The Outlaw Steve Corbett ink splotch

Swan Dive! Ch. 6: Fight Like a Gull

June 22, 2022

To set the mood for the upcoming protest rally on the beach, RayRay pounded the drum skins and slammed a high-hat cymbal with the primitive power of a caveman banging brontosaurus bones on a boulder, belting out a tribal solo as the leader of the bar’s Saturday night house rock band. Outside on the cracked […]

Swan Dive! Ch. 5: Boom!

June 15, 2022

One by one, about a hundred gulls appeared in the sky from the east, circling the paint-chipped dinghy that bobbed like a homemade fishing lure about 100 yards off the Clearwater Beach coast. Making worse noise than an English new wave band, the man duct-taped to the mast couldn’t get away from the mad cacophony […]

Swan Dive! Ch. 4: For the Birds

June 8, 2022

First Sam brushed the driftwood gently to remove sand and dirt. Then he softly blew on the wood from all angles to alert whatever unseen organisms might live on or in the wood, giving the tiniest specks of life a chance to move out or fly away. Then he soaked the driftwood in a pail […]

Swan Dive! Ch. 3: New Jersey Nightmare

June 1, 2022

Just like that, out of nowhere, Sam Bennett delivered to a stranger on the beach an impromptu ornithology lesson. “A gull can eat up to 20 percent of its body weight in food each day,” the shriveled sun-cured senior citizen said. “That’s a lot of french fries,” Marty Durkin said. “A group of gulls is […]

Armed and Dangerous: A Short Story

May 27, 2022

Every man, woman and child in the civic arena rose to their feet when little Sally Rumple took the podium. Dressed in a camouflage patterned sun dress, the freckled second grader wore blond pigtails and a sunny smile. “I can shoot the eyes out of a potato,” she said into the microphone in a Minnie […]

The Outlaw Steve Corbett ink splotch