M.C. Finch
Bio
North Carolina ➰ New York ➰ Atlanta. Author of Fiction. Working on several novels and improving my craft. Romance, family dynamics, LGBTQ+, and sweeping dramas are what I love most.
Writing Instagram: @m.c.finchwrites
Stories (13)
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Loneliness Comes in Threes
The Willard Washington 4, DC
By M.C. Finch 11 months ago in History
Fish in a Barrel. Runner-Up in The Moment That Changed Everything Challenge.
Friday November 22, 1963 Manhattan, New York, 1 p.m. Prime rib, asparagus and whipped potatoes, .5 cent beers and .15 cent Manhattans were the lunch special every Friday at Captain Cutler’s Lounge in Midtown. You could smell it as you turned from Fifth Avenue onto West Fifty-Sixth. It was warm, so the door to the lounge was propped open by a golden hoof of a door stop. Cigar smoke and plunky jazz wormed its way onto the street to mix with the low hanging clouds that blanketed the city.
By M.C. Finch 12 months ago in The Swamp
Wallowing in the Soft Year, 2024. First Place in Echoes of the Year’s Lessons Challenge.
I recently discovered the term “soft year.” Soft life, soft months, it is the act of shirking the day-to-day woes in an attempt to create a more leisurely, joyful existence for oneself. I’ve thought a great deal about the soft year. This was my thirtieth trip around the sun—hold the applause—one that I initially dreaded. Those gray hairs start showing in your beard and you inherently start adopting traits that remind you of your parents, like becoming easily annoyed in a coffee line or intaking too much news and having grumbling opinions about things. The more I’ve sat with the notion of a soft year the more I believe it is not merely the rejection of unpleasantness in hopes to create a cocoon for yourself, but merely that there are years where you must be soft with yourself.
By M.C. Finch about a year ago in Motivation
Santa Wears Italian Leather. Top Story - December 2024.
Christmas Eve, Manhattan NY, 1989 I believed myself a romantic as my brain twinged with the rumblings of a delightful buzz. Mother had forced us into crisp blazers, quaffed our hair, and hurried us to a candlelight sermon at the Presbyterian church on Madison Ave. I was in trouble. Alec and I felt riotous after lunch in midtown. He and I pillaged the kitchen for airplane bottles and swigs of cooking sherry we stuffed in our pockets before nudging each other out the door and into stiff-backed church pews.
By M.C. Finch about a year ago in Families
W-365—4-8-8-4
It rattled the house twice a day with a jarring clip that let you know its industrial usage was being forgotten. Once at noon, and once at the cusp of two in the morning. I heard the cuckoo of the time, and I shuddered awake as I felt the loose weight of a rocks glass fall from my hand onto a floor that was dated and scarred by the anxious scuffing of boots. I swallowed a gasp as I frantically considered the empty train car. It was paneled wood, tufted seats, and the windows were thick with a grime that assured you there was nothing to be seen flicking past outside.
By M.C. Finch 3 years ago in Fiction
The Demon of My Granny's Bible
Every secret I’ve ever learned that kept me awake at night and staring into the dark was learned at the hands of a red lettered book of god. I know not if it’s a familial lack of intelligence or rather a custom that was brought about by times of necessity that continued to plague the branches of our namesake tree, but I often wondered why a person would keep their most private secrets folded among the scriptures. At first, I concluded that it must be some sort of personal attempt at atonement of one’s sins, stuffing them like that in the passages that burst with red verse as a way to absolve them. I then realized that in this wild and thorned part of the world that there were two things most people carried with them at all times. A gun and a bible. In these parts before the invention of technological ways of keeping up with the turning world, there was only the bible. Dates, important births, etc. It was simply an unfortunate habit picked up by god-fearing people in wagons, I suppose.
By M.C. Finch 4 years ago in Fiction
Death Is Neither Quiet, Nor Unassuming
He should have written about stars, he thought. They always write about stars. Poets, philosophers, the average drunk in the pub; they have an enigmatic way of thrashing a star into a parable—a metaphor so profound it short-circuits your breathing and makes you feel as if you have never loved anything in any sort of way that mattered in your whole life. Nabokov, talking of rust and stardust. Nietzsche, of falling from the stars to meet here. McMillian, he would be remembered for hair dark as candy licorice and an ass as of Grecian clay…Grecian clay. He should have written about stars.
By M.C. Finch 4 years ago in Fiction
Long May They Rage
The gallery was that typical low-resolution hum of boring old bastards giving what they knew to be a critique of utmost importance. That their interpretation of any medium was the superior one and whoever was unlucky enough to have traipsed upon that banal semicircle was now forced to sup down tepid champagne and nod in a half-hearted agreement. You would never find Arthur Cranbrooke in any such semicircle.
By M.C. Finch 4 years ago in Fiction
Oh Captain, My Captain
It was hot in the flat graveyard as our fathers glided easily over the browning grass as they took the body of our beloved August to his final resting place. They had done it as a service to the rest of us, knowing that we wouldn’t have been able to endure it. Disposing of the dead had always upset me, and it wasn’t until a few months later that I came to learn they didn’t even bury that sleek bullet of a casket draped in ivy, magnolias, and marigolds. In fact, August hadn’t even been in it at all as we stood there sweating as Gus, high as a kite, leaned on it in despair in the viewing room. They had cremated him. After we left the gravesite, they buried a small urn of his ashes and took the rest home to spread them out across the water. You can’t imagine how much better I felt having learned that—that it wasn’t a trapped and wired and patched up August in that box.
By M.C. Finch 4 years ago in Fiction
All My Love
The act of receiving gifts was something that Mrs. Wisteria Bancroft was no stranger to. Anymore it was the only thing that she delighted in. The arrival of parcels and packages gave her a small glimmer of hope to, even for a moment, fill the aching void that had threatened to consume her over the last year of her life. Her husband wanted her to forget about that afternoon on the lake. He wanted her to forget Andreas Cauldwell once and for all, and for them to move forward from this place to have a marriage that was at least bearable for the both of them.
By M.C. Finch 4 years ago in Fiction
Wisteria in Decay
The club had been known as Dalloway Farms for the better half of a century. It was situated in a clearing of tall pines and thick oaks nestled against the banks of a pond that spread wide away from the property. In the summer it evoked warm stone and gentle breezes that rustled through the tassels adorning cream canvas umbrellas. There was the tinkle in the air of crystal and the murmur of voices that were just as cold and crisp as the champagne that chilled in ice buckets before them. In the winter, however, that chill was omnipresent. It burdened the thick, twisting boughs of the trees and the blades of grass withered beneath mounds of snow that threatened to dip over the rim of the tallest boot that trudged to the gargantuan front doors.
By M.C. Finch 5 years ago in Fiction
There's Cake on a Corner in Brooklyn . Second Place in SFS 2: Death By Chocolate Challenge.
I think that surely there are half a dozen bakeries if I were to leave my apartment and head out in any given direction. New York is like that. The moment you have an inkling or an inkling of an inkling of a craving, it is almost certain that you can remedy it with a brisk walk, or at worst a puttering little train ride into Manhattan. However, that morning as my eyes parted to streaming rays of sun blasting through my apartment, the only inkling or craving that consumed my body was to disappear.
By M.C. Finch 5 years ago in Fiction
