New Orleans Fiction
I moved to New Orleans in 2010, but I'd been drawn to the city long before then. Growing up only three hours north, I spent many weekends here, mostly doing the typical tourist stuff--Bourbon Street, the ghost tours, the aquarium, the riverboat rides. Living here is, of course, an entirely different experience, one filled with moments of pure joy (marching down St. Charles in a Mardi Gras parade, beads littering the pavement, or walking along the banks of Bayou St. John, when the jasmine blooms all at once all over town), and moments of sheer anxiety (prepping the house for a category four hurricane, corralling the cats for last-minute evacuation, fighting the city over an outrageous water bill, popping a tire in one of the city's infamous potholes).
I love it. It's got its claws in me. I can't imagine living anywhere else in the world.
Below, find excerpts from some of my short stories set in New Orleans, as well as my personal photos of the city.
My photo of the Irish Channel St. Patrick's Day Parade, Uptown, New Orleans.
Excerpt from "Percipient," published in Willow Springs, Issue 70
Georgia has been ghost guiding in the French Quarter for just over a year when she spots the man she will later claim as her first ghost. What she won’t mention, when she tells the story, is that he’s only the first ghost who is not her missing mother. That’s a story she won’t tell, how sometimes, as she leads her tours through the dim, gas-lamp-lit streets, her mother appears—a thin, dark-haired figure beckoning from a balcony, or strolling along the sidewalk just ahead, flat and colorless against the bright facades of Creole townhouses. Or flitting, faint and shadow-like, in the corner of Georgia’s eye, there for a split second and then gone, every time Georgia turns to look.
And she won’t tell either how, on the same night she sees the ghost-man, her mother is there too, only hours before—there, among the crowd of tour-goers gathered outside the iron gates of St. Louis Cathedral. There, in so much more detail than the other sightings, when she was tenuous and unreal, a half-lit dream. So there, in fact, that for a moment Georgia is sure—could almost swear—that it’s really her, really her mother, finally back after six years missing.
There’s a lot of moon out the night it happens, throwing a bluish glow over the narrow streets and barred transoms and balconies with their wrought iron like bands of dark lace, everything washed in that cool light, Georgia too; the bare skin of her arms, her face and throat, throb where it touches her. Feeling the moon like she would the sun. She has just finished her monologue about moving statues, the tolling of ghost-bells, disembodied voices moaning out hymnal song, and has paused long enough for the crowd to gaze up at the cathedral. Then, signaling them to move on, she strikes her black cane against the pavement, and is about to spin on her heel to make her cape fly out, when in an instant and out of nothing her mother appears, her close-set black eyes and long face hovering above the broad shoulder of a man at the back of the crowd.
Jasmine, Lafitte Greenway, Midcity
My photo taken in front of the Roosevelt Hotel, Baronne Street.
Excerpt from "The Hanged Man," published in West Branch, No. 80
He reaches Jackson Square just as the lingering summer light fades to a silvery glow. He’s one of the night crowd, the bolder, more flamboyant fortune-tellers who hover over glowing candles and call to passers-by. But it’s early for that yet, the day psychics sill packing up their tables, and right away he finds Anna in her usual place beside the iron gate. He watches as she wraps her crystal ball in a towel and tucks it into her bag. Watches as she folds up her sign: Palm, Tarot, and Crystal by Anna in light blue letters and, beneath, a drawing of a hand—her hand; Roman sketched it himself—palm out.
He makes his way to her from across the square. Above, in dark silhouette, looms the St. Louis Cathedral, its jutting steeples like the towers of some ancient castle. A medieval backdrop to the street artists and vendors, the colorful umbrellas and fruit-laden carts, the fortune-tellers and musicians and painted performers. But the crowd is thinner at this hour, the gray period between night and day, that brief mingling of light and dark. His favorite time, dusk, when he knows he will see Anna, if only for a moment.