A proud husband.

That'd be me. My beautiful wife, Joy, just had a short story published in the latest edition of Dappled Things. I may be biased, but I do think she has a talent for writing fiction.

Follow this link to get the entire story. Also, do check out some of the other articles and stories in the latest issue. There are some mighty good ones in there.

Here's a teaser from Joy's story:

We sat in the shade of the trench for a bit, smoking our Turkish cigarettes. The sky shone a deep blue against the red of the dirt towering over our heads. I looked at Tom as he pulled the cigarette out of his mouth between his thumb and index finger. That was the way my father used to smoke.

“It's strange, isn't it?” I asked.

“What?”

“Here.”

Tom nodded, extending his long legs out as far as he could before the soles of his black boots hit the other wall.

When we met, I had asked Tom why he came to fight, and he had told me he didn't come to fight. He came because he heard how beautiful Turkey was from his uncle who had traveled around the world two times before he turned twenty-four. Tom had said that on this continent you could get on a train and in six hours be in a completely different culture. He figured he'd let the government pay for him to get here. “But as soon as this thing is over,” he had said, “I'm off.”

Though he never said it, I knew he missed his family. He kept a picture in his pocket all the time. It wasn't very old, but it was worn. It showed his five sisters, all blonde like him, his mother, who had a round face and dimples, and his father, who was tall like Tom. The two of them stood in back, both with long faces and big ears, while the women sat in a row in front. I thought of my dad and his hard, grim life. How he gave up and left us without hope.

I didn't have a picture to show Tom. He asked why. I lied and said I didn't know.