The Greenwood Heights Review

We stop for gas before Fallston. B drools the last of her cash into the tank, just enough to shudder the needle past quarter-full. She tells me the newsroom won’t pay out her expenses anymore and I ask if she wants my lunch. Later, when we cross the bridge into town, she winces her way through a room-temp sandwich. Rubs her cheek like she’s hiding something. Five phones feed off the blood of the engine. Right away we see them: people locked in violent, endless, unexplainable motion.

I hope everyone is having a good summer. Thank you for reading. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to my father, so the night before his burial I broke into the funeral home on the eastern end of Fallston, stole through the stale dark to the basement freezer, opened the great steel door, revealed his still and silent nakedness, and cut off his right hand. I used a saw to slice through pale, cold skin, then hard bone. His body shook as one great lifelessness while I worked.

Thank you for reading. The raccoon rocks its body up against my garbage bin beneath a moth-mobbed floodlight, late spring, until the bin tumbles, cover flopped against the stubbled asphalt, black bag ripe, a plastic shine beneath the light. I live in a crack-bricked letter I, two floors, more barracks than home, constructed midcentury and promptly neglected on the eastern edge of Fallston near the turn of the new millennium.

Z.H. Gill’s Burial Mag has published my new story, Moths. Here’s how it starts: The moth is dead at the center of my pillow, brown wings folded, little legs curled like plastic straws. I bend down and touch one of its wings. For a few uneasy minutes I wonder if the moth died in mid-air and fell, if moths become ghosts when they die or if people become moths when they die. Then I decide there’s no way I can sleep in my bed tonight. A light breeze wanders in through the open window.

Thank you for reading. My house floated thirty feet above the ground. Not hovering or bobbing in the wind, just existing, as if it had been built there, high above the crack-stone open wound of my basement. Ten minutes earlier, my wife texted while I walked alongside the river. She’d received a flurry of phone notifications from our security cameras. Gone haywire, she wrote. She’d left a letter, a week before, about how she needed to leave and climb mountains and figure things out.

Today’s story is a slightly revised version of a piece first published by Expat Press in 2021. Slightly revised, as in modified to fix some bits (mostly in the open) I’ve long winced about, but it’s otherwise as it was published all those years ago. I’m trying not to overdo the re-release of previously published fiction and am only selecting pieces I feel fit within what I’m trying to accomplish with this newsletter. As always, thanks for reading.

Image Credit: NASA. Thanks for reading. Paul is pitching one of the neighbors on an investment scam when I return from the local dump. The two of them sit on opposite ends of the scuffed leather L-couch we fished out of the alley two months before. Paul leans forward, large hands connected at the fingertips, as he calmly explains the potential for parabolic growth in exotic metals stocks. There’s no mention of specific stocks, their cost, or when the neighbor might expect a tangible return.

This poem was first published by VANITY. Thanks for reading.

New short fiction. Thank you and welcome to all the new subscribers of Commonwealth Junction. I hope you enjoy your stay. Nine acres, my father tells me. I can build rock walls ‘til I die. My father squats beside the wheel and connects it to his emphysemic air compressor. It’s late September and hot enough to draw sweat in the lake house driveway. I’m supposed to watch him but I’m bored so I look around for anything interesting. A couple doors down, a man tugs a cover across his speedboat.

A good day: woke up from an extended dream based on an idea for a story I had just before bed. Worked on it over the course of the day in anticipation of tonight’s Dodo Eraser prose reading. And keeping with the spirit of the proceedings, here is the story. Might do more of these. Thanks for reading. Eight months after the invasion failed our newspaper had electricity again.