Dave's Fiction Warehouse

T his summer I accompanied the brunette to her 50-year high school reunion. I really didn’t want to go. I mean, I skipped my own 50th reunion six years ago, and the one before that . The 10- and 20-year reunions were fun, but after a while they begin to seem as dreary as that face I see in the mirror every morning. So I told Tess no. For some reason she kept at it.  I finally relented. I’ve gotten better at discerning the things I must refuse and the things I probably shouldn’t. I bought a new shirt and a new pair of shorts and steeled myself for an introvert's nightmare: a weekend of small talk among total strangers. At least, I thought, they’d all be unaware of the countless regrets and embarrassments that define my own memories of high school.  We drove to Ellensburg, a middling college town best known for its rodeo and unceasing wind. The former classmates gathered Friday night at a dive bar on the edge of town. There was the obligatory guy in a MAGA hat and another in one...

A ccording to this piece in the New York Times , more Americans are forgoing the doggy bag  –  apparently unconcerned that there are starving children in Africa who would be delighted to dine on their unfinished mac ’n cheese.   The story says the average American leaves about 53 pounds, or $329 worth, of food on their restaurant plates each year. That’s hard to credit: how many restaurants do these average Americans hit in a year? For me it’s maybe five or 10. No wonder they’re getting fatter . And that’s without cleaning their plates! But back to the takeout box. There appear to be a variety of reasons people don’t ask for them:  young dating couples don’t want to seem cheap, post-covid social stigma about sharing entrees,  the unwillingness to go clubbing with half a Cobb salad at your side.   All of which is another reminder that I have little in common with these crazy “average” Americans.  I rarely leave restaurant food on my plate. I’...

I used to live near the Canadian border. The northern boundary of the folks’ ranch was a stone’s throw from the 49th parallel. There was a switchback road you could drive up to see the border itself – a 20-foot swath in the timber that stretched out to the horizon (that’s my son and brother-in-law in the photo). Even back in the ’70s I remember thinking it was pretty incredible to have such a long, totally undefended border between two sovereign nations. Not even a fence, then. Sometimes, hiking or hunting, we’d stroll across the border just to say we had. Other days we’d drive through the border station at Roosville to pick apples or buy Labatt’s. Each way, the guards would make small talk and wave us through. Then 9/11 happened. Then, 15 years later, so did Trump. Then Covid. And now, an older, meaner and more disordered Trump, who no longer seems to be kidding when he raves about annexing our more civilized neighbor to the north. Plus the tariffs. Don’t get me started about the stup...

A mazon boycott update : Still pretty sure this is the path of wisdom, not to mention a fun way to flip Bezos the bird. Best of all, it’s proving easier than I thought. One star Yesterday our digital meat thermometer quit working. In simpler times, I would have jumped on Amazon and ordered another one. After all, that’s how I acquired the cheap piece of crap that just broke. It was only $11. What a bargain! Then I thought: Wait a minute. Maybe the low, low price has something to do with the low, low quality. It lasted a couple of years and now it’s more plastic for the landfill. Also, it was a pain in the ass that it quit working while my wife was cooking chicken. She had to check for doneness the old-fashioned way. The horror. Anyway, I looked up the best meat thermometers online, careful to ignore the sponsored ads, the cutesy soliloquies from paid influencers, and of course anything Amazon. I found three possibilities – all quite a bit more than $11. No matter; I was going for quali...

I f you're reading this, it means I have successfully redirected my davesfiction.com domain back to this site on Google's Blogger platform. The reason being that hosting is still free here. Kind of. The last two years' worth of posts are on here now, as well as the first two or three years, starting in 2007. I'll be transferring the rest over a few at a time. Meantime, please leave a comment to let me know someone's actually seeing this site. Thanks, Dave Knadler

T his morning we rode our bikes up to watch the UM homecoming parade. It was the second one I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. The first was in 1968 when I accompanied my then-girlfriend and her mom – a UM alumna – on the drive from Eureka down to Missoula for just that occasion.   I don’t know about parades. I know you’re supposed to applaud and whoop at certain intervals. I know that, past a certain age, one should not actively collect the candy tossed from floats. I know that one should be discreet about ogling the pretty cheerleaders. I know that the first 30 minutes of any parade is really all one needs to see. Especially if it’s raining.  My girlfriend at that first parade became my wife a couple of years later. She became my former wife 24 years after that – one of the reasons I left Missoula. I thought of that today, standing in the drizzling rain, watching the makeshift floats and marching bands drift by. It all seemed a little forced, a little lackluster, but that s...

  If it ain't covid, it's something else L ast week I felt the tiniest scratch of an imminent sore throat, a few unfamiliar aches, a bit of leakage around the nostrils. I thought, here we go. My wife had caught Covid for a second time not even three weeks earlier, and pretty much everybody else I know has had it at least once. I’d made it three and a half years without testing positive. It was a good run, but I knew it was just a matter of time.  We still had a couple of tests lying around. Being a responsible adult, I took one. Waited the required time. Negative.  Well, people often test negative before the disease fully takes hold. I waited a couple more  days, until I was dry-coughing and blowing my nose every three seconds, and even a small bite of oatmeal felt like a big bite of sandpaper. I also had a fair amount of pain elsewhere, as though  I’d been dropped from a great height onto a field of farm implements.  The next day I was slightly better. I t...

J ust when I thought my desultory writing career was nearly done, I sold another short story. It’s called “Five Hat Minimum” and it appears in the current issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (which we literary lions refer to as EQMM). You should buy several copies and hand them out as gifts. Or, use them as fun coasters for your next soiree!  This yarn features a character I introduced in another EQMM story some years back. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry. I won’t say it’s the best story ever written, but maybe the best I’ve written. Which, admittedly, is not a real high bar. EQMM has published quite a bit of my work over the years. It’s funny: my first published fiction, “Nobody’s Business,” appeared in the same issue as a story by Joyce Carol Oates, back in 2003. I was quite proud of that. Now this one, which may be my last, also appears alongside one of her stories (“The Siren: 1999”). I mention it because she’s not a frequent contributor to the magazine. I’ll definitely use that as...

It's a long way from "Yellowstone" F or the first time in 13 years, I was watching Florida hurricane reports at a far remove. Just the way I used to watch the reports of Montana wildfires: Tough luck, I’d think, but what are you gonna do? No matter where you live, it’s always something.  I’m a Montana resident again, once more fully tuned in to the whole wildfire thing. The wife and I have our new driver’s licenses and license plates and we’re registered to vote in Missoula County.  We’ll be voting straight blue, needless to say. All we need now is a Golden retriever and a Subaru Outback. We left Montana in 1997, moving first to Kansas City, then to Philadelphia, then to Wichita, then to Jacksonville. We had good reasons for each move, most related to money and our newspaper careers. But I always missed the homeland. No matter where one lives, I think, one’s birthplace exerts some considerable tug on the psyche.  So here we are. Things have changed some. Not Rip-Van-Winkl...

Those bikes need a lot of adjustment T here’s something about being an older white guy in America: At some point you feel like the kids need to get off your lawn. Figuratively speaking.  We got some new neighbors a few weeks ago. This neighborhood is OK, but there’s a somewhat decrepit rental house across the street. It’s so decrepit that it is actually affordable. Thus, the tenants come and go. They come for the affordable rent; they go because the house is, well, decrepit. Black mold and so forth.  Our newest neighbors are two or three young guys who spend a lot of time working on their mini motorbikes on the sidewalk out front. There’s only one way to work on a motorbike. You tinker with it, and then you start it up and twist the throttle to see if your tinkering has made any difference. Maybe take a test run up and down the street. Repeat until the neighbors call the authorities.  We’re not calling the authorities. Sometimes, brooding through slatted blinds, I’ve felt...

Mr. and Mrs. Yours Truly, earlier in the pandemic. T o the best of my knowledge, I still haven’t gotten Covid. I would like to thank my superhuman immune system, my strict adherence to scientific protocols, and a social circle that could fit comfortably in a Mazda Miata. Oh, and the Academy. Just kidding. At this point it’s all down to luck. Nearly everyone I care about has had at least one case of Covid. Most took the pandemic seriously for the first couple of years, but then, like me, quietly and gradually said to hell with it. Now it seems that despite all the masks and vaccinations and social distancing, it’s less a question of if you get infected, but when. Turns out you can’t put out a fire if half the onlookers keep tossing books on it. I know: simply writing about this probably guarantees an epic case of Covid within the next few weeks. And some of us still don masks once in a while. Last week I went in for a blood test at Quest Diagnostics, a venue usually jam-packed with sham...

W henever I go to a Wal-Mart to pick up a prescription, I am reminded that what you save there you eventually surrender in dignity. But it happened to be the first place with available appointments for the Covid vaccine, so my vigilant wife arose early and booked it online. When I arrived at the appointed hour, a number of lines had already formed in front of the understaffed pharmacy counter. In the middle were eight chairs arranged in parallel rows, like a pretend bus.  These chairs were supposedly reserved for those who had just gotten the vaccine and were waiting the required 15 minutes to see whether it would kill them or not. But I am a cynical man, and I suspected most of the sitters had been there awhile and were just taking a load off.  The standing lines were comingled with people dropping off prescriptions, or picking up prescriptions, or waiting for the vaccine. No one seemed sure which line was which.  My personal rule of thumb is that whenever there is more ...

I n Barry Levinson's 1990 movie " Avalon ," there's a scene where the aging patriarch sits down in his easy chair in front of the TV.  The camera remains stationary, but there's a slow cross-fade, and at the end of it  we see that several years have passed. The old guy is still in the chair, still watching TV, but he has gotten much, much older.  His golden years have passed without notice into full decrepitude. It's a poignant moment, but also kind of scary.  Over the last year of Covid isolation, I've felt something like that.  Each day is much like another, lived by rote and routine and the occasional Zoom call. Each day I think we're keeping things together pretty well, but at the end of each day I reflect that I'm in the same place I started -- both literally and figuratively. My TV is mostly the computer; my easy chair is this same Herman Miller Aeron I splurged on 17 years ago. Since August I've been flying around in the virtual world of...

L ast Friday I was driving up I-95 to see my daughter and her girls in Virginia. Somewhere south of Savannah a gleaming red Mercedes coupe with New York plates swept by on my left. It was car to remember, even more so because there was an enormous cream-colored cat lounging the back window, calmly observing all the other northbound motorists. It seemed very relaxed for a cat doing around 90 on a freeway crowded with maniacs. My own experience with cats in cars is that they need to be confined and lightly sedated.  Then a few miles down the road I saw a man leaning on the guardrail by the southbound lanes, his hands cuffed behind him. He wore a green sweater and tan pants. He seemed to be appreciating the empty blue sky above the trees. The cop standing with him was smiling for some reason. The door to his cruiser was open but the flashers weren’t on. I thought: there’s a story I will never know. Just like the cat.  Normally you don’t see anything on I-95, beyond the grills of ...

I participate in the Goodreads reading challenge mostly to keep track of the books I read in a calendar year. Why that’s important, I don’t know. At this point in life, I guess, I like to take note of the few challenges I can actually accomplish. Now that I’ve ruled out paddling around the world in a dugout canoe. My goal this year was 52 books: one a week. I achieved that today when I finished “The Furious Hours” by Casey Cep. Last year, my goal was 40 books — and because then I was showing off as a brash contender, a kid out of nowhere, I almost doubled it by finishing 79. This is how I roll: set the bar embarrassingly low, and then boast about clearing it with two feet of air. Lest anyone think I’m an intellectual, the kind of man who reads Nietzsche and Proust for fun, I should point out that my reading leans toward crime fiction, a genre in which the pages turn easier because the stories tend to be plot-driven. Also, they tend to be shorter. Although length can be deceptive. For e...

T oday I went to Publix, thinking I should do something to prepare for the approach of a Category 4 hurricane. But the only thing I bought of a hurricane nature was a case of bottled water. Publix had big pallets of it stationed around the store, and most people seemed to be grabbing at least one. I did too. If everybody had been grabbing big sacks of pomegranate, I probably would have done the same. We should all know it’s possible to fill up jugs with regular tap water and keep it for a few days, right? But when a hurricane’s coming you feel like you have to step up your game. Thus the bottled water. I also bought an overripe honeydew melon and some Cheerios and milk and a screamin’ BOGO deal on whole-bean coffee. I filled up the Prius and got $100 out of the ATM. And more wine, of course.  Bring it on, Dorian! Hurricane warnings are tough for me. I can never get in the proper mindset. The tracking forecast changes at least hourly, and it’s hard to maintain a true sense of urgenc...

M y morning walk was cooler than it’s been in awhile. Gray skies and the possibility of rain. Still humid as hell, but when you’re in Florida in late August, a dip into the mid 70s can put a spring in your step. They say those gray skies may portend a Labor Day hurricane, but I’ll go ahead and enjoy them for now. I saw an older black guy on a pedal bike stopped at the corner. He appeared to be rolling up his rain jacket. He had a boom box in the front basket, playing some cool ’70s soul number at mid volume. Sounded like Al Green. “Let’s Stay Together,” maybe. I liked it. Usually when people play their music in public, the music is very shitty and very loud. Way too much bass and the only lyrics you can make out have to do with motherfuckers. This tune was just right, fading pleasantly as he pedaled away down the empty street. The song was still in my head three miles later. If the guy had looked my way, I might have smiled or nodded or given him an inane thumbs-up. But you don’t want ...

I know; it’s been awhile. The Trump nightmare keeps getting darker, and writing about anything else has seemed frivolous. But life goes on. I am just determined to outlive this bastard, to dance rhetorically on his grave when all this passes, as it must. So I’ve deleted Facebook and Twitter from my phone again, and I’ve resumed writing fiction. Rewriting it, too. Recently I decided to repackage all my published short stories into a single volume, and put it on Amazon as an e-book. I realized there aren’t quite enough of them to make a book, so I’ve written a couple more. In the process, I’ve gone through all the published stories and polished them to a showroom sheen. At times I’ve been embarrassed at how poorly some of them were edited before appearing in “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.” That’s on me, not the magazine. A few weeks from now, the Kindle book should be on the market. I’m calling it The Least Best Place. It’s the title of one of my favorites stories, which first appear...

There's a quintet to draw to T ake a look at the composite picture above: What do the five faces have in common? I’ll just wait here while you ponder. Hint: It’s not the Dave Clark Five. It’s not the Five Amigos. It’s not the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It’s not the Five Guys. It’s not the Five Pillars of Islam. No, my friends, these five faces represent the closest resemblance to yours truly, according the Google Arts and Culture app that’s been wasting a ton of bandwidth on social media over the last few weeks. I saw a story about this stupid app and downloaded it today. I thought it might be fun to see which famous painting would have a guy who looked like me. Yeah, real fun. I should point out that the image on the left is the one that came up first. As you can see, things didn’t improve much over the next four tries. As the kids would say: WTF? Not that it matters, but the reference image is my profile image: a selfie that, like all of them, fails to capture the essence o...

L ast night we headed for bed just before midnight. The New Year’s Eve gunfire was like the opening battle scene in “Saving Private Ryan,” to the point that the dog followed us upstairs to cower by the bed. My wife asked me what my hopes for 2018 might be. She asks things like that. I hadn’t thought much about it, but the answer came pretty quickly: “To see Donald Trump driven from office in disgrace.” I don’t know if that says more about me, or more about Trump. Is my life so barren that I should for the first time in my life care that much who occupies the White House? Or is this president so loathsome in every respect that his ouster should be my fondest wish? Obviously, I’m going with the latter. Trump cast a pall over pretty much every day last year, a thickening miasma of dread and disgust that all the late-night comics in the world couldn’t quite dispel. I woke up in the morning with minor hopes and dreams, and every day there was some new outrage concerning Trump and his terrib...