old male has a life expectancy of 8.34 years. In other words, he tells Helen, he’s not expected to live past eighty-eight.
“I’ll put it on the calendar,” she says, not looking up from the romance novel she’s reading.
A Delicious Silence
Cutleaf Journal (Nov,2021)
Evelyn, an unfortunate name for a boy, knew how to make the dogs howl. He’d been aware of this gift, if you could call it that, since he was five. One night as he lay in bed, he opened his mouth just so, like you would for a good yawn, tightened the muscles in his neck and pretty soon Shep, the old English sheep dog who lived next door at the Morgan’s, began to yelp and howl. Evelyn tried it again and almost immediately, Snowball, the cocker across the street at the Feinstein’s, joined in. Evelyn was both excited and afraid. “I’m only five,” he thought, pulling the covers tight under his chin, as if this awesome power should rest more comfortably on the shoulders of someone more mature.
Traces of an Early Summer
Rivercliff Books and Media -- PenDust Radio (July, 2021)
Podcast
It was dark by the time the police dropped Nettie and Daniel back at the grocery. “He’s fine,” Nettie said as she left the squad car and walked toward the store. On the way, she bent down and lightly touched William’s shoulder. She stopped at the door of the grocery, sighed a long, low whistle like a steam engine coming to rest. Daniel, his arm bandaged, walked behind his mother. He hesitated as he reached William and then, without saying a word, moved on.
My Birthday Celebration
Waxing & Waning (September, 2021)
Right before we left on this trip, my mother gave me five dollars. “Just in case,” she said. “And don’t tell Daddy.” I knew what she meant by “just in case.” Maybe other kids could go on a fishing trip with their dads, giddy with excitement and with no worries, but I started this trip with the fear that somewhere along the way the money my mother had given me would be necessary.
Me and Elodie
Bengaluru Review (March, 2021)
Mr. Littow was the floor manager back then. He could usually be found motionless with one hand on the brass railing and one foot on the first step of the curved stairway leading up to the main floor where the dress shoes were sold. He’d greet every customer as they walked down the stairs. “How do. Help you?” His voice was deep, authoritative, but friendly. Littow was a robust man in his fifties, with wavy, thin and receding black hair combed straight back and held in place with pomade. He had a pencil thin black mustache that even in 1956 and even in Chicago looked out of place and old fashioned. He wore dark suits and wide ties. His belly forbade the buttoning of his suit jacket without some distress. His black wingtips were burnished smooth and shiny, reflecting the fluorescent ceiling lights. I wanted desperately to be like him.
The Visiting Professor
Five on the Fifth (March 5, 2021)
I felt a twinge of conscience as the cab pulled away, and fought the urge to look back at the gangly professor. Indeed, even today, three years later, I know it was wrong—“a colossal fucking character defect,” the assistant dean called it at the time—leaving Blonsley undulating back and forth, heading further and further south.
Love and Herman Cogan
Adelaide Literary Magazine (Feb. 2021)
It was the fall of 1961 and Cogan was alone again. He looked around his apartment for something to do. Not one to make a mess, he saw little to clean, nothing to rearrange. He had dusted the previous Monday, the morning after Carole had broken it off. “It’s you, not me,” she had said. “You lack ambition. You lack spunk. You lack…” Cogan felt her searching for another key attribute of life. He wanted to say “glistening hair,” but he knew she wouldn’t find that funny. In the end she shook her head, said goodbye and left. And now Cogan, straightening a stool in his small kitchen, thought, “What next?”
The Embrace
Scarlet Leaf Review (March 2021)
He enters the sanctuary determined to drive the tryst from his thoughts. But as he wraps his prayer shawl around his head and shoulders and prays to the God who has sanctified us with His commandments, he doesn’t see, as he often does, an image of Moses on Mount Sinai. In its place, Cogan sees Sapinsky smashing the holy tablets and caressing Mrs. Levine.
The Watch
MacQueen's Quinterly (Jan. 2021)
She didn’t tell him about her abortion last year. She didn’t mention her two miscarriages a decade ago with the guy she thought she loved. She avoided talking about her abusive father and alcoholic mother. “Just a small town girl,” she said. “High school cheerleader. Anthropology major at Oberlin. Eight years ago a friend got me the job at the agency. Been writing copy ever since. And what do you do besides practicing law?”
Wednesday's Child
Passengers Journal (Dec. 2020)
She smiles. He smiles. Holding hands. Foreplay. Then to bed: Grunting, sighing, release. Cigarettes.
"Nice," she says.
"Thanks," he says, cocksure. They sleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
Morning: Coffee. He makes breakfast. She showers. "Must go," she says. "Tonight?"
"Not tonight."
"Tomorrow?"
"Not tomorrow."
"When then?"
"Next Wednesday. You know the rules."
"I'm tired of sharing you," she says.
The Ring on Ruby Rifkin's Pinky
The Cobalt Review (Nov. 18, 2020)
About halfway through the service, Rifkin began to sweat heavily. The handkerchief he used to wipe his face and neck was soggy. He rubbed his left arm and began twisting the ring as if it were strangling him. He was having trouble getting it off his fat finger. He signaled for his aide who had been standing at the back of the sanctuary, but Rifkin had the ring off before the goon arrived. He grabbed my hand and put the ring in my palm, closing my fingers around it.
“Take care a dis for me, kid,” he whispered before he growled something in Yiddish and passed out.
The Tunnel
The Nonconformist (Nov. 7, 2020)
She arrived in the lobby that evening with a brochure for Tom describing some of the tunnels running beneath London. One, she said, was used by Charles II to sneak off to a high class brothel. They had a pleasant dinner in the hotel at the Caxton Grill, during which they drank wine and talked about his meeting with the solicitors and her life in London. She was born and still lived in Barking, east of the city center. “Takes about forty minutes by underground to get to my office,” she told him. “About par for the course. Probably like New York.” Tom smiled. His daily commute into Manhattan was actually longer.
Working from Home
Free State Review (Nov, 2020)
After explaining the depositions, I take a seat across from Val—not six feet, but at least four—eat my veggie moo shoo, Val eats her moo goo gai pan, and we both think wordlessly about having sex with one another. Do I actually know what’s in Val’s mind? No, but as she reached over and plucked an errant bean sprout from my cheek, there was a look I understood. My imagination? Hardly, but I decide discretion is the better part of Val, and go home. I go home! It’s not like we hadn’t done it before. When we were kids, seniors in high school. We agreed it was nothing personal, that it was just to have the experience with someone we trusted. There’s never been an encore, and it’s been twenty some years since we last spoke of it.
Children of a Distant Past
Fictive Dream (August 2020)
Barry goes back to the bar at the top of the hotel and orders lunch along with his second dry martini. He’s Googled both Tara and Don. He has their telephone numbers and some background information. Neither uses his last name. They were six and three when their mother took them away. That marriage had slowly, painfully eroded until, like a glacier sliding into the sea, it was gone. She quickly married a man named Genson who moved the family to the West Coast. Barry’s attempts to see his children were met with a phalanx of lawyers hired by her father and he didn’t have the resources to fight back. That wasn’t the end of it, of course.
The Coracoid Process
Light and Dark Magazine (August, 2020)
Benny packed his bags and took a bus back to Chicago. “Go back to school,” his grandmother said, but he had no interest in being a student. A friend from high school got him a job as a forklift operator at the Matteson Paper Company on the far south side. The pay was good and it was regular hours. He joined the union. He used the facilities at a nearby YMCA to build back strength in his right shoulder. Matteson had a baseball team that played in an industrial league around Chicago. Word spread quickly through the plant that Benny had pitched Triple A ball and had a few games in the big leagues. His foreman encouraged Benny to join the company team.
The Loop
Passengers Journal (August, 2020)
The first few stops of the elevated train are at ground level, bells ringing, gates lowering ahead of the train, stopping automobiles. Larry leans his head against the cold window and closes his eyes. As the tracks begin to rise over his northwest side Chicago neighborhood, he feels this secret thrill, like taking off in a small plane from Meigs Field. By the Western Avenue stop, they’re up out of the way of traffic. A woman boards. She is tall, thin with straight gray hair touching her shoulders. To Larry she looks a little like Doris, maybe a tad taller, a little older. She’s wearing a heavy blue wool, ankle-length coat and, like him, she’s wearing a party hat—this one a small cardboard bowler with red and green stripes. “Happy New Year,” she says.
The Yo-Yo Man
Drunk Monkeys (July, 2020)
This story was selected as one of the ten Fiction Finalists in the 2019 Tiferet Writing Contest and appears in Drunk Monkeys.
She had given him his first yo-yo on his fourth birthday. His father thought he was too young, but she reminded him how graceful Freddie ran and how well he could throw a baseball. She showed Freddie how to use the yo-yo in the small yard behind their apartment house, holding her hand over his. “Let it roll off your finger,” she said. “Watch how it comes back up.” Her soft voice reassured him. “That’s it. Do it again.” Freddie liked the precision.
A Summer of Love
Vessel (May 2020)
Kenny called her babe. “I’m okay, babe.” As if it hadn’t been forty years. He told her he lived in Tarzana, in the Valley. He has a drapery shop—he and his wife. He said he was going to the reunion and hopes she would consider it. Ann said it didn’t make sense for her to go. He pleaded, saying it would give them a chance to talk. “We’re survivors, babe. Isn’t it time we acknowledged that?”
“We didn’t all survive,” she whispered.
Sail Along Silverman
The Great Ape Journal (March, 2020)
The rabbi has been dating Pinky’s ex-wife, Shirley, for the last three months. If they married, Pinky’s alimony payments would stop. But the rabbi didn’t want to get Pinky’s hopes up, mainly because he, the rabbi, wasn’t sure yet whether he would ask Shirley to marry him. In this way, he was proffering himself the same advice he had given Pinky: Give it time. The rabbi was sixty-three. His wife, Thelma, had died three years earlier. While Shirley was only in her late forties, they had much in common. In the years since the divorce from Pinky, Shirley upped her religious observance. She was a regular at morning and evening services. She rose to a leadership position in the women’s auxiliary. She was rebounding from a brief affair with that good-for-nothing Marty Rosenberg, when a chance meeting with Rabbi Gottleib on the Ravenswood elevated train led to coffee and then dinner. The rabbi talked about his love for Thelma and how her heart attack challenged his faith and left him devastated. Shirley squeezed his hand and held it to her breast.
The Problem
Apeiron Review (Spring 2020. Page 84)
There it was, Kessler thought, the problem. Mention his love life and his friends would all come up with the same name. True enough, he thought often of Gloria. Gigi, he called her. It could be when he passed the coffee shop where they would sit across from one another, silently sipping black tea. Or when he saw a woman on the L resting her head on the shoulder of the man next to her. Gloria Greenspan. Gigi. They went steady. They were a couple. And then it was over. To be sure, there had been other girls, women. But his dates tended to be one and done, as they would say now. There was no high school sweetheart. His few romances seemed seasonal: A relationship begun in the fall, didn’t survive the winter. Gloria was the exception. That was a romance that lasted in fits and starts over several seasons during his college days. But Kessler sensed Gigi saw him as more of a friend than a lover. And she ended it abruptly with the thinnest of explanations. She wanted to taste life, she had said, as if dating Kessler was some kind of bland death.
Basic
Oddville Press (Fall, 2019)
Kessler remembered being gripped by equal measures of excitement and dread on the cold February evening he stood outside the Waynesville whorehouse clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. This was to be his first time. Part of him wanted to run back to the base. He worried he’d be too nervous to perform, that he was too skinny to be taken seriously, that it was too small. But he promised himself he wouldn’t go off to war a virgin and this whorehouse—really just a string of small rooms over a downtown beer joint popular with the soldiers—provided his only realistic opportunity to make good on that promise.
The Esterlink
r.kv.r.y quarterly (Winter 2019)
2005 Metroversity Writing Contest - First Place in Graduate Division
On a frosty March morning, Leon Esterlink leaves his Louisville home, running with a slow, steady pace. “It’s made for running,” he says to himself, moving up Eastern Parkway to Cherokee Park. He does the hills with ease, past the golf course, the pond, and then out of the park toward downtown. He knows he is sweating, but the dry air wicks it away. A trumpet voluntary marched through Leon’s head. The music paced him and he was lost in its melody. He barely noticed crossing the Second Street Bridge into Indiana. Leon’s goal was Indianapolis. If he could keep his normal pace, he’d be there before midnight. A film crew accompanied him: three guys in a flat bed truck and two more in a helicopter. He did his best to ignore them.
The Photograph
Rumble Fish Quarterly (Spring 2019 Edition)
The restaurant faces Central Park and we choose to sit outside in the warm fall evening. Potted banana trees are placed to afford each table an illusion of privacy. Joan is laughing at something I said when the shooting starts. It is a sincere laugh, one that makes me smile. One of the bullets, the fourth or tenth—I can’t remember—enters her head and she is dead before her wine glass shatters on the concrete floor. There are many deaths at the three locations the terrorists hit that night.
A Christmas Tree for Cogan
Edify Fiction (Christmas 2018)
Ginger
Prometheus Dreaming (Vol. 1.1)
A Death
Good Works Review (2018)
A Geometry of Life
Chicago Quarterly Review (2017)
The Catchfly
The Delmarva Review (Vol. 10 - 2017)
Vondelpark
The Louisville Review (2016)
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
2004 Metroversity Writing Contest - First Place in Graduate Division
Alterations
Literary LEO (2013)
Apple, Watch, Penny
Red Fez (March, 2011)
Gutman Goes Free
The Oddville Press (Sept., 2014)
Grace
Blue Lake Review (June, 2011)
Marvin Kessler's Shoes
Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (Winter, 2010)
Opportunity
Blue Lake Review (Nov. 2011)
Rothstein Before the Fall
Front Porch Review (July, 2010)
The Makeover
Word Riot (2016)
Somewhere in the Heart of Rome
Lowestoft Chronicle (Issue 17 - 2014)
The Casket in Cogan's Cellar
Jewish Fiction.Net (2015)
A Mistake in the Parking Lot of the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport
Writer's Digest 12th Place in 2010 Short Short Story Competition
Carlton on the Verge
Boundoff (Audio)listen
Blue Room With Woman (1954)
The Writing Disorder (Winter, 2012)
Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train November 2009 Short Story Award for New Writers
Jacobs, the Jew
Tikkun Magazine (June, 2016)
Nickel, Dime, Anything
Diverse Voices Quarterly (2014)
The History Lesson
Northern Liberties Review (2012)
Mullins
Black Heart Magazine (Aug. 2011)
All stories are copyright Robert H. Sachs, 2009-2022. All rights reserved.
The Writing Disorder (Fall, 2022)
“Nathan, where are we?” Julia asks, looking at a purple and orange dangling participle swaying from an unfocussed noun. They are standing at the base of the penultimate paragraph on page thirty-five. They had only recently met on page thirty. Nathan looks worried. He knows where they are and wants out. “In a novel, I’m afraid.”
Secrets
The Main Street Rag (TBD 2022)
He wondered a lot about Sarena and he fell asleep to the pleasant rhythm of her voice; the way she’d say Leonard, not like the accusation in his mother’s voice, more like a spiritual incantation, something you’d say while lighting a candle.
Pipkin
Bacopa Literary Review (Nov., 2022)
Published by the Writers Alliance of Gainesville for inclusion in its Bacopa Literary Review, an annual international print journal.
In the evenings after work, Lawrence Pipkin, thirty, takes regular and solitary walks around his north side Chicago neighborhood. He’s what Baudelaire might have called “a botanist of the sidewalk.” It’s a two-mile loop from his parent’s three-bedroom apartment on Carmen Avenue. His course never varies, no matter what the season, no matter what the weather and because he traces the same path year after year, he notices things others don’t. Now, as he crosses the small bridge near his apartment, he notices a body floating face down in the drainage canal.
The Teller
Rivanna Review (June, 2022)
He continues west until they reach Knobs Noster State Park. He pulls off and stops in a wooded area. The leaves, she notices, are variegated shades of brown and yellow, the blue water placid. He unties her hands and removes the dynamite sticks. “I’ll call the chief and tell him where he can find you. And I’ll leave this phone here. It’s no use to me. You can use it to call them if there’s a problem. Oh, and don’t worry about the dynamite sticks,” he says. “They’re phony.”
The First Day
Sledgehammer Literary Journal (February, 2022)
He finished his drink and drove to an apartment he kept near Lincoln Park. He’d purchased the apartment years ago for his mistress, Lucinda Markum. She had been with him for eight years, starting two years before his wife died. After his wife’s death, Foxcroft wanted Lucinda to move into his house in Lake Forest. She declined, saying it wouldn’t look right and it wouldn’t feel right. He promised to find them a new home, but before he could, she left him for a younger, even richer man.
Old Times
Tiferet Journal (Fall-Winter, 2021)
This story was selected as the Fiction winner in the 2021 Tiferet Writing Contest
Barry turned eighty in April and the thought of it is consuming him. The entreaties by Helen that it’s only a number don’t satisfy him. He worries over every pain, every missed appointment, every lost word. He feels guilty continually asking What? His mail is filled with ads for senior housing, men’s diapers, and free hearing aid tests, as if they know something he only fears. He tells himself to stop dwelling on it. Don’t live your life thinking every minute about your age. But that’s what he does. He’s read that an eighty year old male has a life expectancy of 8.34 years. In other words, he tells Helen, he’s not expected to live past eighty-eight.
“I’ll put it on the calendar,” she says, not looking up from the romance novel she’s reading.
A Delicious Silence
Cutleaf Journal (Nov,2021)
Evelyn, an unfortunate name for a boy, knew how to make the dogs howl. He’d been aware of this gift, if you could call it that, since he was five. One night as he lay in bed, he opened his mouth just so, like you would for a good yawn, tightened the muscles in his neck and pretty soon Shep, the old English sheep dog who lived next door at the Morgan’s, began to yelp and howl. Evelyn tried it again and almost immediately, Snowball, the cocker across the street at the Feinstein’s, joined in. Evelyn was both excited and afraid. “I’m only five,” he thought, pulling the covers tight under his chin, as if this awesome power should rest more comfortably on the shoulders of someone more mature.
Traces of an Early Summer
Rivercliff Books and Media -- PenDust Radio (July, 2021)
Podcast
It was dark by the time the police dropped Nettie and Daniel back at the grocery. “He’s fine,” Nettie said as she left the squad car and walked toward the store. On the way, she bent down and lightly touched William’s shoulder. She stopped at the door of the grocery, sighed a long, low whistle like a steam engine coming to rest. Daniel, his arm bandaged, walked behind his mother. He hesitated as he reached William and then, without saying a word, moved on.
My Birthday Celebration
Waxing & Waning (September, 2021)
Right before we left on this trip, my mother gave me five dollars. “Just in case,” she said. “And don’t tell Daddy.” I knew what she meant by “just in case.” Maybe other kids could go on a fishing trip with their dads, giddy with excitement and with no worries, but I started this trip with the fear that somewhere along the way the money my mother had given me would be necessary.
Me and Elodie
Bengaluru Review (March, 2021)
Mr. Littow was the floor manager back then. He could usually be found motionless with one hand on the brass railing and one foot on the first step of the curved stairway leading up to the main floor where the dress shoes were sold. He’d greet every customer as they walked down the stairs. “How do. Help you?” His voice was deep, authoritative, but friendly. Littow was a robust man in his fifties, with wavy, thin and receding black hair combed straight back and held in place with pomade. He had a pencil thin black mustache that even in 1956 and even in Chicago looked out of place and old fashioned. He wore dark suits and wide ties. His belly forbade the buttoning of his suit jacket without some distress. His black wingtips were burnished smooth and shiny, reflecting the fluorescent ceiling lights. I wanted desperately to be like him.
The Visiting Professor
Five on the Fifth (March 5, 2021)
I felt a twinge of conscience as the cab pulled away, and fought the urge to look back at the gangly professor. Indeed, even today, three years later, I know it was wrong—“a colossal fucking character defect,” the assistant dean called it at the time—leaving Blonsley undulating back and forth, heading further and further south.
Love and Herman Cogan
Adelaide Literary Magazine (Feb. 2021)
It was the fall of 1961 and Cogan was alone again. He looked around his apartment for something to do. Not one to make a mess, he saw little to clean, nothing to rearrange. He had dusted the previous Monday, the morning after Carole had broken it off. “It’s you, not me,” she had said. “You lack ambition. You lack spunk. You lack…” Cogan felt her searching for another key attribute of life. He wanted to say “glistening hair,” but he knew she wouldn’t find that funny. In the end she shook her head, said goodbye and left. And now Cogan, straightening a stool in his small kitchen, thought, “What next?”
The Embrace
Scarlet Leaf Review (March 2021)
He enters the sanctuary determined to drive the tryst from his thoughts. But as he wraps his prayer shawl around his head and shoulders and prays to the God who has sanctified us with His commandments, he doesn’t see, as he often does, an image of Moses on Mount Sinai. In its place, Cogan sees Sapinsky smashing the holy tablets and caressing Mrs. Levine.
The Watch
MacQueen's Quinterly (Jan. 2021)
She didn’t tell him about her abortion last year. She didn’t mention her two miscarriages a decade ago with the guy she thought she loved. She avoided talking about her abusive father and alcoholic mother. “Just a small town girl,” she said. “High school cheerleader. Anthropology major at Oberlin. Eight years ago a friend got me the job at the agency. Been writing copy ever since. And what do you do besides practicing law?”
Wednesday's Child
Passengers Journal (Dec. 2020)
She smiles. He smiles. Holding hands. Foreplay. Then to bed: Grunting, sighing, release. Cigarettes.
"Nice," she says.
"Thanks," he says, cocksure. They sleep wrapped in each other’s arms.
Morning: Coffee. He makes breakfast. She showers. "Must go," she says. "Tonight?"
"Not tonight."
"Tomorrow?"
"Not tomorrow."
"When then?"
"Next Wednesday. You know the rules."
"I'm tired of sharing you," she says.
The Ring on Ruby Rifkin's Pinky
The Cobalt Review (Nov. 18, 2020)
About halfway through the service, Rifkin began to sweat heavily. The handkerchief he used to wipe his face and neck was soggy. He rubbed his left arm and began twisting the ring as if it were strangling him. He was having trouble getting it off his fat finger. He signaled for his aide who had been standing at the back of the sanctuary, but Rifkin had the ring off before the goon arrived. He grabbed my hand and put the ring in my palm, closing my fingers around it.
“Take care a dis for me, kid,” he whispered before he growled something in Yiddish and passed out.
The Tunnel
The Nonconformist (Nov. 7, 2020)
She arrived in the lobby that evening with a brochure for Tom describing some of the tunnels running beneath London. One, she said, was used by Charles II to sneak off to a high class brothel. They had a pleasant dinner in the hotel at the Caxton Grill, during which they drank wine and talked about his meeting with the solicitors and her life in London. She was born and still lived in Barking, east of the city center. “Takes about forty minutes by underground to get to my office,” she told him. “About par for the course. Probably like New York.” Tom smiled. His daily commute into Manhattan was actually longer.
Working from Home
Free State Review (Nov, 2020)
After explaining the depositions, I take a seat across from Val—not six feet, but at least four—eat my veggie moo shoo, Val eats her moo goo gai pan, and we both think wordlessly about having sex with one another. Do I actually know what’s in Val’s mind? No, but as she reached over and plucked an errant bean sprout from my cheek, there was a look I understood. My imagination? Hardly, but I decide discretion is the better part of Val, and go home. I go home! It’s not like we hadn’t done it before. When we were kids, seniors in high school. We agreed it was nothing personal, that it was just to have the experience with someone we trusted. There’s never been an encore, and it’s been twenty some years since we last spoke of it.
Children of a Distant Past
Fictive Dream (August 2020)
Barry goes back to the bar at the top of the hotel and orders lunch along with his second dry martini. He’s Googled both Tara and Don. He has their telephone numbers and some background information. Neither uses his last name. They were six and three when their mother took them away. That marriage had slowly, painfully eroded until, like a glacier sliding into the sea, it was gone. She quickly married a man named Genson who moved the family to the West Coast. Barry’s attempts to see his children were met with a phalanx of lawyers hired by her father and he didn’t have the resources to fight back. That wasn’t the end of it, of course.
The Coracoid Process
Light and Dark Magazine (August, 2020)
Benny packed his bags and took a bus back to Chicago. “Go back to school,” his grandmother said, but he had no interest in being a student. A friend from high school got him a job as a forklift operator at the Matteson Paper Company on the far south side. The pay was good and it was regular hours. He joined the union. He used the facilities at a nearby YMCA to build back strength in his right shoulder. Matteson had a baseball team that played in an industrial league around Chicago. Word spread quickly through the plant that Benny had pitched Triple A ball and had a few games in the big leagues. His foreman encouraged Benny to join the company team.
The Loop
Passengers Journal (August, 2020)
The first few stops of the elevated train are at ground level, bells ringing, gates lowering ahead of the train, stopping automobiles. Larry leans his head against the cold window and closes his eyes. As the tracks begin to rise over his northwest side Chicago neighborhood, he feels this secret thrill, like taking off in a small plane from Meigs Field. By the Western Avenue stop, they’re up out of the way of traffic. A woman boards. She is tall, thin with straight gray hair touching her shoulders. To Larry she looks a little like Doris, maybe a tad taller, a little older. She’s wearing a heavy blue wool, ankle-length coat and, like him, she’s wearing a party hat—this one a small cardboard bowler with red and green stripes. “Happy New Year,” she says.
The Yo-Yo Man
Drunk Monkeys (July, 2020)
This story was selected as one of the ten Fiction Finalists in the 2019 Tiferet Writing Contest and appears in Drunk Monkeys.
She had given him his first yo-yo on his fourth birthday. His father thought he was too young, but she reminded him how graceful Freddie ran and how well he could throw a baseball. She showed Freddie how to use the yo-yo in the small yard behind their apartment house, holding her hand over his. “Let it roll off your finger,” she said. “Watch how it comes back up.” Her soft voice reassured him. “That’s it. Do it again.” Freddie liked the precision.
A Summer of Love
Vessel (May 2020)
Kenny called her babe. “I’m okay, babe.” As if it hadn’t been forty years. He told her he lived in Tarzana, in the Valley. He has a drapery shop—he and his wife. He said he was going to the reunion and hopes she would consider it. Ann said it didn’t make sense for her to go. He pleaded, saying it would give them a chance to talk. “We’re survivors, babe. Isn’t it time we acknowledged that?”
“We didn’t all survive,” she whispered.
Sail Along Silverman
The Great Ape Journal (March, 2020)
The rabbi has been dating Pinky’s ex-wife, Shirley, for the last three months. If they married, Pinky’s alimony payments would stop. But the rabbi didn’t want to get Pinky’s hopes up, mainly because he, the rabbi, wasn’t sure yet whether he would ask Shirley to marry him. In this way, he was proffering himself the same advice he had given Pinky: Give it time. The rabbi was sixty-three. His wife, Thelma, had died three years earlier. While Shirley was only in her late forties, they had much in common. In the years since the divorce from Pinky, Shirley upped her religious observance. She was a regular at morning and evening services. She rose to a leadership position in the women’s auxiliary. She was rebounding from a brief affair with that good-for-nothing Marty Rosenberg, when a chance meeting with Rabbi Gottleib on the Ravenswood elevated train led to coffee and then dinner. The rabbi talked about his love for Thelma and how her heart attack challenged his faith and left him devastated. Shirley squeezed his hand and held it to her breast.
The Problem
Apeiron Review (Spring 2020. Page 84)
There it was, Kessler thought, the problem. Mention his love life and his friends would all come up with the same name. True enough, he thought often of Gloria. Gigi, he called her. It could be when he passed the coffee shop where they would sit across from one another, silently sipping black tea. Or when he saw a woman on the L resting her head on the shoulder of the man next to her. Gloria Greenspan. Gigi. They went steady. They were a couple. And then it was over. To be sure, there had been other girls, women. But his dates tended to be one and done, as they would say now. There was no high school sweetheart. His few romances seemed seasonal: A relationship begun in the fall, didn’t survive the winter. Gloria was the exception. That was a romance that lasted in fits and starts over several seasons during his college days. But Kessler sensed Gigi saw him as more of a friend than a lover. And she ended it abruptly with the thinnest of explanations. She wanted to taste life, she had said, as if dating Kessler was some kind of bland death.
Basic
Oddville Press (Fall, 2019)
Kessler remembered being gripped by equal measures of excitement and dread on the cold February evening he stood outside the Waynesville whorehouse clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. This was to be his first time. Part of him wanted to run back to the base. He worried he’d be too nervous to perform, that he was too skinny to be taken seriously, that it was too small. But he promised himself he wouldn’t go off to war a virgin and this whorehouse—really just a string of small rooms over a downtown beer joint popular with the soldiers—provided his only realistic opportunity to make good on that promise.
The Esterlink
r.kv.r.y quarterly (Winter 2019)
2005 Metroversity Writing Contest - First Place in Graduate Division
On a frosty March morning, Leon Esterlink leaves his Louisville home, running with a slow, steady pace. “It’s made for running,” he says to himself, moving up Eastern Parkway to Cherokee Park. He does the hills with ease, past the golf course, the pond, and then out of the park toward downtown. He knows he is sweating, but the dry air wicks it away. A trumpet voluntary marched through Leon’s head. The music paced him and he was lost in its melody. He barely noticed crossing the Second Street Bridge into Indiana. Leon’s goal was Indianapolis. If he could keep his normal pace, he’d be there before midnight. A film crew accompanied him: three guys in a flat bed truck and two more in a helicopter. He did his best to ignore them.
The Photograph
Rumble Fish Quarterly (Spring 2019 Edition)
The restaurant faces Central Park and we choose to sit outside in the warm fall evening. Potted banana trees are placed to afford each table an illusion of privacy. Joan is laughing at something I said when the shooting starts. It is a sincere laugh, one that makes me smile. One of the bullets, the fourth or tenth—I can’t remember—enters her head and she is dead before her wine glass shatters on the concrete floor. There are many deaths at the three locations the terrorists hit that night.
A Christmas Tree for Cogan
Edify Fiction (Christmas 2018)
Ginger
Prometheus Dreaming (Vol. 1.1)
A Death
Good Works Review (2018)
A Geometry of Life
Chicago Quarterly Review (2017)
The Catchfly
The Delmarva Review (Vol. 10 - 2017)
Vondelpark
The Louisville Review (2016)
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize
2004 Metroversity Writing Contest - First Place in Graduate Division
Alterations
Literary LEO (2013)
Apple, Watch, Penny
Red Fez (March, 2011)
Gutman Goes Free
The Oddville Press (Sept., 2014)
Grace
Blue Lake Review (June, 2011)
Marvin Kessler's Shoes
Mobius: The Journal of Social Change (Winter, 2010)
Opportunity
Blue Lake Review (Nov. 2011)
Rothstein Before the Fall
Front Porch Review (July, 2010)
The Makeover
Word Riot (2016)
Somewhere in the Heart of Rome
Lowestoft Chronicle (Issue 17 - 2014)
The Casket in Cogan's Cellar
Jewish Fiction.Net (2015)
A Mistake in the Parking Lot of the Sarasota-Bradenton Airport
Writer's Digest 12th Place in 2010 Short Short Story Competition
Carlton on the Verge
Boundoff (Audio)listen
Blue Room With Woman (1954)
The Writing Disorder (Winter, 2012)
Honorable Mention in the Glimmer Train November 2009 Short Story Award for New Writers
Jacobs, the Jew
Tikkun Magazine (June, 2016)
Nickel, Dime, Anything
Diverse Voices Quarterly (2014)
The History Lesson
Northern Liberties Review (2012)
Mullins
Black Heart Magazine (Aug. 2011)
All stories are copyright Robert H. Sachs, 2009-2022. All rights reserved.
