from Randy Michael Signor’s story “Crossing Over”

[Excerpt]: Twenty-eight years does things so I wasn’t sure the pumped dude across the yard by the free weights was who I thought it was, dude standing there sizing up the equipment, flexing his bicepts, so I could see that little ripple all the way over where I was, leaning on a wall south of the ball court.

But then he shot a glance my way, not looking at me or nothing, just one of those quick turnaround looks, see who was watching what, and I knew: It was Joe.

Seeing him kickstarted the strangest shit. Kind of dude made you question things you thought you’d settled.

I was on the downhill part of a twenty-year hit, but hoped to get out in another five or six; this pop another career move gone haywire with the speed of a nightclub fire.

It was my second big fall. Fronted some bearer bonds that turned out I didn’t own. A setup from the get-go, run so slick I never gave it a thought and woke up one morning with a cell mate and an empty calendar.

The other one had been twenty-eight years back, for murder. Some story there… [Read the entire story on page 65.]

From the Press

…Two new story collections – Tennessee Jones’s Deliver me from Nowhere (Soft Skull Press) and Meeting Across the River: Stories Inspired by the Haunting Bruce Springsteen Song (Bloomsbury) …— serve mainly as reminders of Springsteen’s own superior skill as a storyteller….Meeting Across the River comprises 20 variations on a noirish monologue…”It’s what’s not in the lyric,” Martin J. Smith writes in a foreword, “rather than what is, that makes the song so intriguing…” —New York Times, July 2005

In a new anthology of the same title, 20 writers improvise on the lyric's spare tale about a petty criminal and his pathetic plot to score an illicit two grand…surprisingly inventive…pure noir.—San Francisco Chronicle, July 2005