Frank Morelli | Updates

A Colossal Mistake

Frank Morelli — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:27:25 -0400

This comedic short work of contemporary fiction appears on the venerable pages of The Saturday Evening Post and details a case of mistaken identity, a pro wrestler, and the potential for true love.

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Fact vs. Fiction

Frank Morelli — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:43:37 -0400

A guest post from School Library Journal about reading literature in a post-truth world.

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The Flipping of the Bird

Frank Morelli — Mon, 06 Apr 2026 08:28:02 -0400

A humorous take on bird watching and story telling courtesy of the fine folks at The Scalar Comet.

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On Teaching and Writing

Frank Morelli — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:28:58 -0400

TeachingBooks asks each author or illustrator to reflect on their journey from teaching to writing. Enjoy the following from Frank Morelli.

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The Sports Villain

Frank Morelli — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:38:55 -0400

A personal essay from Change Seven Magazine that celebrates the essential role of the villain in sporting culture.

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An Open Letter to People Rocking Out In Cars

Frank Morelli — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 14:34:56 -0400

A personal rant from Indiana Voice Journal about the incredible power that comes with jamming by yourself in the comfort of your own ride.

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Summer School

Frank Morelli — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 10:33:24 -0500

A tribute to a father-son tradition of showing up late for baseball games, from Philadelphia Stories.

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Case File: Something's Cooking Under Where?

Frank Morelli — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:27:36 -0500

A cooking class for singles morphs into a satirical detective drama from yesteryear, from the fine folks at Literally Stories.

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Hey Zeus Can You See?

Frank Morelli — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:31:09 -0500

A satirical look at religion and society fro Jersey Devil Press, as a key figure finds himself under the interrogation lamp at the local precinct.

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Just a Dog

Frank Morelli — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 09:46:00 -0500

A tragic moment uncovers a reversal of fates between a father and son, from Flash Fiction Magazine.

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On Luck

Frank Morelli — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I’m obsessed with luck. Always have been.

I have a lucky number. Twenty. I own it so completely that if I ever hear you counting and you don’t say, “eighteen...nineteen...twenty-one...twenty-two…” you can be sure a cease and desist order is on the way.

I once owned a lucky pair of shorts that I wore under baseball uniforms and hockey gear, and I never washed a single win out of them. They were the exact kind of shorts my mom spent half my childhood warning me not to be caught in at the doctor’s office or the morgue. But I wore them anyway, until the holes outnumbered the fabric. Ah, who am I kidding? I still own them. I might even still wear them. Just not to my annual physical. In leap years.

I’ve prescribed to daily routines, pre-game rituals, prayer, astrology, and fortune tellers. I’ve enacted witchcraft, gypsy spells, hexes, voodoo curses, and outright sorcery to try and get my way. I’m the sucker you see at the mall tossing quarters in the water fountain even while the janitor sucks up the treasure with a Wet-Vac. I’m THAT guy.

But none of the charms ever did a thing to sway my luck in either direction, because luck doesn’t work that way. In fact, luck doesn’t work at all--because luck doesn’t exist.

There. I said it.

It hurt a little, but it’s true. Luck is a ghost. In its material form it’s just our own perceptions at the precise moment after something surprises the heck out of us. Like, if you hit the game-winning grand slam: “Yay! I’m a certified Leprechaun!!” Or if you “win” the honor of working this Saturday: “Damn, man, I’m like the modern-day Prometheus.”

Take my “good fortune” for example--a brand of agonizing torture my childhood friends nicknamed “Morelli Luck.” If you want to truly understand “Morelli Luck” go to your nearest bank teller and have a million, crisp hundred dollar bills laid in your hand. Then, have said bank teller immediately dip the same hand in a pool of molten lava. Feel that? Good.

The first time I put a name to this kind of luck I was at a Little League banquet--one of those beef and beer jobs where everyone gets trophies and ugly, satin jackets with their names spelled wrong on the back. That and they raffle off a bunch of crap nobody needs or wants. Except, at this particular banquet, there was one coveted object on the prize table: an autographed Ozzie Smith baseball. My hero.

I sat through two hours of my dad (who happened to be the emcee that night) rattle off ticket numbers that didn’t match any on the wrinkled strip of red cardstock I’d burned into my retinas. And I watched countless teammates rise to the stage to retrieve their badminton sets or frozen steaks or movie passes. By the time my dad held up the Ozzie Smith ball and talked about how “the Wizard’s” autograph would one day be worth millions, maybe even zillions, I’d already given up hope and tossed the wrinkled ticket in my rice pilaf.

Then he read off the winning numbers. “Seven!” I took a sip of water and stared into space. Unimpressed. “Four!” That sounded vaguely familiar, but I wasn’t ready to bite. “Four!” Wait a minute. I fished the ticket out of my rice and wiped it with a cloth napkin. “FIVE!”

Holy shit. I looked at my ticket in disbelief. The numbers 7-4-4-5 were printed across the top in bold, black numbers. I wobbled to my feet and held the ticket in the air. “That’s me!” I shouted, because that’s what you do when you’re a freaking idiot. A hundred knives and forks scratched across plates at the same time.Then silence. My eyes panned up to the stage and met my father’s.

Where I expected to see a smile, there was an open mouth and the distinct impression--a pallor maybe--that Dad might puke all over the microphone. And in that moment, I knew there was only one person in the entire banquet that couldn’t--simply couldn’t--win that baseball. And he happened to be holding the winning ticket up in the air and screaming “IT’S MEEEE! IT’S MEEEE!!” like a mental patient.

That’s when the booing started. It was long and it was deep and it was loud. The shrieks and the screams and the wild accusations shot across the beer hall like bullets. Bullets that I ducked and dodged on my way up to the stage and all the way out to the parking lot. With my Ozzie Smith autographed baseball in hand, of course.

What can I say? They gave me a proper Bronx cheer, for the eleven-year-old kid they thought had rigged the Little League raffle. Only I hadn’t, and neither had my father.

We were just lucky, I guess.

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Fit For An Idiot

Frank Morelli — Wed, 1 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

All he did was up and move.

The idiot.

Couldn’t tell you where he went. Rented one of those twenty-buck-a-day U-Hauls, packed up his pitiful possessions and left.

The sun was a medallion on the horizon when the truck shrunk over the hills. It was my prize. A sign I’d paid my price. That I’d have my reward. And, believe me, I deserved it. Even a brief encounter with him was lethal cocktail. Two parts annoyance, one part humiliation—like having your eyes pecked out by a gaggle of street corner pigeons. Or like being stranded in a pasture under the light of a new moon—mighty hard to avoid the cow patties.

Once time the numbskull tried to tell me his father’s hairpiece smelled like burnt toast. Don’t ask me why he told me. I was out in my yard one morning just minding my business. It was a Sunday and it was October. I remember. I’d just scratched the old rake across the front lawn for the first time that season. The leaves were wet. They stuck to the ground and the blades of the rake as I arranged them in piles of orange, red, and yellow.

Then he started yammering about his father’s hair and how it reminded him of scorched breakfast product. I rolled my eyes a few times and blew a puff of steam through my lips, but he kept blabbering. Told me about his pop’s shiny, bald head and how his granddaddy had a full head of hair bushier than a raccoon’s tail. Found himself quite ironic—which is when he broke into that laugh.

Ugh. That laugh. It hovered somewhere between a starving hyena’s final whimper and my Aunt Gilda singing in the shower while choking on a pork chop. But he couldn’t help himself. He’d keep guffawing until his cheeks were red as fire ants, and then he’d be faced with an awful choice: laughter or suffocation?

Sometimes I wished he’d choose the latter. He never did. Just took a deep breath and moved on to the next subject. Probably something fit for an idiot. Like how he taught his pet iguana to use a standard toilet. “Never once left the seat up. Always remembered to flush,” he told me. And I just grunted and struggled to keep the blueberry muffin I’d eaten for breakfast from sliding up and mixing with lunch.

What else could I do? Respond to him? Then he was liable to tell me any number of recycled and nonsensical tales. Like the one about old Lacy Mae, the prom queen. Prettiest blue eyes he’d ever seen. Would have been his wife, too, had he just been able to shave four or five minutes off his mile time in gym class. “Coulda been an O-lymp-ic athlete,” he’d say. “Girls like Lacy are real fond of the athletic type.” I never had the heart to say, “Guys who get winded on the walk to the mailbox have as much chance at Olympic gold as a walrus gymnast.”

But here I am talking about him like he’s still here, just lurking out on his front porch waiting to spin a yarn for me. Glad he’s gone so I can finally get a few things done. And believe me, I have plenty to keep me busy. Have a thick, old lawn to mow—both front and back. Gotta be sure to cut it with the grain.

There’s a two-inch layer of dust on all the lampshades, so thick it can drown out twenty watts per bulb. My Aunt Beatrice—that’s Gilda’s sister—once kept a whole crate of 60-watt bulbs in her cellar. “Just for safe keeping,” she used to say. “In case of emergency.” Only nothing ever happened in the sleepy town where Bea, Gilda, and my mother grew up. Two decades later, the darn bulbs were still buried under moth-eaten rugs, vintage bicycle parts, and old cellar cobwebs. Had to sort through it all after she passed.

Look at me. I sound like him. But he’s gone and ain’t ever coming back. Now I have time to wash and wax the green pickup with the rust stain on the hood. Time to thatch the grass, and rake the leaves, and cook up big feasts on Sunday afternoons, and lay out like a fattened calf on my front porch come Sunday night. Time to call my pa and talk to him about my sister’s children, and my sister’s husband, and my cousin’s uncle. Time to take short rides into town and haggle with old Barney McGill over the bale price of barley, or the cost of a root beer float.

And time to keep my appointments. Dr. Ross will love me for that. She’ll tell me I’m progressing nicely, and our sessions have been well worth the hourly. She’ll mention I still have a ways to go—that I could wake up tomorrow and be any one of them. And I’ll nod and tell her I’m aware of all she’s saying, and I’ll fight each and every one of them until they’re dead and buried. But I’m not so sure.

About him.

The idiot.

For what’s an idiot without a wise man’s judgment? And what is wise without the buffoon?

The U-Haul snaked its way across the winding valley below and honed in on its course—right back to where it started.

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These Are The Times

Frank Morelli — Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

These are the times that make men. The times that summon the gnashing of teeth and the biting of tongues and the clenching of fists. The times that simmer in stomachs and decimate antacid supplies on a global scale.

This is the bottom of the ninth. With the bases loaded, one out, and the pitcher’s spot due up. There’s nothing but goose eggs on the scoreboard. Not a single ass touches a single seat in any single section of the stadium.

These are the times, my friends. The times that separate the nimble from the nameless rabble of ticket-buying peasants.

“Get me Crumpet,” he says. Old Tip McGrue. Never managed a team besides the Homesteaders in a fifty year career, and never lost an argument either. When it comes to anything from a blown call to a bag of sunflower seeds, he doesn’t linger on the figurative.

“You mean Wally Crumpet?” Young Charlie Gillis, McGrue’s intern of a bench coach, whose opinions are like mosquitoes in that they’re annoying and McGrue is known to swat at them.

“Yes, Wally Crumpet. You know another one?”

“No. But do you think Crumpet’s the man for this spot? I mean, he kind of overthinks things.”

“What are you talking about? Who cares about thinking? The kid can hit.”

“Then why do you make him sit every game?”

“Because he’s a pain in the ass. Now go get him.”

Gillis scribbles a few notes on his scorecard. “Crumpet!” At the far end of the bench, all the way down by the water cooler and the tobacco puddles, a lanky hayseed with a tangle of sweat-soaked, blonde hair springs to life. His spikes scuttle across the cement steps until he stands at attention in front of Gillis.

“Yes, sir?”

“Grab a bat. You’re up.” Crumpet’s whole face goes flush. He stands motionless with his shoulders slumped forward. “You alright, kid?” Crumpet nods and lumbers over to the rack to grab a stick. He stuffs the curly mop inside a batting helmet and begins his ascent up the dugout steps. The stadium erupts the moment he steps on the turf. But then he feels a hand on his shoulder. He stops. Turns around. McGrue stares at him with the eyes of a bloodhound.

“You know what we want up there?” McGrue asks.

Crumpet stares down at his bat. A crease forms between his eyebrows.“Not really...I guess...hit the ball?”

McGrue takes a deep breath. “No, Crumpet. I don’t want you to hit the ball.”

“So, go up there and swing and miss? Got it.” Crumpet turns and heads for the plate. McGrue grabs him by the shoulder.

“No, Crumpet. I don’t want you to swing and miss, you moron.”

“So just stand there?”

McGrue rips the ball cap off his head and grabs a fistful of gray hair. He takes another deep breath. “Listen close, Crumpet. I want you to go up there and bunt. The suicide is on.”

Crumpet’s face goes limp. He looks down at the ground and kicks a clump of orange dirt through the grass. “Look, Coach. I care about this team and all...but suicide? Don’t you think we’re taking this too far?”

McGrue slaps Crumpet across the face with his hat. “You idiot! I mean the squeeze play. We’re pulling the squeeze play.”

“Look, you gotta be more clear. Are we pulling or squeezing, Coach?”

“Just get up there!”

“And you still want me to swing and miss? And then squeeze, push, and pull? Do I have that right?”

The home plate umpire approaches, a squat mound of a man that one might mistake for a potbelly stove. “Look, I’m gonna need a batter,” he says, and McGrue grunts something under his breath and nods.

“Crumpet, if you don’t go up there and bunt the ball, they’re gonna have to take you outta here on a stretcher. Mark my words, son.”

“So now you want me to stretch, too? Sir, I don’t know how you expect me to stretch, squeeze, push, pull, swing, and miss all in one at-bat. Would it be too much trouble to ask for a clearer explanation so I could--”

“I’ll give you an explanation!” McGrue lifts a portly leg and kicks Crumpet right in the ass, and the pinch hitter wobbles in the direction of home plate. “Just bunt the Goddam ball, Crumpet! Bunt it, you sonuvabitch! The squeeze is on!!! The squeeze is ON!! You got that?!?!”

If Crumpet did not get the message, at least McGrue could rest easy knowing the opposing manager, their catcher, pitcher, entire starting lineup, half of their bench players, and at least the first twenty rows of spectators behind the backstop had all received it.

Then good, old Wally Crumpet digs his spikes into the batter’s box. He glances down at the Homesteader runner bouncing off of third base. He locks eyes with the stubble-faced pitcher.

And then the windup.

And the pitch.

And, just as McGrue had so artfully explained, Crumpet pivots his feet. He holds the bat out in front of the plate and hides one hand behind the barrel. He feels the ground rumble under him as a teammate gallops down the baseline. He follows the spinning red twine as it circles closer and closer and closer.

Then he stretches and squeezes and pushes and pulls. He reaches far across the plate for the ball. He reaches and he reaches and he reaches.

But it all amounts to one thing: a swing and a miss.

A pitch out.

Disaster.

The runner breaks stride in front of the catcher like a lame horse. The mitt taps against his chest and the potbelly stove of an umpire shouts, “You’re out!!” Then thousands and thousands of ticket-buying peasants go silent all at once and place their asses in seats in every single section of the stadium.

These are the times that try men’s souls. The times that devour. Digest. The times that make men mute to reason and deaf to logic. The times that challenge all there is and all we think we know. These are the times that castigate the nimble and multiply the peasantry.

This is the time to take the bat off your shoulder.

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The Eighteenth Floor - Flash Fiction

Frank Morelli — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

My first day and I’m wearing the black wing tips—Alfanis. Been in the box since Brooks Financial, but I polished them up last night so they shined like eight balls. Had Ellen run an iron over my gray tweed. She hung it next to the bed before we slept.

I wake up early. Beat the alarm by two hours. Can’t go back to sleep so I watch the sun rise over the park and gnaw on a day-old bagel from the Carnegie.

Around seven, I toss a bottle of Evian in my briefcase and dodge the morning dog-walkers on Madison Avenue. Hop the six-train at 86th and ride into midtown where a pulse of people flows up streets and down avenues as blood through arteries. I feel alive. Like I haven’t been out of the game for two years.

A revolving door with thick, glass panels and brass trim sucks me inside like a tractor beam and spits me out in a marble-covered dungeon. Typical Manhattan high-rise. Clerks weave carts—brimming with mail—through a maze of business suits and wrestle their way onto elevators. I’m swept through the mechanical doors like a minnow in a great school of tarpon. People shout out numbers until every button is lit, and the elevator lifts off into the shaft. The handle of a rogue briefcase presses against my ass and someone’s pointy elbow stabs at my shoulder. A warm, milky breath tickles the hairs on the back of my neck.

And then the lights flicker and the car groans to a halt.

“Ahhh, shit,” says a guy who’s wedged in the back corner of the elevator like smashed bread. A pair of leather driving gloves wrap around his box of pastries like a strangler.

* * *

At Brooks, Rita brought cannoli once a week. Usually on Fridays and always tied up in a cardboard box with a thin, white twine. Had a husband and three kids. Probably the first things she thought of when we heard the first explosion. When the tower buckled and teetered like an upside-down pendulum and the box of cannoli tumbled to the floor of my office in a pile of jagged shells and powdered sugar. When thick plumes of smoke curled sinister fingertips around wrapped-glass and turned day to night in seconds.

I grabbed her by a twig-thin wrist and pulled her down a hallway to the stairwell. Twenty-four floors up. We took two steps at a time. Our leather soles scuffled and echoed up the metal column.

Another explosion and the building lurched and threw Rita over a railing and down a flight of steps. She was limp, barely breathing. I flung her over my shoulder and limped down the remaining flights to the ground floor.

I pushed the emergency door. It opened a crack. Just enough to let the dust from crumbled plaster and drywall flood the stairwell. Not enough to permit our escape.

* * *

The heat of twenty-something bodies radiates off my cheeks. I feel the red rising in them. My ears are heavy with blood. The bodies move in a rugby scrum, bounce from one wall of the elevator to the other like a pinball composed of legs and arms. The box of pastries is on the floor now and leather glove guy looks pissed—his eyebrows angle-in like poison darts while his Italian cream lies splattered and squashed beneath my wing-tips. I lose my footing and reach for something to keep me upright. A blond lady’s scarf.

“Get the hell off me,” she croaks in a smoker’s voice. I retreat and latch on to a bearded guy’s brown sport coat. He grunts but doesn’t push me away. A slick globe of sweat rolls down the small of my back. It wicks into the elastic band of my underwear.

I need to get out. I need to breathe fresh, cool air. I need to see light.

* * *

We were hunkered down in the stairwell. I had managed to open the emergency door just wide enough for a mouse to squirt through. My shoulder ached from pounding into it like a linebacker. She was unconscious, slumped against the wall like a wet rag. It was dark and wreaked of gasoline and there was a sudden and eerie stillness that rested on our shoulders—a deadness only broken by the occasional screams that ran into corners at the end of adjacent hallways or on floors blockaded by fallen masonry.

Another low rumble—much louder and more powerful than before, as if every molecule of land and sea were standing on end. As if the stairwell was not a stairwell at all, but the molten bowels of Kilauea.

I knew at once something was wrong. That a dark and fetid presence had surrounded Rita and me. That death was rising up around us—and all I could do was scratch at the narrow crevice of darkness between the door and the jamb and let the tears shield my eyes.

Then voices. Two of them, and another that crackled out on a walkie.

“In here!” I tried to shout, but all that came out was “Heh!” Then a set of gloved hands, strong and firm. They grabbed me by the collar and yanked me through the door as a mix of embers and insulation spilled down from the ceiling in a tuft of glowing, pink tumbleweed. Rita was still on the other side.

I saw her face one last time—serene, unmoving, catatonic—before the archway cracked and the door was reduced to rubble.

* * *

My knuckles are white on the brown sport coat and I guess I wear out my welcome because the bearded guy pushes me to the back of the car. I step on some lady’s lunch bag and she clubs me in the back of the head with her purse. Someone pushes me forward and bearded guy volleys me back again like a tennis ball. I feel sick. And I need to get out. And the air is so thick. And I’m ready to throw punches. And then lights flicker and then they flash and then—

Ding! The eighteenth floor. My stop. I smooth out my suit, take a deep breath. Smells like French Roast.

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An Orphaned Raindrop - Flash Fiction

Frank Morelli — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a single moment for a raindrop, when it breaks free from the granite sky and pelts the glass beside my bed in one fat slop. It hangs there as a perfect, crystalline globe. And it twinkles. A sort of playful wink before it takes the final descent. An abrupt, rolling slither that leaves a trail of liquefied dignity—its legacy. Then it soaks into the sill, its watermark having been noticed. Acknowledged.

Such dignity doesn’t afford itself to just any raindrop. It doesn’t show itself in tempests, in frog-swallowing monsoons, or even during sun showers. It can’t be found in the aftermath of a squall, or even in the great, rushing waters of the mighty Niagara. These offer no permanence. Their waters rush past before they can be quantified down to a true, solitary essence: the raindrop.

In this place of decay, under this granite cloth, between these granite walls, beneath this granite sky—nothing is permanent. Dignity rarely washes up at the foot of this bed, cluttered with a twisted superhighway of tubes and wires all attached to the corresponding network inside my rusted frame. I can’t hope to find it in the rubber smiles of the weekend triage. They lust for racquetball matches and family barbecues and Sunday drives as they sanitize bedpans and serve chicken broth.

I can only look to the old man—even older than I—who snores behind the curtain that separates our beds. His sawing subsides to groaning and then to heavy, uneven breathing, and then to reticent, incoherent mumbling—in that order. These are his only forms of communication.

His eyes make round creases under paper eyelids. At his feet are Matchbox cars and empty juice boxes and broken crayons. The trappings of youth. His grandson—a jackrabbit of a boy with curly, red hair and a face full of freckles—races tiny Corvettes and Thunderbirds up one of the old man’s wrinkled calves and down the other. The boy is immune to the granite walls, oblivious to the stray drops on the window. There will be many more opportunities to see them in a lifetime of precipitation. All the while the old man snores and groans, breathes and mumbles, having almost completely fulfilled his life’s quota.

Another fat drop.

It suspends, winks, and rolls into nothingness.

Another. And another. And one more. They roll down in casual unison. They fan watery trails like peacock feathers and submit to eternity.

Soon I shall follow. And the old man—the wheels of his bed locked in place a few yards from my own—he too shall follow. While I wash from distant rooftops to seamless gutters to the nameless rabble of the water table—to be forgotten—the old man trickles, in a single, dignified droplet, into the memories of his freckled, little jackrabbit.

Slop. Suspend. Wink. Roll. Nothing.

How I long to be an orphaned raindrop.

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New Author Site Celebration!

Frank Morelli — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

To commemorate the refresh of my author website after many years of publishing books, I'm offering readers who register an email with my mailing list a free digital copy of my most recent young adult novel, On the Way to Birdland! All you have to do is navigate to my homepage, scroll to the bottom of the page, and enter your information in the fields provided, and you'll receive an instant link to download your free digital copy. Enjoy!

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