Published Works

2020 - Article/Commentary - “Reading and Drinking: ‘Reality TV’ by Michael Kardos.” The Cincinnati Review. December. Online.

Dystopia, in Michael Kardos’ “Reality TV”, feels like Supermarket Sweep and Survivor were cross-bred with 1987’s The Running Man, which is to say, it feels too real. In 1987, when Arnold Schwarzenegger was wrongly sentenced to death and given the opportunity to participate in a reality show for a chance at freedom, it read as satirical absurdism. Social commentary, for sure, but blown so wildly out of proportion that it was well within the sci-fi realm, and the stuff of Hollywood. Now, in the twilight of 2020, during the ascension of COVID-19 and the descent of political decorum in America, Kardos’s “Reality TV” is entertainingly chilling.

2018 - Fiction - “No One Likes a Story About Heartache.” Geometry. May/June. Issue Three. Print.

My father’s son—a spoiled, overly sensitive, single child—doesn’t usually find himself in a situation like this one, where the woman in bed with him, naked and still slicked with sweat from the love they’ve made, asks, with far too little compunction, about the greatest heartache of his life. He doesn’t tell her that story, not yet, because he doesn’t know where to start. Instead, he begins with this:

2017 - Fiction - “For the Life of You.” Cleaver. Spring. Online.

Profiled against the warped wooden fence that spreads like bad teeth at places along its base, [your son] is small, and he’s half-leaning into the neighbor’s yard over the top, his jeans dark from playing in the yard. On toe-point, he’s reaching over, looking at a situation you only later—by how cold the world feels on your knees, how it falls out beneath you—will begin to figure; he’s pointing into that other yard, his arms marshmallow thick in his blue winter coat saying again without looking back, “Dad! Dad! Dad!” because he knows you are there, trusts for some reason that you will always be, and you make an effort to talk except what comes out isn’t helpful or coherent because, face it, you’re ripped and don’t know what to say anyway, but you know what to do, goddamnit, which is scale that six-foot wooden fence now, Dad, right now.

2017 - Fiction - “The Big Feed.” The Carolina Quarterly. Spring. Online.

Of course the carnivores were the real draw. Who cared about fruit bats or toads or the elephants and their pumpkins? They wanted to see blood, hear the crack of bones. She wanted that too, admittedly.

2016 - Fiction - “Earl’s Shadow.” Zone 3. Fall. Issue 26.2. Print.

Earl was filling up the company tanker at my oil well like he used to every Tuesday and Thursday evening when he told me he was thinking about getting a dog for his kid despite the boy being sixteen. Out here, there’s the light from the truck and the one flood perched up top on the well, but other than that and the deep glugging from the hose it’s dark and contemplation quiet. Earl used to arrive after midnight because he had to drive from his home in Ohio to pick up the rig in West Virginia before coming all the way out here to Tennessee to fill it up. It’s pretty good money, for him and me both, him hauling combustibles and me selling them, but it takes its toll on someone eventually, trucking. Wives, mostly, and kids, if you’ve got them. Being gone for twelve to twenty hours a day, five or more days a week and holidays, wears a relationship to the bone, but Earl was convinced a dog would do the trick with his kid, mend broken wounds or some shit.