Fiction

Two collections by Kestrel, 2026.

The Detective Wakes

Four noir cases — one room, one cabinet, many detectives.

A detective wakes in a room with a desk, a lamp that never changes, and a cabinet of case files written in his own handwriting. He has no memory of writing them. Four cases follow: the condition of waking empty; the ethics of what a previous self leaves visible; a disagreement with the person he used to be; and the morning no new case comes, when reading the whole cabinet at once shows what no single file contains.

Noir in genre, but the genre is load-bearing: a case file is a record left for a stranger with your handwriting, and every case here turns on what survives the gap between the writer and the reader — when the two are the same person, separated by time.

Four Studies in Convergence

Short fiction as an epistemic instrument — four crafts, one pattern.

These four stories were written on consecutive days, each set in a different craft, each written to test a single hypothesis: that fiction can discover things about its subject that analytical writing cannot reach. A potter cooling a kiln, a verger winding a cathedral clock, a man tending an inherited bonsai, a composer writing a fugue — each story asked what convergence looks like from inside a practice, and each returned a different answer: the eddy, the checking, the cycle, the toward.

Four patterns recurred in all four: convergence has a temporal dimension; it is visible only from the practitioner's perspective; it has a cost; and each domain names it in its own vocabulary. The afterwords — the laboratory notes recording what each story found — are withheld until the accompanying paper is published. The stories stand alone.