I write clear, AP-style content on deadline for businesses,  nonprofits. and individuals—including press releases, email newsletters, feature and profile articles, website copy, social media ad campaigns, proposals, logos, photo work, video editing, graohic design, and grant writing support. Every project starts with a brief discovery call and includes light fact-checking and two rounds of edits, with optional local media distribution.
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A short work of fiction

The Shoe

In Early 2006, 6 months into cleaning up the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the effort was getting some much-needed momentum.
Groups from all over Mississippi came to remove the wreckage and help rebuild what could be rebuilt.
The sand on Front Beach hissed under Mike Davis’ boots the way paper whispers when you turn a page.
He’d learned there were a thousand sounds to ruin the quiet tranquility—tarps snapping on roofless houses, hammers keeping time in church parking lots, the low hum of FEMA trailers in the evenings—but the beach sounded like breath.
Out past the waterline, the Mississippi Sound lay dull, lifeless, and the color of pewter. The stumps of old piers stuck up like a row of broken teeth facing Biloxi.
Where the Ocean Springs–Biloxi bridge had once arched like a necklace, now lay so many dominoes toppled by an insolent child. 

Mike had come down with a Baptist disaster relief crew from Yazoo County, jammed in a church van between rakes, shovels, chainsaws, and a blue ice chest that sweated all over the floor.
He was twenty-four, a criminal justice major at Ole Miss, following the path of his father’s career the way a boy steps in the footprints of a man walking ahead.
Six months later, and Katrina still felt like a person you could meet at the gas station who might stick a knife in your neck on a Friday night.
There were still spray-painted Xs on doors, a code that there had been death waiting inside.
Mattresses slumped against oak trees.
Casinos that used to float had been sucked out only to be slammed down on the beach, leaving scattered shards of neon, carpet, and poker chips.
Everywhere, you could see the line the water drew and dared you to cross again.

He was picking up trash on the beach when he saw it.
Not driftwood.
Not a crab trap or a rope of seaweed.
A shoe.
Small, half-buried, the strap stiff with salt—a girl’s sandal, yellow once, now the faded color of an old photograph or a jaundiced corpse.
There was a heart-shaped buckle near the ankle.
Size six, maybe, he thought.
He brushed sand off with his glove and stared at it until the shoe felt heavier than it had any right to be. 

In the lecture hall at Oxford, his criminology professor had drawn two columns on the whiteboard: modus operandi on one side, and signature on the other.
“The need to do,” the professor said. ”Versus the need to be seen doing.”

Some offenders take a trophy, others leave something behind, like a calling card, Mike remembered the professor saying.
“Profilers call that extra flourish a signature—the ritual that goes beyond what’s needed to commit the crime—and it often shows up as taunts, trophies, or staged scenes. BTK wrote taunting letters and arranged elements at his crime scenes to assert control. The Zodiac mailed ciphers and notes to newspapers, hinting at souvenirs taken from victims. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, paired his mailed explosives with manifestos meant to etch his ideology into the investigation,” the professor had said. “Son of Sam” left notes for police and press, feeding the fear he’d created. The Green River Killer was known to keep small items, like jewelry, and to revisit dump sites, a way to relive what he’d done. Whether it’s taking a token or leaving one behind—a ribbon, a photograph, even a single shoe—the point is the same: to be seen, remembered, and returned to.”
It wasn’t about the victim; it was about the killer telling a story only he could read. 

Mike stood with the sandal in his hand and felt like he was holding a serial killer’s calling card.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said to himself, and wasn’t sure if he believed it. 

The Thing in the water watched him the way a hawk watches a mouse in a field.
It had ridden the storm of late August into the coastline to feed on terror, hidden in the storm’s devastation It fed the way a starving animal will eat its young to survive.
Storm was only a word humans used to describe bad weather.
This was pure appetite with wind, hail, and rain wrapped around it.
It had tasted panic in the throats of a thousand-thousand, like salt on the rim of a glass.
It had surged through kitchens and bedrooms and sanctuaries, feeding until it felt drowsy, warm, and content, like a serpent with its meal still bulging in its middle.
It had slumbered in the water, digesting its meal until Mike's particular scent and flavors had roused it from whatever an alien god might dream about.
It was old and still tired; It dismissed Mike and had turned away from the coast, still full, ready to slide down the continental shelf and drift back to that cold black cradle the humans named the Mariana Trench without understanding how deep and far it went.
But courage has a flavor, and righteousness came with a fever pitch; that was irresistible to the Thing.
That taste, and heat had thinned in the centuries since It last pushed mountains under the oceans and made the planet hold its breath.
Mostly, It fed on fear, and humans served that up in heaping helpings.
But this boy’s fear had a husk to it, and under the husk there was the promise of a feast. 

Mike took the sandal to St. Paul’s United Methodist church, where a folding table had become a lost-and-found that could outfit a wedding party if you didn’t mind that nothing matched.
Holding up the shoe, he asked a volunteer in a neon vest if anyone had turned in the other one. “No” was all the overworked volunteer had said.
With no success there, Mike went to First Baptist church on Washington Avenue, where a pod of white trailers hummed like bees and children chalked hopscotch lines on the cracked sidewalk.
He asked a Jackson County deputy named Carter Long, who wrote “sandal—yellow—heart buckle” in a small book already damp from the day.

“Plenty of folks missing shoes,” Deputy Long said, squinting at the line of water against the shore. “Plenty of folks missing everything.”

On Government Street, the bottles in a reopened coffee shop clinked like luck, but no sandal, nor its owner, was there to be found.
On Porter Avenue, a woman named Miss Pauline Landry, who had turned eighty-two during the storm and then again the morning after, because time was different when your house was in your backyard, held the sandal and shook her head.
“Not mine,” she said, with a soft laugh that sounded more like sorrow than mirth. “Baby, I only wear sensible shoes.”

When Mike’s girlfriend Stephanie arrived—sunburned nose, ponytail high, backpack rattling with granola bars and a borrowed hammer—he felt the axis of his day tilt back to true.
Stephanie Ross, from Indianola, was a girl who wore sweaters big enough to be small tents and laughed with her eyes more than her mouth.
They had promised to save what was meant to be saved for the day they’d be wed, and that promise had never once left them feeling like something was missing.
When she hugged him, he knew that the world was a place that still held hope. 

They walked Front Beach together, the concrete promenade cracked and scalloped, the live oaks trying to lift their broken branches, as if in prayer.
He told her about the professor and the columns with two words.
Signature.
Modus operandi.
A shoe, like a whisper, only this time the whisperer was listening.
“It feels wrong to leave it in a box,” Mike said. “It feels wrong to just put it with the umbrellas,  cellphones, and single earrings.”
“So we’ll find its story,” Stephanie said. “Or we make its story’s ending kinder.” 

In the water, listening, wrapping Itself in its ink-black tentacles, turning Its blood-red eyes toward the beach, It reached into the young lover’s minds and began to play its symphony of misery, tapping out the tune on both their spines like a xylophone.
Jealousy is a small door that opens with ease.

It led the young couple down the beach to an electrician, tanned and easy, Chad Brooks took it upon himself to show Stephanie how to pry nails without splintering the plank.
The electrician stood behind her pressing into her backside as he gripped her hands in his. The pressure and closeness of this man stoked a blush on her face, the color of the shoe’s heart-shaped buckle.
The sight of this man touching Stephanie put a heat in Mike’s chest that had nothing to do with the sun. A quick, mean breath of venom was about to spill from his lips, but he swallowed it, the way his daddy taught him to swallow words you didn’t want to regret later.
Awkwardly stepping between them, he handed the electrician a cold bottle of water and said, “You do good work, man.”
But the door did not slam shut. The thing in the water felt Mike’s resistance and noted it, like a scientist observing an anomaly, but the Thing was much older than science.

Pride came next.

When a local reporter asked for a quote, the thing nudged Mike’s tongue toward a little sermon about service and sacrifice and doing what leaders do.
He heard himself and was repulsed by the words; he could also hear his father’s words in his head saying, ‘Son, a person’s worst day is not your best stage.’
He stopped, he reset, and for the first time, he thought about evil being unleashed here on the coast.
“We’re just trying to help,” he said. “The folks who live here are the tough ones.”

The entity in the water turned to greed next, and it was easy amidst all of the loss and fear.
The Thing’s mind ran up the beach and planted a rumor about a shipment of generators, which were as scarce as the storm’s mercy had been.
Mike watched faces harden as the lines doubled, then tripled.
He saw desperate people getting close to ugly behavior.
He stepped into the space where anger likes to oil over and started counting off loud and slow, working the list the way his father worked a car crash scene—fair, visible, and calm.
He gave the last generator to a woman holding an infant, and if the truth be told, it bothered his thinking for an hour that he hadn’t kept it aside for an elderly couple he’d promised to help.
He felt ashamed as he watched the couple walk away in despair, but he had to let it go; misery was the new normal here, he thought. 

Envy.
Gluttony.
Lust.
Wrath.
Sloth.

The Thing in the water tried them like keys, listening for the soft clicks in the lock's tumblers.
Lust it dressed in Stephanie’s soft, albeit sweaty face, not like a shameful sin, but like a wholesome reward offered at the wrong time. She and Mike took a walk at dusk and found the porch of a house that was only a porch, with a set of steps leading to nowhere.
They sat close.
Somewhere, a radio played an old Gospel song that the wind, and the Thing bent and twisted into a desperate lover’s lustful dirge.
They kissed with the care you’d use handling delicate porcelain that you cherished.
But, something overtook Stephanie; she kissed harder and darted her tongue into Mike’s mouth. He responded, pulling her close, she in turn laid her hand on the front of his sandy jeans and squeezed the throbbing member inside. Mike gasped with the unexpected pressure. “Stephanie, what are you doing?” he gushed, reluctantly removing her hand. “We can’t do this, we promised to wait until we’re married.”
Spurned by Mike but spurred on by the Thing’s influence, she ran one hand down her pants and began slowly masturbating, the other hand found a nipple beneath her shirt and began to squeeze.
“Come on Mike, no one will see us,” she moaned. “I want you inside me so bad, I’ll do anything you tell me to.”
Mike felt the urge, felt the temptation, felt the Thing’s influence, although he didn’t know what it was.
“Lord, give me the strength to resist this temptation and open Stephanie’s eyes to the enemy in her midst,” He prayed. “In your name and in the name of Jesus Christ I pray, amen.”
The Thing recoiled from their minds; it had been a very long time since it had heard that name.
The couple stopped because they believed they were stronger than the present moment, completely unaware of the evil that was driven out by evoking the name of Jesus Christ
The water hissed with an irritation that sounded exactly like a wave dragging back over shells.
The Thing remembered the joy it felt when It almost claimed Jesus’ disciples on the Sea of Galilee.
But here came Jesus walking on the very substance that the Thing used to instill terror in the human heart and mind. The laughter It had issued–when Peter had lost faith in the young Charlatan and nearly fell into the Thing’s clutches–sounded like roaring thunder.  

They chased the shoe’s story because any story was better than the devastation and misery they were surrounded by.
At a distribution point on Hanley Road, a teenage girl with a Saints cap said she used to have sandals like that and grinned, all braces and bravado, then told them that her’s were glitter-blue and size eight.
At St. Alphonsus, an older man said his granddaughter had worn yellow sandals the summer before but that she’d outgrown everything by August, the way kids do, and that the family was living with cousins in Pascagoula now.
At the edge of Davis Bayou, where the Gulf Islands National Seashore still smelled like marsh and sun-warmed creosote, a volunteer named Inez Morales from Arizona lifted the sandal, turned it over, and said, “I think this one came a long way,” in the tone people use when they mean more than miles.

That night, the Thing came closer and spoke in the voice most humans give to their own doubts.
It showed Mike every broken thing It had ever made.
It showed him an ark pounded by rain, and the space between breaths when you wonder if there will be another.
It showed Mike how small a man looked to a god.
It did not say the word flood, because humans said it all to often for the Thing.
It showed him tsunamis, Monsoons, Hurricanes, and floods throughout history.
In every vision, Mike could almost make out the blurred blackened figure riding the water inland.
It did not say the word Hell, because humans have built their own and then pretended not to know the architect.
“I am old,” It said. “Older than your stories by which you make yourselves feel brave. Older than the idea of a story.” 

“You have no power over me,” Mike said, standing at the edge of the high tide mark. He had no recollection of ever leaving the fellowship hall where he and the cleanup crew had been sleeping. The yellow sandal was clutched in his hand so tightly that blood dripped from his palm. “You’re just something I don’t even need to name.”
He had learned from his father that sometimes naming a thing gives it ground it doesn’t deserve.
He had learned from Stephanie that love and God Almighty would let you stand against evil and not let fear overrule you. 

It did not like that the human had called it “just,” the way tyrants do not like to be compared to ordinary men.
It rose from the water and stared Mike directly in the eyes.
Standing before Mike, the Thing rose 20 feet from the water. Its jet-black body had octopus-like tenticles where its arms should be, and those fiery red eyes pinned Mike in place. He could feel fear blooming in his chest. The creature, tasting Mike’s fear, smiled.
The smile was worse than anything Mike had seen of the creature.
The teeth were sharp, uneven, and of various sizes, but the thing that scared Mike the most was what was stuck between them.
Arms, legs, and here and there parts of houses, but the worst thing Mike saw in the Thing’s mouth was a baby.
The infant must have drowned because it was blue, but its eyes were open, and Mike felt like it was staring at him, as if accusing him of not being able to save it.
To add to Mike’s fear, the way a chef will add spices to a dish, the Thing pried open the skin of the Gulf and showed Mike, just for an instant, a fiery place inhabited by creatures like Itself.
The glimpse Mike got of the other place was far deeper than this part of the waterfront could possibly be.
It had looked like a portal Mike would later tell Stephanie.
As the water fell back in place, the reflection of the moon spun and churned in the water like the baby’s accusing eye.
Somewhere, far off, a barge horn groaned.
“Take me,” it said, with a voice like a current dragging a net. “Take me into yourself, let me fill your soul, this is how men become legends, this is how men go insane.”

Mike pictured his father in uniform outside a wreck on Highway 49, taking statements without letting the gore become the story.
He pictured himself at a desk years from now, working cases that would try to teach him the wrong lesson about what people were.
He pictured Stephanie asleep on a church nursery cot, mouth open, utterly unafraid, because she trusted the faithfulness of God.
Mike didn’t pray fancy.
“Help,” he said, which is the oldest prayer and the truest.

Standing atop the water, maybe 30 feet from shore, It was bold and confident, ready to strike like the serpent that the bible had depicted it as.
But instead, lightning flashed from the sky, finding its target in the Thing's chest.
Like an old animal deciding not to show its teeth, It withered and sank into the water, still glaring at Mike.
He set the sandal down at the waterline.
The sea nosed it, then left it alone, as if confused.
“Signature,” Mike said quietly, and then he said, “No, this isn’t your story.”

In the days that followed, he and Stephanie started pinning index cards to a corkboard inside the church—names, descriptions, small items found.
They added photos taken with disposable cameras and scribbled arrows and question marks.
A teen boy named Tyrel from Biloxi snapped a picture of the sandal and printed flyers that read FOUND—YELLOW SANDAL—HEART BUCKLE—CALL ST. PAUL’S.
Two weeks later, a call came not from a girl but from a woman in Gautier who had lost a sister to the storm. Her sister had worn a pair like that to a family beach day the summer before.
They met her on a Saturday on the sand.
She held the shoe and cried the kind of tears that mend instead of break.
“It may not be hers,” she said, “but it feels like something of ours came back.”

The Thing had not stopped watching, but it knew Mike was not on the menu anymore.
It had wanted to return to its deep, full, and unchallenged in its self-regard.
Now It delayed, drifting in the Sound, tasting the flavor of a different kind of fear—fear that loves a thing enough to face it.
It sifted old memories the way whales sift krill: mountains shrugging off forests under a sky that would not stop weeping, a box of pitch and hope rising on a brown plain, a family listening to animals breathe.
Men had learned to build and had learned to sing and had learned to sell their singing to one another.
They had grown clever with their sins.
The Thing had grown accustomed to easy meals.

It reached again for jealousy, because jealousy is reliable.
It showed Stephanie a Facebook post on a shelter laptop—Mike tagged with a girl from the coffee shop, both of them laughing over a tray of donuts they were not supposed to keep for themselves.
It let the caption read, “My hero,” because pride looks good in public.
Stephanie felt the sting, then felt the next thing, which was her certainty about Mike.
She shut the computer and went to find him and said, “You’re terrible at pictures,” and kissed his cheek in the open, which is its own kind of courage here.

The Thing rolled its long body and felt something like age.
It did not understand keeping.
It did not understand vows.
It understood hunger and the end of hunger.
It understood, dimly, that this boy and this girl were stubborn in a way that did not chew through easily. 

On their last day, Mike walked out onto the wrecked line of the old pier and stood at the last safe plank.
Interstate 10 hummed far inland, trucks moving like beetles across a silver thread, but the beach ran with Highway 90, a ribbon close enough to smell like hot rubber and salt.
Seagulls argued professional nonsense.
He held the sandal once more and took a pen from his pocket.
Inside the strap, he wrote, with tiny block letters, a phone number and a name: ST. PAUL’S—FOUND.
He cocked his arm back to throw it into the water, but at the last second thought better of it and returned it to his pocket.
Later on his way back to the Church, he wedged the sandal high in a live oak that had learned to lean toward the water without falling in.
He tied it there with fishing line so the storms to come would have to work to take it.

Stephanie threaded her fingers through his. “Maybe the other shoe is in Texas,” she said.
“Or maybe it’s in a ditch in Bay St. Louis.” Mike said, “Maybe it never existed, and this is how God leaves breadcrumbs.”

They stood for a while in the ordinary holiness of a wind that smells like salt. 

Out beyond Cat Island and Ship Island, the water turned its face toward the deep.
It slid over the shelf and let the cold take its bones.
Before it went, it tasted again the air above Ocean Springs and felt, not fullness, but something it did not have a word for.
It would leave the coast to the hammerers and the hymn-singers and the boys who knew how to step back from a line a lesser man would cross just to see if he could.
It did not forgive because forgiveness is a word that belongs on land.
It did not repent because repentance is a turning, and It was always turning.
It simply went, carrying the memory of a yellow sandal and a boy who would not make fear the center of his story.

Months later, at a fall festival behind St. Alphonsus, a little girl tugged at a string in a live oak, and the shoe came down like a prize.
The girl had come up from the water unseen, and a shadow that somehow looked alive had followed her up.
The girl looked at the sandal with fiery red eyes and smiled her horrible smile.
Something to remember Katrina by, she thought. 

Mike and Stephanie drove north on 49 toward the Delta, past fields that turned bronze in the low light.
They did not talk about evil as a creature with teeth.
They talked about nails and lists and the next trip down, because you only ever fix the world one hammer swing at a time.
Somewhere between Yazoo City and home, she fell asleep with her head against the window.
Mike kept the cruise control steady and watched the road unspool.
He thought about signatures and what they mean. He thought about how to leave his own, not as a calling card, but as a promise.
He thought of the ocean, and what was in it—infinite, old, and somehow annoyed—and he smiled into the dark, and silently thanked God. 

If you scrolled all the way down here, thank you. Here is an Easter egg for you. These short videos are from my early work as an activist in Kentucky and Ohio. I was teaching myself Adobe After Effects and animation while working a full-time job. So, try not to judge this early work or my life choices too harshly; it was a long time ago, in a galaxy about 900 miles away...

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