Jason Simon's Blog
March 28, 2026
Short Fiction: The Other Side of the Hedge
The old man next door had died a month or so before Tom and Mallory moved in. Living next to an abandoned house, particularly one with disordered stacks of files and boxes visible through each of the upstairs windows, a lawn overrun with creeping charlie, and a looming 20-ft boundary hedge that hadn’t been pruned in decades, wasn’t an ideal situation or investment, but theirs was a two-story red brick colonial revival at a low price in a nice enough neighborhood a few minutes from downtown. Sure, there were the telltale signs of a flip in the greyscale interior design, the simulated woodgrain LVP floors, and the unfinished lumber on a new deck off the second floor, but Tom liked the proximity to the freeway for his long work commute and the park three streets up where he could take the dog. Mallory expressed no opinion one way or the other, which represented at least acquiescence.
They referred to the place next door as alternately the haunted house, the hoarder house, or sometimes Monster House, after a kids' cartoon they’d both seen years earlier. Tom supposed there were some advantages to not having a neighbor on the one side. Surely it was better than living beside somebody loud and volatile or even cold and uptight. Still, sometimes when he stood pissing and looking out the bathroom window, he’d wonder about the state of the place next door. Would someone buy it for next to nothing and flip it? Had the weight of what was stockpiled throughout the house so damaged the structural integrity that it would need to be torn down to the foundation and rebuilt?
It wasn’t until the giant tulip poplar next door snapped down the middle, and half of it fell onto Tom and Mallory’s fence and backdoor awning, that they met Steve, the dead neighbor’s adult son. He came to the house to apologize and cover any damages, but Tom waved him off, saying the insurance would take care of it. Steve was a psychology professor at a state university 40 minutes north and hadn’t come down to check on his late father’s house as often as he should have. He offered to pay for any expenses not covered by insurance and left his card, which Mallory stuck to the refrigerator with a chip-clip magnet. After that, Tom and Mallory saw Steve’s car at the curb maybe twice a month.
One day in late winter, when Tom was out front getting the mail, he saw Steve loading a few boxes from the house into his car and walked over to say hello.
“Hey, listen,” Tom said, “it seems like you have a lot on your plate with this house. If there’s anything I can do from here with the yard, just let me know. I mean, I’m out anyway, and our lots are pretty small.”
Steve nodded and said, “I appreciate that. Let me get back to you. Oh, and by the way, feel free to do whatever you want with that hedge. It’s out of control and partially on your property anyway.”
Tom considered this as he took in the imposing wall of brush running the length of his driveway along the property line. The hedge had once been planted in a straight, deliberate line, but years of neglect had undermined its discipline. What remained was a thick, uneven wall of bare wood, privet gone haggard and gray at the base, lilac stems rising in smoother clusters, all of it knotted through with buckthorn and pale, twisting ropes of old grapevine. Here and there, something else had taken hold: a young mulberry pushing up too fast, a stray rose threading thorns through the gaps. With the leaves gone, the structure showed itself: a crowded lattice of branches crossing and recrossing, some dead and brittle, others green and stubborn, all of it leaning just slightly into the driveway as if it had been inching forward for years in conquest.
“Sounds good,” Tom said. “I’ll get on it before it warms up and everything starts blooming.”
By the end of March, Tom finally had a free weekend to tackle the hedge, and on a rainless Saturday afternoon just after the equinox, he set to work. From the garage, he grabbed a large pair of hedge shears, his corded hedge trimmer with about 100 ft of extension cord, his electric chainsaw, and a small set of garden snips, which he kept in the back pocket of his ripstop work pants. These he placed inside a wheelbarrow and drove the assemblage to the curb at the very front of the hedge. He removed the chainsaw and trimmer, placed them in the front yard on the other side of the driveway, and began clipping some of the smaller twigs at the front of the bushes with the snips before switching to the shears to cut away a significant portion of the dense brush.
After roughly an hour, Tom had cut a length of the hedge six or so feet from the curb down to waist height and was in the process of filling the wheelbarrow with trimmings when he spotted something bright near the bottom of the hedge, shining as it reflected sunlight. Tom assumed it was a foil food wrapper that had blown into the bushes from another neighbor’s garbage can on some past trash day and leaned over the branches to retrieve it.
He was puzzled by what he saw. Instead of a single piece of litter among the twigs and branches, there appeared to be a series of five or six stones arranged in a line, too deliberate to be accidental. Curious, he walked the length of the hedge from the curb to the back of his house, bent low as he examined the underbrush. At intervals, he observed the same pattern of stones, barely visible through the denser areas of thicket but undeniably there. Tom made a mental note to ask Steve about this the next time they crossed paths and to show Mallory when she returned home from her mother’s and then went to work on clearing the trimmings from the driveway before getting back to work on the hedge.
Tom found he couldn’t get the presence of the stones from his mind and, temporarily abandoning the task at hand, began to scrutinize the hedge more closely. He soon began finding other anomalies in the structure. First, there were places where thread had been woven between branches, creating a sort of binding shape or sigil. He wondered why the word sigil had popped into his mind as he crouched before the hedge, peering inside. In other spots, he noticed faded pieces of fabric caught in the growth but tied in knots in regular repeating patterns. Next, he began to notice small nails that had been pounded into a few of the thicker branches, all pointing inward, as though they were pinning something in place. Again, he was puzzled about his own interpretation of what he was seeing.
Careful not to disturb these peculiarities among the hedge, Tom picked up his chainsaw and began cutting through some of the wider trunks and branches, trying to keep his cutline straight at waist level. On one of the trunks near the base of the structure, he found what appeared to be candle wax in a shade of black or deep red and a few feet beyond, two small glass vials filled with a reddish, murky liquid and what appeared to be small pebbles or, possibly, teeth. Human teeth? he wondered.
On a hunch, Tom returned to one of the spots of the hedge where he’d found thread and examined it more closely. He untied one of the threads, constructed into a clove hitch knot, and inspected the wispy material, which brought to mind human hair. Even more concerning, he found small animal bones within the knot, like those of a sparrow or robin. Although he might have stopped at this point and waited for someone to witness his discoveries, Tom began working even more frantically to trim the hedge. Now, he no longer cleared the debris using the wheelbarrow but allowed a growing pile of loppings and trimmings to accumulate in the center of the driveway in a path leading to the back of the house. He had gotten thirsty from working steadily in the warm spring air but found himself unwilling or unable to stop and instead felt a growing compulsion to finish clearing the hedge.
A phrase then came into his head: it stays in the green. It repeated. He had no idea what it meant, but he found himself uttering it over and over like some sort of intonation. As he repeated the words to himself, he kept cutting, eventually reaching the end of the hedge at the back of his house overlooking the lower backyard, all the while mouthing those words over and over. It stays in the green.
Tom dropped the trimmers back into the yard and approached the hedge, now pared to waist height. He paced beside the structure with his hand on the cut line, feeling the jagged twigs and branches gently raking his palm. Then, he came to a stop and listened closely. Within the hedge, he heard an unmistakable sound. There was the rustle of movement within the brush, or was it the sound of weak, rattled breathing–inhalation and exhalation growing louder and more vital–and the low drone of something building in intensity?
Tom crouched low and stared directly into the hedge. Although he was unsure what he saw, he had the dawning awareness of having set a process into motion, having released something inchoate but now becoming fully actualized. He gazed up at the abandoned house on the other side of the hedge and noticed that the boxes in the windows were now gone, replaced by open windows and sheer curtains billowing in the temperate springtime air. At that, Tom abandoned his task and returned to the house.
“What the hell, Tom?” Mallory asked upon entering the kitchen and finding her husband seated at a small dinette in the breakfast nook with an untouched glass of water before him. “I can’t get into the driveway. It’s full of branches, and I have groceries to bring in.”
Wordlessly, Tom arose and returned to the driveway, where he carted the rest of the yard waste to the backyard while Mallory brought in her purchases and began preparing dinner. Through dinner, Tom was communicative but reticent to offer much beyond short responses and wordless grunts of acknowledgement about the details of Mallory’s day. He mentioned nothing about the hedge, nor the objects he’d found within it, nor the changes in the house next door.
A week later, Tom stood in the bathroom around 2:30 in the morning pissing and staring out the window at the house next door. There were now lights on inside, and through the open window, Tom could hear faint music and the sounds of scattered conversations and laughter as though a spirited get-together were in progress. Looking down, he noticed that he had become distracted and urinated on the floor, which he then cleaned up with some tissue and washed his hands before returning to bed.
On his way back to the bedroom, Tom paused at the door to his office and looked at the collection of boxes and stacks of paper he’d already begun to accumulate. Before long, they would begin piling up on the chairs and taking over the desk and bookshelf. Eventually, they would rise higher than the windows and then spill out from the office into the other rooms of the house. Tom understood this and could see the eventual outcome. He continued walking into the bedroom and crawled under the covers next to Mallory, who breathed softly in restful, untroubled sleep.
They referred to the place next door as alternately the haunted house, the hoarder house, or sometimes Monster House, after a kids' cartoon they’d both seen years earlier. Tom supposed there were some advantages to not having a neighbor on the one side. Surely it was better than living beside somebody loud and volatile or even cold and uptight. Still, sometimes when he stood pissing and looking out the bathroom window, he’d wonder about the state of the place next door. Would someone buy it for next to nothing and flip it? Had the weight of what was stockpiled throughout the house so damaged the structural integrity that it would need to be torn down to the foundation and rebuilt?
It wasn’t until the giant tulip poplar next door snapped down the middle, and half of it fell onto Tom and Mallory’s fence and backdoor awning, that they met Steve, the dead neighbor’s adult son. He came to the house to apologize and cover any damages, but Tom waved him off, saying the insurance would take care of it. Steve was a psychology professor at a state university 40 minutes north and hadn’t come down to check on his late father’s house as often as he should have. He offered to pay for any expenses not covered by insurance and left his card, which Mallory stuck to the refrigerator with a chip-clip magnet. After that, Tom and Mallory saw Steve’s car at the curb maybe twice a month.
One day in late winter, when Tom was out front getting the mail, he saw Steve loading a few boxes from the house into his car and walked over to say hello.
“Hey, listen,” Tom said, “it seems like you have a lot on your plate with this house. If there’s anything I can do from here with the yard, just let me know. I mean, I’m out anyway, and our lots are pretty small.”
Steve nodded and said, “I appreciate that. Let me get back to you. Oh, and by the way, feel free to do whatever you want with that hedge. It’s out of control and partially on your property anyway.”
Tom considered this as he took in the imposing wall of brush running the length of his driveway along the property line. The hedge had once been planted in a straight, deliberate line, but years of neglect had undermined its discipline. What remained was a thick, uneven wall of bare wood, privet gone haggard and gray at the base, lilac stems rising in smoother clusters, all of it knotted through with buckthorn and pale, twisting ropes of old grapevine. Here and there, something else had taken hold: a young mulberry pushing up too fast, a stray rose threading thorns through the gaps. With the leaves gone, the structure showed itself: a crowded lattice of branches crossing and recrossing, some dead and brittle, others green and stubborn, all of it leaning just slightly into the driveway as if it had been inching forward for years in conquest.
“Sounds good,” Tom said. “I’ll get on it before it warms up and everything starts blooming.”
By the end of March, Tom finally had a free weekend to tackle the hedge, and on a rainless Saturday afternoon just after the equinox, he set to work. From the garage, he grabbed a large pair of hedge shears, his corded hedge trimmer with about 100 ft of extension cord, his electric chainsaw, and a small set of garden snips, which he kept in the back pocket of his ripstop work pants. These he placed inside a wheelbarrow and drove the assemblage to the curb at the very front of the hedge. He removed the chainsaw and trimmer, placed them in the front yard on the other side of the driveway, and began clipping some of the smaller twigs at the front of the bushes with the snips before switching to the shears to cut away a significant portion of the dense brush.
After roughly an hour, Tom had cut a length of the hedge six or so feet from the curb down to waist height and was in the process of filling the wheelbarrow with trimmings when he spotted something bright near the bottom of the hedge, shining as it reflected sunlight. Tom assumed it was a foil food wrapper that had blown into the bushes from another neighbor’s garbage can on some past trash day and leaned over the branches to retrieve it.
He was puzzled by what he saw. Instead of a single piece of litter among the twigs and branches, there appeared to be a series of five or six stones arranged in a line, too deliberate to be accidental. Curious, he walked the length of the hedge from the curb to the back of his house, bent low as he examined the underbrush. At intervals, he observed the same pattern of stones, barely visible through the denser areas of thicket but undeniably there. Tom made a mental note to ask Steve about this the next time they crossed paths and to show Mallory when she returned home from her mother’s and then went to work on clearing the trimmings from the driveway before getting back to work on the hedge.
Tom found he couldn’t get the presence of the stones from his mind and, temporarily abandoning the task at hand, began to scrutinize the hedge more closely. He soon began finding other anomalies in the structure. First, there were places where thread had been woven between branches, creating a sort of binding shape or sigil. He wondered why the word sigil had popped into his mind as he crouched before the hedge, peering inside. In other spots, he noticed faded pieces of fabric caught in the growth but tied in knots in regular repeating patterns. Next, he began to notice small nails that had been pounded into a few of the thicker branches, all pointing inward, as though they were pinning something in place. Again, he was puzzled about his own interpretation of what he was seeing.
Careful not to disturb these peculiarities among the hedge, Tom picked up his chainsaw and began cutting through some of the wider trunks and branches, trying to keep his cutline straight at waist level. On one of the trunks near the base of the structure, he found what appeared to be candle wax in a shade of black or deep red and a few feet beyond, two small glass vials filled with a reddish, murky liquid and what appeared to be small pebbles or, possibly, teeth. Human teeth? he wondered.
On a hunch, Tom returned to one of the spots of the hedge where he’d found thread and examined it more closely. He untied one of the threads, constructed into a clove hitch knot, and inspected the wispy material, which brought to mind human hair. Even more concerning, he found small animal bones within the knot, like those of a sparrow or robin. Although he might have stopped at this point and waited for someone to witness his discoveries, Tom began working even more frantically to trim the hedge. Now, he no longer cleared the debris using the wheelbarrow but allowed a growing pile of loppings and trimmings to accumulate in the center of the driveway in a path leading to the back of the house. He had gotten thirsty from working steadily in the warm spring air but found himself unwilling or unable to stop and instead felt a growing compulsion to finish clearing the hedge.
A phrase then came into his head: it stays in the green. It repeated. He had no idea what it meant, but he found himself uttering it over and over like some sort of intonation. As he repeated the words to himself, he kept cutting, eventually reaching the end of the hedge at the back of his house overlooking the lower backyard, all the while mouthing those words over and over. It stays in the green.
Tom dropped the trimmers back into the yard and approached the hedge, now pared to waist height. He paced beside the structure with his hand on the cut line, feeling the jagged twigs and branches gently raking his palm. Then, he came to a stop and listened closely. Within the hedge, he heard an unmistakable sound. There was the rustle of movement within the brush, or was it the sound of weak, rattled breathing–inhalation and exhalation growing louder and more vital–and the low drone of something building in intensity?
Tom crouched low and stared directly into the hedge. Although he was unsure what he saw, he had the dawning awareness of having set a process into motion, having released something inchoate but now becoming fully actualized. He gazed up at the abandoned house on the other side of the hedge and noticed that the boxes in the windows were now gone, replaced by open windows and sheer curtains billowing in the temperate springtime air. At that, Tom abandoned his task and returned to the house.
“What the hell, Tom?” Mallory asked upon entering the kitchen and finding her husband seated at a small dinette in the breakfast nook with an untouched glass of water before him. “I can’t get into the driveway. It’s full of branches, and I have groceries to bring in.”
Wordlessly, Tom arose and returned to the driveway, where he carted the rest of the yard waste to the backyard while Mallory brought in her purchases and began preparing dinner. Through dinner, Tom was communicative but reticent to offer much beyond short responses and wordless grunts of acknowledgement about the details of Mallory’s day. He mentioned nothing about the hedge, nor the objects he’d found within it, nor the changes in the house next door.
A week later, Tom stood in the bathroom around 2:30 in the morning pissing and staring out the window at the house next door. There were now lights on inside, and through the open window, Tom could hear faint music and the sounds of scattered conversations and laughter as though a spirited get-together were in progress. Looking down, he noticed that he had become distracted and urinated on the floor, which he then cleaned up with some tissue and washed his hands before returning to bed.
On his way back to the bedroom, Tom paused at the door to his office and looked at the collection of boxes and stacks of paper he’d already begun to accumulate. Before long, they would begin piling up on the chairs and taking over the desk and bookshelf. Eventually, they would rise higher than the windows and then spill out from the office into the other rooms of the house. Tom understood this and could see the eventual outcome. He continued walking into the bedroom and crawled under the covers next to Mallory, who breathed softly in restful, untroubled sleep.
January 24, 2026
Short Fiction: Teacher Appreciation Week
She’s the first person he talks to every morning. He told her this once, early on, and now, when she comes into his room in the morning, which happens every morning, she asks specifically, “Was I the first person you talked to today?”
“Yes,” he says and then offers some approximation of, “I left for work this morning before anyone else in my house was awake. Even the dog. You’re the first person I’ve interacted with.”
“Yay!” she says.
“I know. It sets a good tone for my day. I’m glad it’s not someone I like less,” he says.
“Okay, so, Mr. Asher,” she says, “listen to this…”
--
Mr. Asher pulls into the school parking lot between 7:15 and 7:20. He is one of the first teachers to arrive, yet he’s never as early as the math teacher, Mr. Mallory, or Madame Maitland, the French teacher. By the time Mr. Asher backs into his regular parking space–the third spot in the first row abutting a small grassy hill–retrieves his leather satchel from his back seat and his insulated coffee tumbler from the front center console, makes the short walk up to his building, and unlocks and enters his first floor classroom, room 118, it’s nearly 7:30, and he has exactly half an hour to ease into the morning before first period English 9.
By 7:35, Anna is there. The first thing she does is grab one of the dry-erase markers from the whiteboard ledge and start writing on the board. Sometimes she writes “Anna was here” or “I love Julie,” Julie being a student in Mr. Asher’s first-period class, or even “Mr. Asher is the GOAT.” Some days, when Mr. Asher has a new set of markers, she performs a marker rating on the board, testing each specimen’s strength and vibrancy: “purple = 80%, blue = 30%, red = 40%, etc.” Often, she draws pictures of assorted cartoon or anime characters, unfamiliar to Mr. Asher.
“How are the freshmen this year?” she asks. “Are they as good as we were last year?”
“No. They’re maniacs. It’s like they’ve never been allowed indoors before.”
“Aww.. you miss us.”
“I miss some of you.”
By 7:50, she runs off for her first period class somewhere down the hall. “I gotta go,” she says. “I can’t be late for Modern World.” And then, “Okay, bye. Love you!” on her way out the door.
“Okay. Have a good day,” Mr. Asher says, laughing.
--
One morning, Anna enters looking dejected, and Mr. Asher asks if she’s okay.
“Connor and I are fighting, and I have a chemistry test I didn’t study for. I think I’m just going to kill myself,” she says.
“Well,” Mr. Asher responds, “it’s clear you didn’t arrive at this decision lightly. And you’ve lived a good life. Not a long one but an eventful one. We’ll miss you. People will cry at the assembly.”
This makes her laugh, and she says, “Mr. Asher. You’d be so screwed if I actually did it one of these times.”
Mr. Asher thinks about that for a minute. He says, “I’d have to make it look like a murder to throw suspicion off myself. And then kill a few other 15-year-olds from other schools, so everyone thinks it’s like a local serial killer thing.”
“Wow, you’ve thought about this.”
“Hey, I’d lose my job and teaching license. I’ve got a mortgage to consider. It’s that or follow suit. I mean, I suppose we could meet up in the afterlife for our morning chitchat. The markers never run low there.”
She looks briefly confused and then laughs even harder and says, “Okay, gotta run. Love you.”
--
The next day, she’s elated and leaps into the room energetically.
“Glad you survived the night,” Mr. Asher says.
“I got my temps!” she announces. “And we already picked out the car I’m getting for my 16th birthday!”
“Lamborghini?” he asks.
She smiles, “We’re not that rich, Mr. Asher. It’s a Bronco. A 2025, though.”
“Well, maybe you’ll pass a blue 2018 CR-V on the way in sometime. Just know that its operator is inside listening to audiobooks or talking himself out of suddenly jerking the wheel over the Valley View Bridge.”
“Wow, that’s dark.”
“Yeah, well, driving is deadly serious. Keep your hands at 10 and 2 and your existential crises in check.”
“You’re so weird. Okay. Love you.”
“See you tomorrow.”
--
“So, Connor is jealous.”
“Connor is the hockey bro with that haircut they all have?”
“Yes, Mr. Asher, he’s my boyfriend.”
“Okay, so…”
“So, he thinks there’s something going on with Nick.”
“But, there is something going on with Nick, right?”
“I mean, we talk online, and he tried to kiss me, but I didn’t really kiss him back.”
“What about Ugly Guy?”
“Well, Ugly Guy…”
“Also, I don’t think he’s ugly, by the way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him.”
“No, he’s definitely ugly. But he’s sweet. We texted last night.”
“And Connor is jealous.”
“Yes, should I just break up with him?”
“Nah, just date them all. Ugly Guy too. Who cares? You’re not married. Ain’t no ring on that finger.”
“Mr. Asher.”
“Look. I never claimed to give good advice. I just think you’re very young. They’re young too. You should all just not worry too much about this kind of grown-up relationship stuff yet. You have years before you join the rest of us and enter into your own domestic hellscape.”
“Mr. Asher. Your wife would not like that description.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m quoting her. I’m the optimistic one in our relationship. She’s probably skimming from the savings account and planning her escape.”
--
Sometimes, he passes her in the hallway on his way to lunch or between classes, and she makes him stop and do their handshake she invented for them. It’s two slaps and a fist bump. She wanted something more elaborate, but he told her he was too old to remember choreography and too uncoordinated. “My dancing days are over and gone,” he said.
He has other kids who visit him throughout the day, too. Imani and Amari also use the markers to leave notes for him and their classmates. Ella keeps him well-versed in varsity softball gossip–lore, she calls it–and Landon tries to engage him in politics to no avail. But Anna is his most regular attendee, and whenever she’s sick or late for school, he feels an absence from his daily routine. Not that he’d ever tell her that.
--
“Mr. Asher,” she says from the doorway one morning.
“Hey,” he says, surprised, “what’s going on?”
She enters the room and sits across from him. “I was watching you from the doorway, and you just looked so sad.”
He looks surprised for a second and then recovers, and, in a deadpan, says, “Well, I was probably thinking that I’ll be waking up to an alarm and driving to work in the dark five days a week for the next 25 years. I mean, that or I’m still nervous that you and Ugly Guy won’t get together. Think about the stories you’d never get to tell your half-ugly grandkids someday.”
“I can never tell if you’re joking,” she says.
“I’m always joking,” he says.
“How’s your life, Mr. Asher?” she asks. “For real. Are you happy? Are things good with your family? With you and your wife.”
He stares at her for a minute and then says, “Yeah, everything’s good. Went out to a nice dinner last night, came home and watched some TV, had a cocktail, in bed by 10.”
“Oh, okay,” she says and then hands him an envelope, laughing. “I got this for you. For teacher appreciation week or whatever.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“It’s a Starbucks gift card,” she says. “I know you like coffee or…”
“I’ll act surprised when I open it,” he says and then smiles at her. “Thank you. It’s very sweet. I really appreciate it.”
She smiles too and says, “Okay. Gotta go. Love you.”
“Be good,” he says.
--
That night, he arrives home just before 6:00 after stopping at the pub for a few pints. He enters through the mudroom at the back of the house and places his satchel atop the rack next to the washer. He hangs up his coat on a hook above the bench by the back door and leaves his shoes lying in the middle of the floor to let the snow melt onto the throw rug. He steps into the house slippers he’d left lying there that morning before work.
He walks through the house to the front door and steps onto the porch to check the mail. There are a few letters in the box and a package from Amazon on the porch, all of which he brings into the living room. The mail is mostly junk mail and addressed to his wife, so he walks over to the paper shredder next to the secretary desk in the dining room and runs each envelope through the whirling blades, reducing it to confetti. The package he places atop the console table behind the sofa, where it joins three or four others, and then walks into the kitchen to make himself dinner.
On Sunday, he’d made a large pot of chili in the crockpot, and there’s still two days’ worth left in a glass container in the refrigerator, so he empties half of its contents into a bowl and microwaves it for 90 seconds. Then he stirs the chili and heats it for another 90 seconds before sprinkling on some shredded cheese from a package in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. He returns both the container and the cheese to the refrigerator, which contains a jar of salsa, a six-pack of beer, a few bottles of hot sauce, a carton of milk, and a carton of eggs with four eggs remaining. He walks holding the bowl to the sofa and sits there eating the chili while he turns on the TV and watches the day’s headlines on a free app that streams local news.
When he finishes the chili, he walks into the kitchen and rinses the bowl in the sink before stacking it on the top rack of the dishwasher and placing the spoon in the utensil rack below. It’s been days since he has run the dishwasher, but it’s not even halfway full, so he closes it and begins to walk back toward the living room when he stops and remembers something. He walks back into the mudroom and opens his satchel on the laundry rack. He digs inside and pulls out an envelope. He then returns to the sofa and sits down before opening the envelope and removing both the Starbucks gift card and a greeting card with a picture of a wide-eyed orange tabby cat sitting before a steaming mug of black coffee. He opens the card, reads the message inside, and smiles.
He watches TV until 9:00 and then goes upstairs to get ready for bed. He has a quick shower and then walks into the bedroom. He switches on his lamp on the bedside table at right side of the bed, climbs under the covers, and opens his Kindle to continue where he left off in the book he’s reading. He reads until just before 10:00 before placing the Kindle back on the table. For a few seconds, he looks around the room. He looks at the identical bedside table to the left of the bed, now completely empty but for a few hair ties and a tube of lip balm. At the far wall, he sees the open, mostly vacant closet full of empty hangers along with a few of his dress shirts and blazers. Finally, he switches off the light, rolls onto his left side, and closes his eyes.
“Yes,” he says and then offers some approximation of, “I left for work this morning before anyone else in my house was awake. Even the dog. You’re the first person I’ve interacted with.”
“Yay!” she says.
“I know. It sets a good tone for my day. I’m glad it’s not someone I like less,” he says.
“Okay, so, Mr. Asher,” she says, “listen to this…”
--
Mr. Asher pulls into the school parking lot between 7:15 and 7:20. He is one of the first teachers to arrive, yet he’s never as early as the math teacher, Mr. Mallory, or Madame Maitland, the French teacher. By the time Mr. Asher backs into his regular parking space–the third spot in the first row abutting a small grassy hill–retrieves his leather satchel from his back seat and his insulated coffee tumbler from the front center console, makes the short walk up to his building, and unlocks and enters his first floor classroom, room 118, it’s nearly 7:30, and he has exactly half an hour to ease into the morning before first period English 9.
By 7:35, Anna is there. The first thing she does is grab one of the dry-erase markers from the whiteboard ledge and start writing on the board. Sometimes she writes “Anna was here” or “I love Julie,” Julie being a student in Mr. Asher’s first-period class, or even “Mr. Asher is the GOAT.” Some days, when Mr. Asher has a new set of markers, she performs a marker rating on the board, testing each specimen’s strength and vibrancy: “purple = 80%, blue = 30%, red = 40%, etc.” Often, she draws pictures of assorted cartoon or anime characters, unfamiliar to Mr. Asher.
“How are the freshmen this year?” she asks. “Are they as good as we were last year?”
“No. They’re maniacs. It’s like they’ve never been allowed indoors before.”
“Aww.. you miss us.”
“I miss some of you.”
By 7:50, she runs off for her first period class somewhere down the hall. “I gotta go,” she says. “I can’t be late for Modern World.” And then, “Okay, bye. Love you!” on her way out the door.
“Okay. Have a good day,” Mr. Asher says, laughing.
--
One morning, Anna enters looking dejected, and Mr. Asher asks if she’s okay.
“Connor and I are fighting, and I have a chemistry test I didn’t study for. I think I’m just going to kill myself,” she says.
“Well,” Mr. Asher responds, “it’s clear you didn’t arrive at this decision lightly. And you’ve lived a good life. Not a long one but an eventful one. We’ll miss you. People will cry at the assembly.”
This makes her laugh, and she says, “Mr. Asher. You’d be so screwed if I actually did it one of these times.”
Mr. Asher thinks about that for a minute. He says, “I’d have to make it look like a murder to throw suspicion off myself. And then kill a few other 15-year-olds from other schools, so everyone thinks it’s like a local serial killer thing.”
“Wow, you’ve thought about this.”
“Hey, I’d lose my job and teaching license. I’ve got a mortgage to consider. It’s that or follow suit. I mean, I suppose we could meet up in the afterlife for our morning chitchat. The markers never run low there.”
She looks briefly confused and then laughs even harder and says, “Okay, gotta run. Love you.”
--
The next day, she’s elated and leaps into the room energetically.
“Glad you survived the night,” Mr. Asher says.
“I got my temps!” she announces. “And we already picked out the car I’m getting for my 16th birthday!”
“Lamborghini?” he asks.
She smiles, “We’re not that rich, Mr. Asher. It’s a Bronco. A 2025, though.”
“Well, maybe you’ll pass a blue 2018 CR-V on the way in sometime. Just know that its operator is inside listening to audiobooks or talking himself out of suddenly jerking the wheel over the Valley View Bridge.”
“Wow, that’s dark.”
“Yeah, well, driving is deadly serious. Keep your hands at 10 and 2 and your existential crises in check.”
“You’re so weird. Okay. Love you.”
“See you tomorrow.”
--
“So, Connor is jealous.”
“Connor is the hockey bro with that haircut they all have?”
“Yes, Mr. Asher, he’s my boyfriend.”
“Okay, so…”
“So, he thinks there’s something going on with Nick.”
“But, there is something going on with Nick, right?”
“I mean, we talk online, and he tried to kiss me, but I didn’t really kiss him back.”
“What about Ugly Guy?”
“Well, Ugly Guy…”
“Also, I don’t think he’s ugly, by the way. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him.”
“No, he’s definitely ugly. But he’s sweet. We texted last night.”
“And Connor is jealous.”
“Yes, should I just break up with him?”
“Nah, just date them all. Ugly Guy too. Who cares? You’re not married. Ain’t no ring on that finger.”
“Mr. Asher.”
“Look. I never claimed to give good advice. I just think you’re very young. They’re young too. You should all just not worry too much about this kind of grown-up relationship stuff yet. You have years before you join the rest of us and enter into your own domestic hellscape.”
“Mr. Asher. Your wife would not like that description.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m quoting her. I’m the optimistic one in our relationship. She’s probably skimming from the savings account and planning her escape.”
--
Sometimes, he passes her in the hallway on his way to lunch or between classes, and she makes him stop and do their handshake she invented for them. It’s two slaps and a fist bump. She wanted something more elaborate, but he told her he was too old to remember choreography and too uncoordinated. “My dancing days are over and gone,” he said.
He has other kids who visit him throughout the day, too. Imani and Amari also use the markers to leave notes for him and their classmates. Ella keeps him well-versed in varsity softball gossip–lore, she calls it–and Landon tries to engage him in politics to no avail. But Anna is his most regular attendee, and whenever she’s sick or late for school, he feels an absence from his daily routine. Not that he’d ever tell her that.
--
“Mr. Asher,” she says from the doorway one morning.
“Hey,” he says, surprised, “what’s going on?”
She enters the room and sits across from him. “I was watching you from the doorway, and you just looked so sad.”
He looks surprised for a second and then recovers, and, in a deadpan, says, “Well, I was probably thinking that I’ll be waking up to an alarm and driving to work in the dark five days a week for the next 25 years. I mean, that or I’m still nervous that you and Ugly Guy won’t get together. Think about the stories you’d never get to tell your half-ugly grandkids someday.”
“I can never tell if you’re joking,” she says.
“I’m always joking,” he says.
“How’s your life, Mr. Asher?” she asks. “For real. Are you happy? Are things good with your family? With you and your wife.”
He stares at her for a minute and then says, “Yeah, everything’s good. Went out to a nice dinner last night, came home and watched some TV, had a cocktail, in bed by 10.”
“Oh, okay,” she says and then hands him an envelope, laughing. “I got this for you. For teacher appreciation week or whatever.”
“Thank you,” he says.
“It’s a Starbucks gift card,” she says. “I know you like coffee or…”
“I’ll act surprised when I open it,” he says and then smiles at her. “Thank you. It’s very sweet. I really appreciate it.”
She smiles too and says, “Okay. Gotta go. Love you.”
“Be good,” he says.
--
That night, he arrives home just before 6:00 after stopping at the pub for a few pints. He enters through the mudroom at the back of the house and places his satchel atop the rack next to the washer. He hangs up his coat on a hook above the bench by the back door and leaves his shoes lying in the middle of the floor to let the snow melt onto the throw rug. He steps into the house slippers he’d left lying there that morning before work.
He walks through the house to the front door and steps onto the porch to check the mail. There are a few letters in the box and a package from Amazon on the porch, all of which he brings into the living room. The mail is mostly junk mail and addressed to his wife, so he walks over to the paper shredder next to the secretary desk in the dining room and runs each envelope through the whirling blades, reducing it to confetti. The package he places atop the console table behind the sofa, where it joins three or four others, and then walks into the kitchen to make himself dinner.
On Sunday, he’d made a large pot of chili in the crockpot, and there’s still two days’ worth left in a glass container in the refrigerator, so he empties half of its contents into a bowl and microwaves it for 90 seconds. Then he stirs the chili and heats it for another 90 seconds before sprinkling on some shredded cheese from a package in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator. He returns both the container and the cheese to the refrigerator, which contains a jar of salsa, a six-pack of beer, a few bottles of hot sauce, a carton of milk, and a carton of eggs with four eggs remaining. He walks holding the bowl to the sofa and sits there eating the chili while he turns on the TV and watches the day’s headlines on a free app that streams local news.
When he finishes the chili, he walks into the kitchen and rinses the bowl in the sink before stacking it on the top rack of the dishwasher and placing the spoon in the utensil rack below. It’s been days since he has run the dishwasher, but it’s not even halfway full, so he closes it and begins to walk back toward the living room when he stops and remembers something. He walks back into the mudroom and opens his satchel on the laundry rack. He digs inside and pulls out an envelope. He then returns to the sofa and sits down before opening the envelope and removing both the Starbucks gift card and a greeting card with a picture of a wide-eyed orange tabby cat sitting before a steaming mug of black coffee. He opens the card, reads the message inside, and smiles.
He watches TV until 9:00 and then goes upstairs to get ready for bed. He has a quick shower and then walks into the bedroom. He switches on his lamp on the bedside table at right side of the bed, climbs under the covers, and opens his Kindle to continue where he left off in the book he’s reading. He reads until just before 10:00 before placing the Kindle back on the table. For a few seconds, he looks around the room. He looks at the identical bedside table to the left of the bed, now completely empty but for a few hair ties and a tube of lip balm. At the far wall, he sees the open, mostly vacant closet full of empty hangers along with a few of his dress shirts and blazers. Finally, he switches off the light, rolls onto his left side, and closes his eyes.
December 19, 2025
Short Fiction: Winter Warmer
Stepping out of the howling wind and snow and into the doorway of the nearby pub, the unaccompanied man first removed his knitted hat and gloves and then unbuttoned his wool parka to reacclimate to the warmer indoor temperature before approaching the long, oaken bar and occupying a stool slightly to the left of center.
Around the pub hung evergreen boughs and garlands of fir, pine, and yew draped over doorframes and along the bar itself, and at random intervals, holly and ivy dangled wild and asymmetrical, tied with leather strips and lengths of twine, sometimes intermingled with sprigs of bright rowan. On the opposite wall of the bar, a fire blazed in the large open hearth, its contents consisting of a single log roughly the size of an intact tree trunk. Upon closer examination, there were ornate symbols carved into the log, but the man was unable to discern their meaning. Along the hearth were apples, crusts of hard bread, and cups of ale near an empty stool unoccupied by any of the pub’s denizens.
Above the din of fiddles, pipes, and hand drums emitting from the pub's overhead speakers, the man leaned toward the barman and asked, “Yeah, can I get some kind of Christmas ale or…?”
“Nothing of that sort here at The Woad & Antler,” the barman replied, “but we have just tapped a few firkins of our local seasonal brew.
“Uhh…sure. That sounds great,” the man said.
At that, the barman retrieved a dimpled glass mug from under the bar and held it at a slight angle under the silver tap of a small wooden barrel resting atop the bar. The glass filled with a reddish auburn liquid capped with a full inch of off-white foam. “An imperial pint of Mari Lwyd,” he announced, placing the mug before the man.
“Mari Lwyd?” the man asked.
“Yes,” the barman replied. “The Grey Mare. Perhaps she’ll even make an appearance tonight for the solstice.”
The man took a sip of the ale, nodded approvingly, and then drank a fuller gulp. He tasted hints of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg with a strong alcoholic finish and a lingering aftertaste of something like anise or licorice. Wormwood? he thought to himself, being reminded of absinthe or even vermouth. The ale warmed and soothed him, and before long, he had emptied his glass and ordered a second.
“So, listen,” the man said to the barman’s back, “I love the decor in here. Rustic and earthy. Very homey. But I can’t help noticing there’s nothing about Christmas here. No nativities or baby Jesuses or jolly old St. Nicks.”
An old woman sitting to his left with stringy silver hair and piercing grey-blue eyes turned to face him. “We don’t mark Christmas here,” she said. “We don’t keep with the rituals of an invader religion from the Middle East. We observe the traditional ways of the European here. Of the Welsh and German, the Norse and Celtic and the Icelandic.”
“Oh, okay,” the man said. “I mean, my dad was German, but I…uhh. We’re in Pennsylvania.” He wanted to ask if this was some kind of race thing but thought the better of it.
The woman looked at him. “This is not Christmas. This is Yule, and today is the Solstice: the season’s end, the final night on which the darkness prevails over the day.”
“Well, I guess Happy Yule then,” the man said, raising his mug.
“God Jul,” the woman replied before turning back to face the bar.
At that, there was the sudden sound of sleighbells as the door to The Woad & Antler opened and a group of five people entered, dressed in dark wool cloaks and carrying lowered lanters. Among them loomed a tall figure covered in a flowing white sheet, fully obscured but for a protruding horse skull. The skull was festooned with a crown of holly and wild flowers, its eye sockets occupied by opalescent green glass, resembling bottles of pilsner. At their approach, the bar fell silent, and the music came to an abrupt halt.
“Trick or treaters?” the man asked the barman, now turned to greet the visitors. “Who’s got the candy?”
“The Mari Lwyd has come wassailing,” the barman replied.
The man chuckled and raised his glass. “Well, cheers then,” he said, ”I’m enjoying your beer here, Ms. Lwyd. Care to sign an autograph?”
The group, led presumably by the Mari Lwyd, she of the ominous horse skull, turned and approached the man. As he sat nervously upright in his seat, he found himself now face-to-face with the skull. The skull’s lower jaw opened as though on a rudimentary hinge, and a voice from somewhere inside the sheet produced the word, “Pwnco.”
“Uhh…” the man said. “Sprechen sie Englisch?”
“Pwnco,” repeated the woman at the bar. “It’s a battle of wits. Of verse. The Mari Lwyd is challenging you. If you best her, she will leave here and venture forth to the next residence to test another.”
The man laughed, “Oh, like a poetry slam? I’ve got this.” Looking around the room, he asked, jokingly, “Hey, anybody know a good rhyme for Nantucket?”
The occupants of The Woad & Antler sat in reverent silence. The man stopped laughing and turned again to face the skull in amusement and anticipation. After a moment or two, the Mari Lywd’s jaw unhinged again.
Two days before all thanks were said,
She closed the door, your table dead.
No bread was broke, no hand held fast—
The warmth you knew slipped to the past.
You fled from roads that knew your name,
Took turns at random, coin-flip game.
A week you dwell now this town in,
A borrowed hearth, a rented skin.
You sleep where strangers rest and go,
With grief for company, quiet, slow.
Alone you drink, alone you stay,
Counting the hours, draining days.
Yet hear me now, who walks the cold:
What’s lost is not the fate you hold.
The year breaks here—and thus the pain.
The sun will turn. You shall remain.
The man rose suddenly from his barstool, wide-eyed and ashen. “What the… Nan… tuck?!” he said, yet all levity had vanished from his affect.
“Your turn,” whispered the woman next to him in sympathy. The barman looked away while the pub’s other patrons bowed their heads uncomfortably, now fully invested in the pints before them. The Mari Lwyd and her retinue stood in silence, awaiting the man’s response.
The man slapped down a few bills on the bar, donning his coat, hat, and gloves and quickly exiting from the pub into the snowy night outside. His second beer lingered on the bar, only partially finished. And among the crumpled cash, there lay a single folded piece of notebook paper he had unwittingly left behind upon his flight.
He weighed returning to his rented room up the street, but this anonymous setting now felt public and exposed, as transparent as his heartbreak now laid bare by the Mari Lwyd’s verse. The denouement he had written for himself in just four days seemed cheapened and pathetic. He considered getting into his car and driving the few hours back to his hometown in Northeast Ohio to lick his wounds and find solace in friends and family, but his pride was too great to allow him ever to be pitied. Being wished well, the concern of others would debase him.
Instead, the man wandered without purpose into a nearby park, abandoning the plowed roads and trudging through the heavy snow toward a treeline at the far edge of the grounds. In the pale moonlight, fog of his hot breath rose like steam in the cold night air. Entering the woods through a thicket of evergreens, the man gave no real thought to his destination. He only wanted to be alone, to be unseen by his fellow man. He wished to have every connection severed, to live completely apart. Or maybe he just thought this place would be as good as anywhere else.
Ahead, he heard the sound of muted drumming and saw the faint glow of firelight in a clearing beyond the trees. Despite his current state, he found himself drawn involuntarily toward the source. At the clearing, he hunched in a snowbank, grasping the trunk of a birch tree marked with unfamiliar symbols, and beheld, just ahead, a gathering of figures around a low bonfire burning steadily in the center of the woods. Among the flames lay heavy logs, carefully situated end to end. Those around the fire swayed in unison, some holding cradle drums and lanterns, their faces obscured by heavy hoods. The air was redolent with pine sap, smoke, and damp earth.
The man wondered if the revelers waited for the Mari Lwyd or for something else entirely, a different old god or spectre from a distant past. He watched the figures sway in communion around the fire, united in ritual and commemorating not the end itself, not oblivion, but the terminus of one cycle and the genesis of another. The days shortened to a point, and then they lengthened again. The leaves fell away from the branches and died, the fruits of the vine were harvested or, instead, rotted in the open air, but then everything reemerged anew.
The sun will turn, you shall remain.
The man reached into his coat pocket for the paper he had been carrying. He thought he would walk forward into the clearing and past the figures and deposit that terrible missive into the flames, but as his hands searched the pocket’s interior, they came up empty. The man laughed, knowing immediately what had happened, yet he came forth anyway. No one acknowledged his presence as he approached the fire. With empty hands, the man cast the null contents into the flames and watched them become consumed. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of the participants slowly turn in his direction and offer a brief smile and nod.
When the man returned to The Woad & Antler, it was as he had found it earlier in the day. The music was lively, the conversations were full of merriment, and the fire burned brightly in the hearth. The man reached the bar and occupied the same stool just left of center. His money was still on the bar, and his second pint of Mari Lwyd still held a quarter of its contents. The man lifted the glass to his mouth and emptied it before sighing approvingly.
“Another one, friend?” said the barman, now turned to face him with a warm smile.
“Yes, please,” said the man. “Hey, uhhh, did I leave a sheet of paper on the bar when I…uhhh…was called away earlier?”
On the stool next to him, the same old woman from before motioned with her head toward the fire in the hearth. Her pale blue eyes glistened in the firelight, and the strings of silver hair framed her open face like tinsel.
The man smiled and nodded. “God Jul,” he said.
“God Jul,” repeated the woman, laying her slender hand across his forearm.
Around the pub hung evergreen boughs and garlands of fir, pine, and yew draped over doorframes and along the bar itself, and at random intervals, holly and ivy dangled wild and asymmetrical, tied with leather strips and lengths of twine, sometimes intermingled with sprigs of bright rowan. On the opposite wall of the bar, a fire blazed in the large open hearth, its contents consisting of a single log roughly the size of an intact tree trunk. Upon closer examination, there were ornate symbols carved into the log, but the man was unable to discern their meaning. Along the hearth were apples, crusts of hard bread, and cups of ale near an empty stool unoccupied by any of the pub’s denizens.
Above the din of fiddles, pipes, and hand drums emitting from the pub's overhead speakers, the man leaned toward the barman and asked, “Yeah, can I get some kind of Christmas ale or…?”
“Nothing of that sort here at The Woad & Antler,” the barman replied, “but we have just tapped a few firkins of our local seasonal brew.
“Uhh…sure. That sounds great,” the man said.
At that, the barman retrieved a dimpled glass mug from under the bar and held it at a slight angle under the silver tap of a small wooden barrel resting atop the bar. The glass filled with a reddish auburn liquid capped with a full inch of off-white foam. “An imperial pint of Mari Lwyd,” he announced, placing the mug before the man.
“Mari Lwyd?” the man asked.
“Yes,” the barman replied. “The Grey Mare. Perhaps she’ll even make an appearance tonight for the solstice.”
The man took a sip of the ale, nodded approvingly, and then drank a fuller gulp. He tasted hints of cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and nutmeg with a strong alcoholic finish and a lingering aftertaste of something like anise or licorice. Wormwood? he thought to himself, being reminded of absinthe or even vermouth. The ale warmed and soothed him, and before long, he had emptied his glass and ordered a second.
“So, listen,” the man said to the barman’s back, “I love the decor in here. Rustic and earthy. Very homey. But I can’t help noticing there’s nothing about Christmas here. No nativities or baby Jesuses or jolly old St. Nicks.”
An old woman sitting to his left with stringy silver hair and piercing grey-blue eyes turned to face him. “We don’t mark Christmas here,” she said. “We don’t keep with the rituals of an invader religion from the Middle East. We observe the traditional ways of the European here. Of the Welsh and German, the Norse and Celtic and the Icelandic.”
“Oh, okay,” the man said. “I mean, my dad was German, but I…uhh. We’re in Pennsylvania.” He wanted to ask if this was some kind of race thing but thought the better of it.
The woman looked at him. “This is not Christmas. This is Yule, and today is the Solstice: the season’s end, the final night on which the darkness prevails over the day.”
“Well, I guess Happy Yule then,” the man said, raising his mug.
“God Jul,” the woman replied before turning back to face the bar.
At that, there was the sudden sound of sleighbells as the door to The Woad & Antler opened and a group of five people entered, dressed in dark wool cloaks and carrying lowered lanters. Among them loomed a tall figure covered in a flowing white sheet, fully obscured but for a protruding horse skull. The skull was festooned with a crown of holly and wild flowers, its eye sockets occupied by opalescent green glass, resembling bottles of pilsner. At their approach, the bar fell silent, and the music came to an abrupt halt.
“Trick or treaters?” the man asked the barman, now turned to greet the visitors. “Who’s got the candy?”
“The Mari Lwyd has come wassailing,” the barman replied.
The man chuckled and raised his glass. “Well, cheers then,” he said, ”I’m enjoying your beer here, Ms. Lwyd. Care to sign an autograph?”
The group, led presumably by the Mari Lwyd, she of the ominous horse skull, turned and approached the man. As he sat nervously upright in his seat, he found himself now face-to-face with the skull. The skull’s lower jaw opened as though on a rudimentary hinge, and a voice from somewhere inside the sheet produced the word, “Pwnco.”
“Uhh…” the man said. “Sprechen sie Englisch?”
“Pwnco,” repeated the woman at the bar. “It’s a battle of wits. Of verse. The Mari Lwyd is challenging you. If you best her, she will leave here and venture forth to the next residence to test another.”
The man laughed, “Oh, like a poetry slam? I’ve got this.” Looking around the room, he asked, jokingly, “Hey, anybody know a good rhyme for Nantucket?”
The occupants of The Woad & Antler sat in reverent silence. The man stopped laughing and turned again to face the skull in amusement and anticipation. After a moment or two, the Mari Lywd’s jaw unhinged again.
Two days before all thanks were said,
She closed the door, your table dead.
No bread was broke, no hand held fast—
The warmth you knew slipped to the past.
You fled from roads that knew your name,
Took turns at random, coin-flip game.
A week you dwell now this town in,
A borrowed hearth, a rented skin.
You sleep where strangers rest and go,
With grief for company, quiet, slow.
Alone you drink, alone you stay,
Counting the hours, draining days.
Yet hear me now, who walks the cold:
What’s lost is not the fate you hold.
The year breaks here—and thus the pain.
The sun will turn. You shall remain.
The man rose suddenly from his barstool, wide-eyed and ashen. “What the… Nan… tuck?!” he said, yet all levity had vanished from his affect.
“Your turn,” whispered the woman next to him in sympathy. The barman looked away while the pub’s other patrons bowed their heads uncomfortably, now fully invested in the pints before them. The Mari Lwyd and her retinue stood in silence, awaiting the man’s response.
The man slapped down a few bills on the bar, donning his coat, hat, and gloves and quickly exiting from the pub into the snowy night outside. His second beer lingered on the bar, only partially finished. And among the crumpled cash, there lay a single folded piece of notebook paper he had unwittingly left behind upon his flight.
He weighed returning to his rented room up the street, but this anonymous setting now felt public and exposed, as transparent as his heartbreak now laid bare by the Mari Lwyd’s verse. The denouement he had written for himself in just four days seemed cheapened and pathetic. He considered getting into his car and driving the few hours back to his hometown in Northeast Ohio to lick his wounds and find solace in friends and family, but his pride was too great to allow him ever to be pitied. Being wished well, the concern of others would debase him.
Instead, the man wandered without purpose into a nearby park, abandoning the plowed roads and trudging through the heavy snow toward a treeline at the far edge of the grounds. In the pale moonlight, fog of his hot breath rose like steam in the cold night air. Entering the woods through a thicket of evergreens, the man gave no real thought to his destination. He only wanted to be alone, to be unseen by his fellow man. He wished to have every connection severed, to live completely apart. Or maybe he just thought this place would be as good as anywhere else.
Ahead, he heard the sound of muted drumming and saw the faint glow of firelight in a clearing beyond the trees. Despite his current state, he found himself drawn involuntarily toward the source. At the clearing, he hunched in a snowbank, grasping the trunk of a birch tree marked with unfamiliar symbols, and beheld, just ahead, a gathering of figures around a low bonfire burning steadily in the center of the woods. Among the flames lay heavy logs, carefully situated end to end. Those around the fire swayed in unison, some holding cradle drums and lanterns, their faces obscured by heavy hoods. The air was redolent with pine sap, smoke, and damp earth.
The man wondered if the revelers waited for the Mari Lwyd or for something else entirely, a different old god or spectre from a distant past. He watched the figures sway in communion around the fire, united in ritual and commemorating not the end itself, not oblivion, but the terminus of one cycle and the genesis of another. The days shortened to a point, and then they lengthened again. The leaves fell away from the branches and died, the fruits of the vine were harvested or, instead, rotted in the open air, but then everything reemerged anew.
The sun will turn, you shall remain.
The man reached into his coat pocket for the paper he had been carrying. He thought he would walk forward into the clearing and past the figures and deposit that terrible missive into the flames, but as his hands searched the pocket’s interior, they came up empty. The man laughed, knowing immediately what had happened, yet he came forth anyway. No one acknowledged his presence as he approached the fire. With empty hands, the man cast the null contents into the flames and watched them become consumed. From the corner of his eye, he saw one of the participants slowly turn in his direction and offer a brief smile and nod.
When the man returned to The Woad & Antler, it was as he had found it earlier in the day. The music was lively, the conversations were full of merriment, and the fire burned brightly in the hearth. The man reached the bar and occupied the same stool just left of center. His money was still on the bar, and his second pint of Mari Lwyd still held a quarter of its contents. The man lifted the glass to his mouth and emptied it before sighing approvingly.
“Another one, friend?” said the barman, now turned to face him with a warm smile.
“Yes, please,” said the man. “Hey, uhhh, did I leave a sheet of paper on the bar when I…uhhh…was called away earlier?”
On the stool next to him, the same old woman from before motioned with her head toward the fire in the hearth. Her pale blue eyes glistened in the firelight, and the strings of silver hair framed her open face like tinsel.
The man smiled and nodded. “God Jul,” he said.
“God Jul,” repeated the woman, laying her slender hand across his forearm.
November 28, 2025
Short Fiction: Shelter in Place
Hurston writes, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer.” Sitting there that day, 365 days beyond the tragedy, we weren’t exactly sure which of these it had been, only that it was a long, punishing period of trial and hardship, of pain and loss. Some of us had stoically persevered while others had fallen apart and been reassembled with the help of friends and loved ones and, maybe, even the town itself.
The first speaker that day was the mayor, and we all listened politely to his banal remarks about overcoming grief and leaning on one another. Many of our minds wandered to to-do lists and work obligations or to kids needing to be ferried to or from youth sports events, but we all applauded at the speech’s conclusion and felt something like goodwill. He wasn’t a bad man, just a bureaucrat.
Next, it was the school principal, and when her voice broke and quavered partway through her speech, we all felt genuine compassion for her. She had been there that day at Burton Elementary School, had taken cover under her desk in her office as the Maniac–his name doesn’t deserve to be preserved here for posterity–rampaged through the fourth-grade hallway on that brisk April Tuesday morning and transformed the lives of everyone in this small, tight-knit community.
After that, the chief of police took the stage and began by rehashing some of the chronology, not that anyone needed a reminder. For some of us, our lives had come to an end that day, and what we lived now was an unsatisfying sequel. Chief Bill didn’t linger over the lurid specifics long: the tragedy of the first classroom and the unutterable horror of the second, but we all held those details in our minds. We remembered how the first responders sobbed without abandon when they entered the first room and how a few had been physically ill upon encountering the second, but that was inappropriate to mention on a day like today.
Besides, a few of the families from that second classroom were here among us now, at least those who hadn’t left town in the aftermath. We wondered about those families, where they were now, whether the current classmates of their children knew what they’d endured and taken part in on that day. Obviously, we weren’t judging the families; their children had survived. We wondered, though, if the parents ever looked at their kids–the boys and girls of Mrs. Thornton’s 4th-grade class–and felt any faint sense of fear or revulsion.
When the Maniac arrived that day, the hallways were still. Although construction paper drawings of astronauts and dinosaurs adorned the lockers in the hallways and the teachers’ doors were decorated with festive spring-themed class photos, there was barely a sound to be heard throughout the building. No kids ran or skipped to the drinking fountain. No one pushed or shoved or struggled with the complicated calculus of lining up properly on their way to lunch or PE. No teachers barked out reprimands for running or horseplay. The only sound the Maniac heard as he entered the 4th-grade corridor was a faintly buzzing siren and a pre-recorded monotone voice repeating, “Attention! Shelter in place!”
The Maniac had come prepared to unleash horror upon the children and teachers of Burton that day. He was armed with two pistols–a Glock 17 and a Sig Sauer P226–with back-up clips for both and a Claymore OTF dagger for close combat. Maybe he could have been better stocked and done a little more planning, but he expected little resistance from a bunch of toddlers and a few old lady teachers.
Burton held no special significance for the Maniac. He wasn’t a former student there and had no real connection to any of the students or teachers. He chose Burton mostly at random. It wasn’t the closest school to his apartment, but it was close enough. The Maniac knew only that killing a large number of innocent children would send a chill through his entire community. A chill across the whole world.
When the Maniac finally came to Burton Elementary School on that Tuesday morning in April, everyone was well prepared for what to do. Fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Harris, bolted the door to room 107 and switched off the lights. She and her 15 students crouched along the classroom wall below the whiteboard so as not to be visible from the hallway or the outside windows. Throughout Burton, other teachers and classrooms full of students did the same. They had been trained through semi-monthly shelter-in-place drills to know exactly how to respond to a situation like this. If they felt apprehension this morning, it was offset by their readiness.
Across the hallway from Mrs. Harris’s 4B Shooting Stars, Ms. Thornton’s students in room 110 were also getting ready. Savannah S. sat sharpening her pencils to a fine point. Lilah G. practiced parrying with a pair of pointed scissors. Brandon J. and Ayden T. constructed piles of textbooks arranged in descending weight on either side of the classroom door, while Bella H., Emmy S., and Rachel S. stocked the classroom tables at the front of the room with staplers, paperweights, bookends, and a hefty snowglobe, all easily accessible. The 4F Supernovas had also been training, and at the moment the Maniac appeared in the 4th-grade hallway, Ms. Thornton’s students were all set.
While the students of Burton Elementary School had been taught through repetition what to do in an active shooter scenario–lock the door, turn off the lights, draw the blinds, silence phones, etc.--Ms. Thornton had developed an entirely different sort of pedagogy in preparation for an intruder.
“I call the program GET,” Ms. Thornton had told 4F at the beginning of the school year, writing the three letters of the acronym on the whiteboard for effect. “G.E.T. stands for Groin, Eyes, Throat, and if anyone comes into this classroom with the intention of hurting us, we’re going to GET them.”
While the other classrooms at Burton practiced sitting in silence in the dark and the teachers worked on calming breathing techniques, Ms. Thornton drilled her students on close-quarter hand-to-hand combat using common classroom items. Sometimes she borrowed the CPR dummy from the PE office, and students practiced gouging its eyes and throat with safety scissors or throwing science textbooks at it from a distance. Other times, Ms. Thornton donned a padded suit and face mask and entered the classroom firing a Nerf dartgun indiscriminately while her students overturned tables and practiced returning fire by hurling their shoes and other makeshift projectiles at this ersatz assassin.
It sounds ridiculous now, and had that hypothetical event not actually come to pass, we might have laughed about eccentric Ms. Thornton and her crack commando unit of paramilitary preteens. Strange as she was, we know Ms. Thornton’s heart was in the right place, and, to be fair, all 18 of her students walked out of Burton that day, blood-stained and strangely exhilarated, having passed the ultimate high-stakes summative assessment of nearly a school year’s worth of direct instruction.
Now, a year later, we sit in Burton Elementary’s gymnasium as the superintendent reads a list of the dead: one security guard, Carol, the front office lady, Mrs. Harris, and, of course, Mrs. Harris’s 15 students. These are the modern-day martyrs of our community, exalted figures whose likenesses appear on t-shirts and billboards and local television programs. Each person is a household name here, and no one in our town holds a more exalted position than the parents of those 15 kids, whose lives were so cruelly shortened on that tragic day.
Ms. Thornton is long gone, having opted for an early retirement and relocated up north to be near her sister and nieces. Most of 4F have moved away too, but some of them still live in town and are homeschooled. Two of them, Savannah S. and Bella H., actually stayed at Burton and are just a month shy of finishing 5th grade. We sometimes wonder how they interact with their peers. Are they feared or respected? Do they have friends or do they sit isolated during lunchtime at cafeteria tables, gazing down at their plastic forks and wondering about their utility in a moment of emergency?
We wonder about the Maniac sometimes too. Not about what led him to the school that day, which is an uninteresting, clichéd story of mediocrity and resentment but about what his last moments were like as he exited Mrs. Harris’s classroom triumphantly, having executed all of its occupants, and forced his way into Ms. Thornton’s room. What were his first thoughts when he realized they’d been expecting him, and how long did he survive as those small children crouched over him, bashing and blinding and slicing and eviscerating him?
Mostly, though, we wonder about the parents of some of those 18 surviving boys and girls who are here among us today, watching the whole community celebrate the dead children of some other parents. Their kids are heroes, if you want to be technical about it. Think about how many other classrooms throughout the 4th-grade wing and the school itself are here today because the Maniac’s second stop became his last. Even so, we can’t help but wonder if what the parents of Mrs. Thornton’s 4F Supernovas feel most days is gratitude or envy.
Written November 2025
The first speaker that day was the mayor, and we all listened politely to his banal remarks about overcoming grief and leaning on one another. Many of our minds wandered to to-do lists and work obligations or to kids needing to be ferried to or from youth sports events, but we all applauded at the speech’s conclusion and felt something like goodwill. He wasn’t a bad man, just a bureaucrat.
Next, it was the school principal, and when her voice broke and quavered partway through her speech, we all felt genuine compassion for her. She had been there that day at Burton Elementary School, had taken cover under her desk in her office as the Maniac–his name doesn’t deserve to be preserved here for posterity–rampaged through the fourth-grade hallway on that brisk April Tuesday morning and transformed the lives of everyone in this small, tight-knit community.
After that, the chief of police took the stage and began by rehashing some of the chronology, not that anyone needed a reminder. For some of us, our lives had come to an end that day, and what we lived now was an unsatisfying sequel. Chief Bill didn’t linger over the lurid specifics long: the tragedy of the first classroom and the unutterable horror of the second, but we all held those details in our minds. We remembered how the first responders sobbed without abandon when they entered the first room and how a few had been physically ill upon encountering the second, but that was inappropriate to mention on a day like today.
Besides, a few of the families from that second classroom were here among us now, at least those who hadn’t left town in the aftermath. We wondered about those families, where they were now, whether the current classmates of their children knew what they’d endured and taken part in on that day. Obviously, we weren’t judging the families; their children had survived. We wondered, though, if the parents ever looked at their kids–the boys and girls of Mrs. Thornton’s 4th-grade class–and felt any faint sense of fear or revulsion.
When the Maniac arrived that day, the hallways were still. Although construction paper drawings of astronauts and dinosaurs adorned the lockers in the hallways and the teachers’ doors were decorated with festive spring-themed class photos, there was barely a sound to be heard throughout the building. No kids ran or skipped to the drinking fountain. No one pushed or shoved or struggled with the complicated calculus of lining up properly on their way to lunch or PE. No teachers barked out reprimands for running or horseplay. The only sound the Maniac heard as he entered the 4th-grade corridor was a faintly buzzing siren and a pre-recorded monotone voice repeating, “Attention! Shelter in place!”
The Maniac had come prepared to unleash horror upon the children and teachers of Burton that day. He was armed with two pistols–a Glock 17 and a Sig Sauer P226–with back-up clips for both and a Claymore OTF dagger for close combat. Maybe he could have been better stocked and done a little more planning, but he expected little resistance from a bunch of toddlers and a few old lady teachers.
Burton held no special significance for the Maniac. He wasn’t a former student there and had no real connection to any of the students or teachers. He chose Burton mostly at random. It wasn’t the closest school to his apartment, but it was close enough. The Maniac knew only that killing a large number of innocent children would send a chill through his entire community. A chill across the whole world.
When the Maniac finally came to Burton Elementary School on that Tuesday morning in April, everyone was well prepared for what to do. Fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Harris, bolted the door to room 107 and switched off the lights. She and her 15 students crouched along the classroom wall below the whiteboard so as not to be visible from the hallway or the outside windows. Throughout Burton, other teachers and classrooms full of students did the same. They had been trained through semi-monthly shelter-in-place drills to know exactly how to respond to a situation like this. If they felt apprehension this morning, it was offset by their readiness.
Across the hallway from Mrs. Harris’s 4B Shooting Stars, Ms. Thornton’s students in room 110 were also getting ready. Savannah S. sat sharpening her pencils to a fine point. Lilah G. practiced parrying with a pair of pointed scissors. Brandon J. and Ayden T. constructed piles of textbooks arranged in descending weight on either side of the classroom door, while Bella H., Emmy S., and Rachel S. stocked the classroom tables at the front of the room with staplers, paperweights, bookends, and a hefty snowglobe, all easily accessible. The 4F Supernovas had also been training, and at the moment the Maniac appeared in the 4th-grade hallway, Ms. Thornton’s students were all set.
While the students of Burton Elementary School had been taught through repetition what to do in an active shooter scenario–lock the door, turn off the lights, draw the blinds, silence phones, etc.--Ms. Thornton had developed an entirely different sort of pedagogy in preparation for an intruder.
“I call the program GET,” Ms. Thornton had told 4F at the beginning of the school year, writing the three letters of the acronym on the whiteboard for effect. “G.E.T. stands for Groin, Eyes, Throat, and if anyone comes into this classroom with the intention of hurting us, we’re going to GET them.”
While the other classrooms at Burton practiced sitting in silence in the dark and the teachers worked on calming breathing techniques, Ms. Thornton drilled her students on close-quarter hand-to-hand combat using common classroom items. Sometimes she borrowed the CPR dummy from the PE office, and students practiced gouging its eyes and throat with safety scissors or throwing science textbooks at it from a distance. Other times, Ms. Thornton donned a padded suit and face mask and entered the classroom firing a Nerf dartgun indiscriminately while her students overturned tables and practiced returning fire by hurling their shoes and other makeshift projectiles at this ersatz assassin.
It sounds ridiculous now, and had that hypothetical event not actually come to pass, we might have laughed about eccentric Ms. Thornton and her crack commando unit of paramilitary preteens. Strange as she was, we know Ms. Thornton’s heart was in the right place, and, to be fair, all 18 of her students walked out of Burton that day, blood-stained and strangely exhilarated, having passed the ultimate high-stakes summative assessment of nearly a school year’s worth of direct instruction.
Now, a year later, we sit in Burton Elementary’s gymnasium as the superintendent reads a list of the dead: one security guard, Carol, the front office lady, Mrs. Harris, and, of course, Mrs. Harris’s 15 students. These are the modern-day martyrs of our community, exalted figures whose likenesses appear on t-shirts and billboards and local television programs. Each person is a household name here, and no one in our town holds a more exalted position than the parents of those 15 kids, whose lives were so cruelly shortened on that tragic day.
Ms. Thornton is long gone, having opted for an early retirement and relocated up north to be near her sister and nieces. Most of 4F have moved away too, but some of them still live in town and are homeschooled. Two of them, Savannah S. and Bella H., actually stayed at Burton and are just a month shy of finishing 5th grade. We sometimes wonder how they interact with their peers. Are they feared or respected? Do they have friends or do they sit isolated during lunchtime at cafeteria tables, gazing down at their plastic forks and wondering about their utility in a moment of emergency?
We wonder about the Maniac sometimes too. Not about what led him to the school that day, which is an uninteresting, clichéd story of mediocrity and resentment but about what his last moments were like as he exited Mrs. Harris’s classroom triumphantly, having executed all of its occupants, and forced his way into Ms. Thornton’s room. What were his first thoughts when he realized they’d been expecting him, and how long did he survive as those small children crouched over him, bashing and blinding and slicing and eviscerating him?
Mostly, though, we wonder about the parents of some of those 18 surviving boys and girls who are here among us today, watching the whole community celebrate the dead children of some other parents. Their kids are heroes, if you want to be technical about it. Think about how many other classrooms throughout the 4th-grade wing and the school itself are here today because the Maniac’s second stop became his last. Even so, we can’t help but wonder if what the parents of Mrs. Thornton’s 4F Supernovas feel most days is gratitude or envy.
Written November 2025
September 14, 2021
Repatriated on Kindle Vella
If you're among my TENS of readers, you may have noticed that I haven't published anything new in my novel-in-progress Repatriated in a while. It's been a busy time with big life changes, new surroundings, etc.
Anyway, the point is that I've decided to migrate Repatriated to Amazon's Kindle Vella platform, which seems to make more sense for what I'm working on and even lead to additional tens of readers. Over the next few days, I'll release the old chapters, and then sometime this month, try to get the next episode released.
Here's the link. Also, thanks for reading.
https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/s...
Anyway, the point is that I've decided to migrate Repatriated to Amazon's Kindle Vella platform, which seems to make more sense for what I'm working on and even lead to additional tens of readers. Over the next few days, I'll release the old chapters, and then sometime this month, try to get the next episode released.
Here's the link. Also, thanks for reading.
https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/s...
March 1, 2021
Repatriated: A (Serialized) Novel
I've started my next writing project: a serialized novel on Substack and the follow-up to my 2019 short story collection World Sick: Stories. If you're interested in following my progress over the next year or so, sign-up at repatriatednovel.substack.com and get new installments once or twice a month right to your email inbox.
December 22, 2019
World Sick: Stories
My first short story collection World Sick: Stories is now available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback formats.
