He is an old man, and on first inspection he seems like the kind of old man who would eat dog food out of a can because he can afford nothing better. His clothes are not synthetic. He wears a brown blazer with missing buttons….
John Sheppard
28 Articles
John Sheppard served four years in the United States Army as an Illustrator (MOS 81E). He was honorably discharged after Gulf War I. He went on to receive an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Florida, where he studied under Padgett Powell, Marjorie Sandor and Harry Crews. He has worked as a grill cook, web site designer, junk mail writer, small town newspaper editor and civil servant. He lives in Chicago.
He did not own much, nor did he care to. His life was what he thought suited him. He lived in a one-bedroom walk-up on the north side of Chicago, conveniently unclose to shopping, entertainment and transportation. He did not own a car. He did…
My mother and brother came up to Washington to visit me in the hospital where I was a guest of our government at Walter Reed. My leg, broken in a mess hall accident an hour after my plane landed in Saudi Arabia, was almost healed…
Uncle Sonny, my father’s brother, died in a horrible car crash shortly after he turned 50. He was driving home to Ohio from Houston. He tried to pass a logging truck on a hill in Arkansas and ran into another truck. Blamo. Glass from the…
This is me, John Sheppard, not some writerly pose. This is me talking, so listen up, take a knee. I have something to say directly to you, without the mediating booze called fiction. Twenty years ago today, on May 27, 1992, my little sister Nancy…
Avoid the occasion of sin, that is, all persons, places and objects usually leading to sin. Be temperate in the use of intoxicants. Abstain from them entirely, if harmful to your soul, your family or others. Be fearless in the performance of all your Christian…
I got up at 3 a.m., which I now refused to call ‘zero-three-hundred hours.’ I went downstairs and turned on the TV in the kitchen. A Laurel and Hardy movie was on, the one where they had to deliver a piano across a rope bridge…
Two years before I joined the Army, and two-and-a-half years before Chess had gone so obviously insane that my mother had no choice but to sign the commitment papers, my father took his three kids in the family truckster over to the Ringling Museum of…
In this excerpt from Alpha Mike Foxtrot (a novel from Paragraph Line Books), Joe Dugan, a soldier recently released from active duty as medically unfit, applies for a job at a retail store. First we walked to the back wall of the store, where a…
In this excerpt from Alpha Mike Foxtrot (a novel from Paragraph Line Books), Joe Dugan, a soldier recently released from active duty as medically unfit, settles in to life at a boarding house in a small Midwestern town. Hours lazily glided by. I stared out…
On my last visit home to Florida, on convalescent leave from Walter Reed, limping and wounds still seeping, I’d made the mistake of staying with my mother – she with the guilt rays emanating from her eye-sockets. Her guilt rays had doubled in power. She’d…
There was always something wrong with my twin brother, some little kernel of not-right. Chess knew it. And he knew that whatever was wrong with him didn’t apply to me. Being a twin is supposed to mean never being alone. We dressed alike, were crammed…
As a child, I was a typical, overfed, pasty and underexercised american with a lower-case a, with little interest in anything beyond the tip of my nose. The Army, with a capital A, remade me using its not-so-subtle methods. Standing in my new attic home,…