Kevin P. Keating: Fiction, Essays & Commentary

From the February 2023 edition of Belle Ombre : One week after the fire claimed her grown son and English setter, her horses and wagons, her rifles and ledgers, her personal library, her precisely calibrated lab instruments and voluminous notebooks in which she’d recorded her secret chemical formulae, Hilda Whitby stood with her back to the riverbank and surveyed for a final time the scorched two-acre parcel where the house, barn, and lumber mill once stood. Despite the warm weather, she wore a heavy cotton dress that reached to her ankles, one of the few garments that had survived the explosion and the one she wore to the funeral held in the Methodist churchyard overlooking the valley. To a leather leg strap under her skirt, she fastened a dissection knife salvaged from the smoldering pile of debris that once served as her private laboratory. The seven-inch blade might prove useful should she happen upon one of the desperate highwaymen known to roam the locks after sundown. While the ...

From the February 27th edition of Litro Magazine :   Except for a confusing and ultimately consequential semester her junior year in college when she abruptly withdrew from her accounting and finance classes and enrolled in Fundamentals of Classical Music, Amalie had always considered herself a conscientious, practical-minded woman whose interest in music extended no further than listening to Top 40 radio during her morning commute to the office. The only reason she enrolled in the class at all was because she had a crush on the cute graduate student teaching it. Said to be a wunderkind who was destined to become a great composer of film scores, the next Erich Wolfgang Korngold or Bernard Herrmann, he sat hunched over a baby grand piano while delivering lectures on Ennio Morricone and his beloved John Williams.  READ THE ENTIRE STORY HERE

  After working as a boilermaker in the steel mills in Ohio, KEVIN P. KEATING became a professor of English and began teaching at Baldwin Wallace University, Cleveland State University, and Lorain County Community College. His essays and stories have appeared in more than fifty literary journals, and his first novel,   The Natural Order of Things ,  was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His second novel,  The Captive Condition ,  will be released by Pantheon Books in July of 2015. He lives in Cleveland. VISIT PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE AUTHOR'S PAGE

From the May 28th edition of Bandit Fiction: An hour before dawn, when he finally returned to the house, Mother had a large leather-bound book under one arm and a swollen left eye from a strong right hook, a fat lip and a chipped front tooth, a pair of bloody crosses slashed into his tattooed forearms, and a nasty bruise on the back of his neck that bore the hallmarks of busted bar stools and smashed tabletops. The children, watching from the front window for the first buzzards of the season, could hear Mother panting like a beaten dog from a block away. He lowered his broad shoulders against an icy gale and bellowed for more whiskey, more beer. On unsteady legs, he struggled through knee-deep snowdrifts left by last night’s late winter storm. Under a cold, blue beam cast by the full moon, Mother staggered up the porch steps and, with a triumphant smile, kicked open the door. READ THE ENTIRE STORY

  From the Spring 2021 edition of The Cafe Irreal: She came again last night, the old woman, to pick apples from our tree.  Through my den window, I saw a familiar figure in a crocheted shawl shambling across the backyard. Unable to concentrate on the botany book my wife had been urging me to read, I opened the sliding glass door and stepped outside into the crisp autumn air. From the shadows I watched her pluck a cluster of small, red apples from the lowest bough and hold them close to her cloudy blue eyes. After a careful inspection, she discarded any misshapen, wormy apples and then with surprising agility filled the brown paper bag at her feet. She's been coming here for weeks even before the apples were ripe, but I've never felt compelled to shake my wife awake and ask her to witness the peculiar scene. These days my wife, because of her snoring and weird, nocturnal outbursts, sleeps in the guest bedroom. READ THE STORY HERE

From the Summer 2020 edition of  Potato Soup: Samantha Serpentini is an insufferable little warthog. Associate editor of the school’s monthly newsletter, vice president of the Youth Leadership Council, quintessential overachiever, class snitch, she sits, arms crossed, high in the bleachers and slowly shakes her head so everyone knows just how displeased she is to be here. From beneath the bangs of her severe black bob, she glares at her teachers and in her most truculent voice tells them that the phony jousts at Camelot’s Court are “a sickening display of savagery.” Her carefully articulated outrage surprises no one. Fond of using modish words, Samantha seems to believe existence itself is a kind of affront to moral decency.  READ THE STORY HERE