HERON

GREENESMITH

Ten for Ever and Ever for Tenner

This story originally appeared on January 23rd in the Piltdown Review. Across the valley sat a small house made of earth. From my front door I could see the thick, shallowly sloped, sunbaked roof and squat chimney, pale between the pines. No smoke ever rose—the house had been abandoned for twenty years. When I was younger, a woman had lived there alone. Smoke rose then, and sounds of chopping wood if the wind and weather were right. The woman had disappeared the day my mother

Deserved It

This story originally appeared in The Collapsar in April, 2018. The day I killed S was the happiest day of my life. He was a miserable man. Miserable and cruel and when I cut across his throat with that little knife, I messed it all up and he died so slowly and said so many terrible things, or tried to, that I laughed and laughed. He wasn’t a miserable man. I mean he was, it’s just he was so handsome. And when he turned his light on, goddamn, it was like the sun. His smile wa

Routine

This story originally appeared in Hematapoiesis Press in March 2018. The therapy program is preloaded with delicate ambient music that floats just beyond my hearing – little tinkles and sighs that catch my attention, then disappear when I try to focus. Part of the experience, designed to maximize something and minimize other things and put me in a receptive state and make me alert and relaxed at the same time. I’m surrounded by what the program calls its room: deep, soothin

The Juniper Bush

The Juniper Bush originally appeared on Entropy Mag on December 31, 2016. Last summer my son disappeared. The police said some folks saw him walking along the river bank after school. The river was still rough the day they found his backpack and his shoes, three days after he didn’t come home from summer school. It had rained the day he disappeared. They never found his body. Standing there with the police, holding my daughter, I watched white peaks froth and foam in the dark

Hana's Hood

This story first appeared in milk journal. on November 3, 2015. Some time ago, before you were born, a young girl lived with her mother and her sisters in a town of only women. The girl was almost eight years old, and her name was Hana. She was wild as the wind and cheerful as rabbits. Hana shared her dark skin, dark hair, and dark eyes with her sisters, her mothers, and many of the women in town. Her hair stood up from her head as if surprised, and her limbs were long and sl

A Woman Lives By Herself

This story first appeared in Broad! Magazine on November 3, 2015. A woman lives by herself in a medium sized house in a small orchard, tucked away from her nowhere village, near a nowhere forest, equidistant from the two roads that lead perpendicularly out of the village, heading nowhere. The orchard was her parents’ orchard and her grandparents’ before that. She grew up with these trees and this house, and moved back in after her husband died working at the village mill. She