Barry Rachin: 49 books

Among the quirky short stories collected in The Chiropractor’s Assistant readers will find : Epistemology - When Ronda Wickford, the assistant manager of Brandenburg’s ShopRite Supermarket, inadvertently hires a middle-age man with a PhD in philosophy to run the fresh produce department,...

Cheryl Oliphant doesn’t do well in social situations. The fourteen year old girl’s best friend, Nicolena, is a four-foot, South American tree boa and her parents are getting divorced. On the plus side, Cheryl just met Teddy Rasmussen who offered her a sympathetic ear plus an inch-thick slice of apricot, sour cream loaf.

Ralph Tucker is dating a woman who favors Orvis, genuine hornback crocodile belts. The dainty accessories retails for just under six hundred dollars. If Ralph’s romance blossoms, he’s going to need a second job.

Sylvia Mandelstam boasts what a wonderful time she had at the international literary symposium in Moscow. Truth be told, the trip was an unmitigated fiasco not unlike her marriage and personal life. She can lie shamelessly and dissemble to everyone - even Danny O'Rourke, the unassuming mason who arrives one summery day to repair her damaged brick wall. But not indefinitely.

Mrs. Chowdhary named her youngest daughter after Saint Theresa, the Little Flower of Jesus. Unfortunately, Terry has more in common with Attila the Hun than her nineteenth century namesake.

A year out of high school, Clarissa, who couldn't even score a date for the senior prom, is into tantric sex, Pablo Neruda and orgasms bordering on divine rapture. And she's still a virgin!

Bethany Glaspell approached the first-ever meeting with Great-uncle Vern, a man who returned from the jungles of Vietnam with a Hmong bride and warped personality, much as a cat burglar might plan his next heist, telling no one, neither friend nor family, her intentions.

Marie Augustin, an Haitian nurses aide, is blindsided when one of her elderly clients, Peter Marsoubian, asks her to accompany him on a trip to hear the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform in Tanglewood. Does the green-card immigrant, who witnessed first hand the endemic violence in her native country, follow agency protocol or bend rules to accommodate the absurd whim of a dying man?

Pearl Singleton, a forest ranger at the Pemberton Wildlife Preserve, is going to show eighteen year old Shawn Mariano her Osborne Smoke Finder, all six varieties of New England ferns, a beaver dam, and something he never bargained for.

Mickey Pisludski wears a chain of armor piercing, machine gun shells around his thick neck. The week after his Army discharge, he bored the quarter-inch holes in the soft, brass casings, later threading the bullets together on a length of rawhide. Like so many gold, sharks teeth, the shells fanned out across a khaki T-shirt with a gash under the left armpit.

Every woman Ernie Summers dated possessed a fatal flaw, which is why he is taking an indefinite sabbatical from the opposite sex. Well, maybe not.

Tawana Saunders is writing the great American novel. Problem is, six months into the project, she’s only got a rough draft plus three lousy paragraphs.

Marty Humphrey has trouble finishing things. He just dropped out of college, and previously, a European backpacking adventure was abruptly cut short, when he became morbidly homesick on the flight across the Atlantic. Maybe the mystic-minded Rose O'Donnell can help Marty sort things out.

* Grace Paulson’s train wreck of a personal life takes a turn for the better when the elementary school teacher meets a gifted artisan whose handmade jewelry boxes are featured at the local museum. Well-versed in nineteenth century Russian literature, Carl Solomon also happens to be the school janitor. *...