A group of friends, several decades after high school, gather in a Tampa restaurant, waiting to hear whether the governor will finally sign the death warrant for the man who murdered their friend in 1986.
My latest short story, Promises (based on real events), has been published by Be About It Press. I hope you’ll give it a read!
It’s about what unfolds in the strange choreography of grief thirty years on: friends who show up and the ones who can’t, reporters circling for a quote, and the uneasy space between ideals and reality. A death-penalty-skeptical activist who’s spent months lobbying for this exact outcome has to sit with that contradiction in real time, in a red dress, in front of cameras, surrounded by people who knew her before any of this occurred.
Woven through the reunion is a decades-long, unconventional relationship. But Promises is also a story about how death — sudden, delayed, anticipated, or simply threaded through a life in small ways — reshapes the people left behind. The sometimes unlovely ways we metabolize loss: through old songs, old jokes, old grudges, and the people we keep choosing to come back to.