The seven-foot tall garbageman can cut a line along a ceiling without a ladder. He can churn concrete like butter and demo walls by bursting through their sheetrock and two-by-fours with a lowered shoulder. Not to mention, he wasn’t lying when he said he’s skilled with his hands: he’s completely capable of the finishing work that Vic Greener would’ve had to hire out for.
And all this for pennies! Vic tells Heather one night in their pulpy Queen-size bed. “I’ve heard you can work three times as fast with two people, but this is ridiculous.”
It’s this same story tonight, like every night these past few weeks. Vic wants Heather to sign off on a second mortgage for their home. His eye already on this next project—this partially burned down Cape Cod he wants to purchase. Risking every cent they had before they finish renovating the current vinyl Colonial. That way, he could keep the garbageman working for them full time, could prevent him from returning to his old job hauling asbestos and bio-solids at the waste company.
“Not forever, of course,” he says. “Just for a little while. Just until everyone finds their footing and we start moving where we need to go.”
“Where’s that exactly?” Heather says.
Well, that’s simple: on to the next foreclosure they’ll renovate. One foreclosed house after another, after the next, renting or selling, until they either keel over or amass a fortune large enough to retire on. “Trust me,” he says. “You’ll see.”
Heather stares at the churning ceiling fan—barely recognizing this man she first encountered a thousand miles from here, picking fake cocaine crumbs out of his nose. Considers the dangers of her husband’s proposal: further fusing their lives with this garbageman who had recently relapsed, abandoned his wife and child to rekindle a love affair with alcohol and methamphetamines. And yet who, somehow, through some spell of luck and pity, has once again come to occupy one-half of what used to be theirs.
“Just as long as we can have our whole house back someday,” she says finally.
Admittedly, though, since the garbageman’s return, she hasn’t observed any strangeness. No weird questions or knocks on the back door. No screaming that rattles her pots and pans through the wall. No abnormal white to his eyes. Nothing close to what happened the last time, anyway. In retrospect, they might’ve overreacted to the whole situation a few months prior.
“Might’ve?” Vic says, laughing.
Well, yeah, but even so, Heather continues. Even if there was another world in which they evicted him and his pregnant wife and their now already enormous toddler and he found out and returned from his endless bender to reap some type of revenge, she was glad things had worked out this way. With the garbageman being welcomed back by his family. (Because she knew what growing up without a father was like.) Here to help Vic succor these foreclosed houses back to life on a budget.
“At least for the time being,” she says. “Right?”
Next night, Vic reports back on the garbageman’s gratitude. “You should’ve seen him,” he tells her. “At first I thought he had spackle dust in his eye,” he says. “Then a tear rolled down his face the size of a marble.”
Heather closes the notebook she uses for accounting, removes a pair of dollar-store reading glasses, then turns off the bedside lamp. “I just hope he doesn’t think he’s going to be here forever.”
“Jesus, Heather. One thing at a time—”
Now a sound radiates through the wall and she shushes him. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” he says. The sound, already vanished.
Now Vic resumes his cryptic ritual of arranging himself for sleep, smacking and flapping the Egyptian sheets. While Heather stares at the ceiling fan, straining to listen past its chopping, blurred blades. For what she tells herself was likely a mouse nesting in the insulation in the wall. Or the rattling crib of the garbageman’s enormous toddler in the throes of a nightmare. The garbageman crushing over that of his wife’s pregnant body.
You’re being ridiculous, she tells herself, closing her eyes. If he was the five-foot tall garbageman, you wouldn’t worry at all.
Next morning, however, after an extra cup of coffee, Heather pulls into the Colonial’s driveway and comes to understand Vic’s excitement with a glance. The progress since her last visit is truly staggering. What was only a disheveled colonial a couple weeks ago is not so disheveled now. It’s quaint, really. Charming. The cracked clapboard, caulked and painted. The crooked gutters, cleaned and leveled. Even the boulders that once scarred the slanting landscape, she notices, are in the process of being repositioned into the regal rock wall she’d proposed.
Heather honks the horn, hoping to conjure her husband. To marvel with his arm around her at what a thorough job
they’ve built. Instead, after another round of honks, it’s the garbageman emerges who from the shadowy woods. Shirtless and grunting, he lumbers across the yard with another cache of stones in his bulging arms without noticing her. His long torso, straining slick with sweat, oddly hairless. Like a skinned circus goat branded with elusive tattoos she can’t decipher.
Is it cauldron or a bomb along his exposed abdomen?
A flapping crow or a knife up his arm?
A chest piece of a tower engulfed in flames or situated before a dusky sky?
She’d met all types of freaks in her travels—homeless teens, buzzing with adrenaline, who flaunted such weapons as machetes, nunchucks, ninja throwing stars. A Satanist with a tongue sliced like a serpent. A eunuch who lied. An ex-felon who, drunk on a park bench, whispered in a voice that sounded stunted from a lifetime of screaming, inviting her to look at the swastika on the head of his penis. And she hadn’t flinched at the sight of them. Not once.
But when, upon noticing her, the garbageman hisses through a clipped smile and drops the stones into a messy pile by his ankles, she doesn’t return the greeting. She waits for him to seep back into the woods, speechlessly. Then she honks again, longer now.
Finally, Vic emerges—paint-flecked and beaming—from inside the Colonial and jogs over. Throws an arm around her, presenting the house to her with the other arm. Just as the garbageman seeps from the woods again with another cache of stones that might as well have equaled three of her. “It’s unbelievable,” she says. “That man’s a monster!”
And Vic squeezes her. “Our monster.”
The morning after putting the finishing touches on the Colonial, Vic stands at the sink attacking a bowl of oatmeal. Every now and then, he peers out the window, watching for the garbageman. Not once has he tried to engage their increasingly silent son.
“I’m telling you,” he tells Heather through a cheek taut with grains. “I’m serious,” he says. “We already should be looking for the next project.”
But before Heather can respond, before she can ask if he’d gotten into the garbageman’s drugs, or if, perhaps, she might bring Junior by today, the screen door of the side entrance shrieks open and through the window the garbageman strides across the driveway in three long steps. And, like an alarm bell, Vic’s spoon rings out in his empty bowl and suddenly he’s kissing her. Saying goodbye. Then tousling Junior’s hair in his highchair. A little too violently. He pauses by the door to tell her not to wait up tonight. To go ahead and eat without him. Owing to the commute for the unforeseeable future, he’d be home later than usual. Without seeming to notice that his son had begun to cry.
“I want to ride this momentum until the wheels fall off,” he adds for emphasis, as if she’d been waiting for him to confirm what she’d already known.
Heather watches from the sink as his truck swings onto the empty road, begins sliding off behind a wall of leaves. And in that split second, she’s sure she can make out the silhouette of the garbageman sitting shotgun, his head pressed up crooked against the ceiling, like a demented birthday balloon. His mouth opening and closing like a bear trap. Then the road’s empty, and she turns on the water, begins washing before what’s left of Vic’s oatmeal can harden into a crust.
The other night, Vic told Heather that the garbageman was a talker. How he revealed his life struggles nearly every morning on these drives to work: “The stories are both entertaining and tragic!” Vic said.
He told her about the garbageman’s early love affair with drugs and alcohol—how his father began liquoring him up at the age of seven to make him into a fighter. How his father placed bets that he could pulverize teenagers, adults even, if he wanted to. A pairing of alcohol and violence that indefinitely led him to jail, prison, and then rehab, this recurring loop destined to repeat itself, off and on, until he met his wife, started his family. Until he started working the steps in AA, without which, he’d be nothing.
To which, she wanted to tell him: this sounds a lot like the yarns I used to spin.
Days, weeks pass in this fashion—every night it’s another version of the same story: at dusk, Vic pulls into the driveway, and then he and the giant stand there for a time, laughing, talking in the dying light. As if they didn’t have families—a child a piece, another one on the way for the garbageman. And Heather watches as the garbageman towers over her husband, his shadow stabbing across the yard each time he throws his head back in laughter. A deep, guttural sound that alerts every dog within a one-mile radius into a long-streaming chorus of barks, not to mention how it makes Junior cry. Until Heather calls Vic inside for dinner. Where Vic will then proceeds to talk through hungry bites of whatever it is Heather has on rotation: meat loaf, hamburger, tuna mac. About the day’s unbelievable progress. The auspicious future of renovating foreclosed houses. One after the other into the next. Before finally, as always, punctuating this talk with yet another rendition of the garbageman’s past, one that always leave her second-guessing their decision to allow him to stay. No matter how much of a golden goose or aspiring family man Vic trusts the garbageman to be.
But otherwise, the days are quiet. Boring, even. Heather gardens. Sometimes, parsing through the county foreclosure auction catalogues or working in the garden or attempting to keep Junior occupied with toys cast across the rug like rubble, Heather will hear a clanging pot or a toilet flushing. The muffled noise of the garbageman’s wife turning up the TV.
On rarer occasions, the garbageman’s enormous toddler lets loose a howl that never fails to flush every terrified robin from the yard—a sound that never fails to remind Heather of her own prolonged pregnancy.
Every time she hears the two-year old’s tantrums every day around noon, a stampede of feet stomping while Heather made turkey sandwiches, she can’t help but feel sorry for the woman. At least Junior was a quiet boy in comparison, a little older, but being home alone with a child was hard, no matter which way you put it.
One bright morning, Heather decides to bring a crate of fresh cauliflower to the side entrance. She knocks once, lightly. Then again, harder. The windchimes murmur in the oak trees above her while she waits. Just this unseen twinkling she can’t seem to trace. Then: a shuffling sound and a cascade of latches and locks releasing.
“I’m sorry,” the garbageman’s wife says, rubbing her eyes. “What time is it? Was the TV too loud?”
The sunlight seems to pain her. And her baggy white t-shirt does little to diminish the enormity of the fetus swelling inside her. Just the glimpse dredges up the discomfort of Heather's final months with her normal-sized son. Who right now, thankfully, was napping. Snoring on the monitor she kept with her, the soft cackle of static a comfort as she steps inside the foyer.
“I had no idea you were so far along,” Heather says.
“Not really,” the garbageman’s wife says, gripping the door frame for balance. Already her legs have started to quiver like a newborn baby fawn. “Only a few months,” she continues. “I know—I look like a monster.”
“Nonsense.” When Heather asks if she’s feeling alright, if she needed anything, the garbageman’s wife laughs weakly and winces as if the uterine pressure is too much.
“I’m fine,” she says. “No really. I’m sure everything will work out just like last time.” Then with a meek smile, the garbageman’s wife says, "Thanks for the cauliflower," and drifts back inside her half of the house.
But as the days pass, Heather feels compelled to check in again. She makes a habit of pressing her ear to the bottom of a glass and listening for sounds of life, trying to scheme up an excuse to stop by: a stray piece of mail or an old article of Junior’s clothing that she already knows would never fit her neighbor’s toddler. Another crate of vegetables from the garden. Then, once gaining entrance and observing the ever-expanding state of her body and the degradation of her home—piled plates and overflowing hampers of clothes, that enormous toddler staring out, bored and suspicious, from behind the screen of his crib—she feels further compelled to stay and help. Despite the woman's protests. To cook and clean. To try and bounce that enormous child on her knee until her arms grow weak. Just so someone is there in case something does go wrong. “Please, don’t,” the garbageman’s wife says: “What did you always want to be a midwife?”
One afternoon, while washing a pile of crusty dishes, Heather’s worry comes to life—suddenly, she hears the garbageman’s wife cry out, a murderous sound. And she hurries from the second kitchen they added to their home with a small camper stove. Into the living room that she’d always planned to renovated into a rec room, expecting to discover this woman split in two, bowels strewn across the pilly carpet.
But it’s only the television, a horror film.
Heather stands behind the couch, watching as onscreen a woman runs down a creaking hallway of an old farmhouse. Along this crimson wallpaper etched with a repeating pattern of ebony and leafless trees, capped with the same naked crown molding as their house, then down a curving staircase. And through a Dutch door apparently demolished with a sledgehammer earlier. Into an even darker woods that reminds Heather of her childhood. The woman shrieking as she’s chased by this tall man with a knife who slips with ease in and out of shadows.
“I don’t know why," the garbageman's wife says, suddenly: "But I can’t stop watching them.” As the woman's shrieks grow louder, more desperate, like a tortured cat. As onscreen the tall man dangles her upside down from an oak tree and begins to eviscerate her with a buzzsaw he hadn't had in the last scene. Her steaming guts spill to the ground where they appear to meld with and soak into the murderer’s shadow. The woman keeps screaming long after the disembowelment—and such a sound of suffering, like the sudden appearance of the chainsaw itself, too, seems impossible.
The garbageman’s wife smiles an apology. “This part is my least favorite,” she says. “I just like the beginnings, mostly. When no one knows what’s going to happen, you know? The long car rides to desolate cabins, fighting over which songs to play on the radio, or lakeside doing tequila body shots out of tan navels. That's what I like. You know that moment? Before their innocence is taken away?"
She waits for Heather to say something.
“Well, no, I guess?” Heather says. “Not exactly.”
But as the days pass, whenever she hears those shrieking sound, Heather soon finds herself neglecting the chores she’s offered to help with—the feast-like meals she’s preparing, the hamper of size XXXXL clothes she’s washing in between reading books or playing musical toys for Junior—and going to sit beside the garbageman’s wife while Junior naps on the monitor.
“Another?” the garbageman’s wife says each time.
“Alright.” The options, Heather realizes, are endless. Each of these movies has a sequel. Or a movie that feels like a sequel. And that movie's sequel has a sequel that has a sequel. Part one, two, three, four, five. Then the spin offs and crossovers. The parodies and rip-offs.
The higher the sequel is in the series, in her opinion, the better the movie. They’re always bloodier, always stranger. Always a ratcheting up of the perversion that came before. While mostly worse in quality, they were more predictable. Harder, for some reason, not to watch.
“Each time the killer comes back,” Heather says. Each time the killer comes back he's less scary, more cartoonish--about his violence, I mean. You almost start to root for him.”
“Always,” the garbageman’s wife says, laughing until she winces. “Without fail. You’re totally right.”
In this way, a new routine is structured—these quiet mornings spent parsing for the next foreclosure, or weeding the garden, followed by afternoons in the garbageman’s half of the house while Junior sleeps. Helping out for a little while before watching another horror movie with the garbageman’s wife. Until Vic’s truck pulls into the driveway. With the garbageman. Then dinner where she must listen to Vic’s talk of unbelievable progress juxtaposed with more dubious garbageman melodrama: the methamphetamine boxing matches his father forced him into now, the other child he fathered that killed his first love. The manslaughter charge he beat. On and on.
The repetition almost makes it normal for Heather. Lulls her into a sense that the garbageman’s story was just another story within the grand scheme of their life, as if what had begun as a temporary arrangement now threatened to be forever. Or at least seems that way—when one night before bed Vic turns to Heather and suggests they invite the garbageman and his wife over for a barbeque. To show them that they aren’t just “tenants and employees” to them, but valued friends.
“Friends?” Heather says. “I’m not sure if I’m comfortable with that—”
But Heather doesn’t go further at the risk of sounding superior when:
“Well, that’s unfortunate,” Vic tells her. “Because I already asked him.” When Heather doesn’t say anything, he continues, “We were wrong been wrong before, weren’t we? And people change. Just imagine how costly this all would have been—”
“Can’t argue with any of that,” Heather cuts him off, and turns out the light.
Later that weekend, Heather stirs lemonade while Vic grills an inordinate number of hamburgers and Italian sausages that he’d bought special. The last time he’d gone shopping, Heather couldn’t tell you. He winks at her and sets the meat out on the patio in the Tiki torch-lit garden she always wanted. “I know it seems ridiculous. But you won’t believe how much food he puts down.”
Then, like a que, the side door creaks open and the garbageman, already slick with sweat, carries the garbageman’s wife’s swollen body through the soft black dirt in his tattooed arms. His boots suck up the mud. “Every time she stands up lately, she falls over,” he says, laughing. “You’d think she was the drunkard.”
Heather laughs politely, sits down. Both guests appear to have dressed up for this occasion. He: in a paisley button up with a few of the buttons blown. She: in a floral-print dress behind which her enormous stomach strains to contain itself. Heather hands them each a lemonade. They seem nervous. Jittery, even. The garbageman downs his glass in a single gulp, begins crunching up the ice in his jaw like he does. So she pours him another.
“I just want to thank you for inviting us,” he says, downing the lemonade again.
“You’re very welcome,” Heather says, refilling his glass.
“No, I mean—” and the garbageman says they have no idea how grateful he is for this second chance, allowing him back into the home. If not for Vic and Heather, he doesn’t know where his family could’ve gone. Or if he would’ve been able to regain control of himself at all. “We’re just so lucky,” he says. “So lucky. After all the misfortunes I’ve had. If there’s ever anything he could do to pay them back.”
“Nonsense,” Vic says, winking at Heather. “We’re the lucky ones.”
Now Heather busies herself doling out buns and salad. Waiting for the small talk to end. For the dinner conversation to begin. To stop from worrying over how entangled their families have become—the proof: them dining together here—and how wrong it feels, suddenly, much like dinners always felt with her stepfather, when she considered how little Vic paid the garbageman relative to the cost of rent.
Heather hurries to refills the garbageman’s glass. To refill it again. When would they leave on their own? she wonders, her gaze shifting from the garbageman to his enormous son, already taller and stronger than Junior, despite being only half his age. As Junior struggles to help him turn over a number of the walk’s heavy flagstones in search of the salamanders nestled safe in the cool, black dirt beneath.
“No, really,” the garbageman says.
Heather keeps waiting for the opportunity to ask the garbageman’s wife—who’d barely touched her plate—if she feels alright, if she preferred anything else to eat. Or if she’d been taking the vitamins she’d dropped off. However, between bites of a second, third, then fourth hamburger, the garbageman just keeps talking.
Through hanks of meat and scraps of buns, he proceeds to issue a vivid description of the dark and proliferating energy that permeates the world. This ancient evil smoke that drifts about, penetrates every moment. Nature is a natural evil, he explains. A witch’s brew of mistrust that embeds itself in others. How only a lucky few manage to extricate themselves from that environment and prove exempt from such fear-based suffering.
"And you, Vic, and you, Heather," the garbageman says: "You, my friends, hail from that select few." He rips off another half a sausage, his face pearled with sweat: "You’re the untouched."
Afterward, the dishes have been washed, and Junior has been put to bed. Vic and Heather sit at the kitchen table, drinking vodka. Alone. This man she used to know. And there is the silence with the occasional clanging of pots, the usual toilet flushing next door. The TV talk and laughter too loud through the wall. The beginning part of the horror movie before anything goes sour, Heather guesses.
The night had not been a success, but she doesn’t say that. Instead, she asks: “Has he been like that ever since you hired him? Has he always talked that much? What did he mean when he said: I don’t know what I would’ve done?”
For a while, Vic doesn’t answer, rather rests on the verge of speaking. Any moment she expects to say something like:
No, the garbageman usually wasn’t like that. Not exactly anyway. But not to worry. Because, like the garbageman said, he was only excited, only offering an immensity of gratitude—
“Ahhhhhhhhhh!” Now Heather screams a short scream. Nowhere near as what the final girls in the garbageman’s wife’s horror movies belt out, but close. At the sudden series of knocks at the kitchen’s old Dutch door right behind her. That shudders the wood in its frame, triggering the empty glasses lining the shelves ring like a battery of off-key tuning forks. A door which, despite her pleading eyes, Vic opens and the garbageman ducks inside.
“What do we owe the pleasure?”
To which, with his head pressing against the ceiling, yet again to her horror, the garbageman begins apologizing:
“I’m sorry,” he says. “So sorry. I don’t mean to intrude.” It’s just that he had this idea, he goes on to explain. And this idea that excited him. This new idea, even his wife was excited about it. If they could spare another minute he’d love to give them the run-down. Would they spare him one last indefatigable kindness?
“Alright.”
“A treehouse,” he says through a gritted-teeth smile. “A big mother right out there in the yard.” What did they think about that? For the children to grow up on. Between those two strong oak trees just outside Heather’s garden. For the children, but also for them. The Greeners. To say thank you. He points out the window, frames the place with his gargantuan hands. Can’t they see it already? And of course, it’d cost them nothing. He already worked everything out. A friend of his, as it turns out, had salvaged a pile of lumber that was being discarded on one of his old routes. “Pressure treated. The good stuff,” he says. “The best kind.”
Now Vic looks at Heather. And Heather looks back at Vic. And they look at each other. And between them looms the question of the past few months—what who colonizing who?— while the garbageman’s head continues pressing up against the ceiling, crooked and bent.
But Vic must’ve mistaken, or disregarded her answer, because then he says, “Why not?”
Next morning—Sunday—Heather stands at the kitchen window, watches the garbageman ferry lumber into the backyard. Five two-by-fours under each arm, stacks of plywood held overhead. A mountain pile of pressure-treated lumber forms. More than any man should be able to carry.
At the table, Vic sips his coffee. “Well he certainly got an early start.”
Around lunchtime, Vic goes out to help him. And Heather observes the interaction in the window: the garbageman’s huge hands wave Vic off, and continue to do so, dismissing him and dismissing him until Vic returns to the kitchen, laughing and arching his eyebrows:
“He said that it’s Sunday and that I should spend my time watching movies or hanging out with my family. No need to concern ourselves.”
Yet all through the day, Heather does concern herself. Through the window, she watches as the garbageman works. While Vic watches movies. A triple feature of action films he’d once scoff at. Through lunch, through dinner, without stopping. While he continues, she listens to his nailgun popping and his circular saws ripping through the pressure-treated lumber. Watches as the garbageman begins erecting a set of stairs that lead high up into the leafy canopy of trees.
“What about his wife?” she says. “Who’s making sure she’s doing alright?”
Next morning, sure enough, the garbageman’s out there. Early. Or still. “Like he never came inside at all,” she says between sips of coffee at the sink. As the seven-foot tall garbageman saws and nailguns the pressure-treated lumber and her husband attacks his oatmeal. As the garbageman builds more stairs, more platforms. Erects the walls. Cuts windows out from inside which their children, one already towering over the other, will wave down through leaves and gnarled branches.
But then the garbageman disappears into the thick billows of leaves.
“I told you he was a hard worker,” Vic says, and kisses her. There’s a foreign odor to him, like he’d spent the night sweating, too. As he sets his bowl in the sink and tousled Junior’s hair before driving off down the road with the garbageman talking beside him.
At dusk, after Vic’s pickup pulls in, and Heather observes no talking, no laughing. No milling about in the dusk. Instead, the garbageman b-lines straight for the backyard, resumes working. After a fourteen-hour day. Where he proceeds to saw and nailgun into the night. To build more stairs, more platforms. More railings. Constructing his thanks.
Slick with sweat, he adds to his mountainous pile. More lumber, more stairs, more platform stairs. Lumber, stairs. Platforms, lumber, stairs, lumber, platform, ferry, cut more windows, lumber, stairs, stairs, lumber—
And through all this Heather watches. Through the window. Into the night and each morning. For days, she observes the tree house taking shape. Every morning, between the two strong oaks trees, the treehouse grows. Branches and spreads. Like another splintering of her home. Now between a third strong oak. Now a four. Its structure becoming less traditional now. Less predictable. Multi-level. Jagged, oblong. A cartoon. At least the parts she could see anyway. Reminiscent of a stack of the shacks she’d seen once in Mexico during their last vacation.
And each time she asks, Vic answers: “He seems fine.” And each time she asks the garbageman’s wife, she answers similarly, her eyes glued to another massacre onscreen. Another woman running down a stairway, a hallway, through the woods while synth and string music signals the unseen killer’s right behind her. Fine, fine, fine.
“I don’t know if I want Junior playing on that,” Heather finally says one morning. At the sink again with her coffee.
“He really is a master carpenter,” Vic tells her. “I wouldn’t worry. He’s just a dedicated father who wants to build something his family can enjoy,” he says. “Something in the shape of his love. To set things right. That’s all. Nothing more than that. You can understand that, right?”
Every night, it’s these same sentiments: family man, a dedicated father. Just trying to do what’s right. Not to mention: all our progress. Always the progress. What the future held.
“Do you have any leads on our next house?” Vic says as the hammering and sawing and nailgunning proliferates above them. As through the window, Heather watches the treehouse expand through the oak trees all around the house. Over the sink, then the bedroom window. Higher. Higher still. Out there. She senses him there.
She can hear him up there, morning and night. All night, even. The garbageman now, a towering darkness in this new house, one that seeps in and out of shadow. One that Vic doesn’t seem to notice. Taking over theirs. A stack of small, foreclosed houses, she thinks, a continuum of future and past. Like those long staircases, winding stairs that are never ending.
Eventually these sounds—the sawing and nailgunning, coupled with moans and shrieks and hurried footsteps—works their way into her dreams. Into a shadowy tower of echoes, a cascade of boarded walls that no matter how much she might have hoped otherwise, she knew, would surely one day come crashing down.
Harris Lahti's work appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM Magazine, Hobart, Bomb, New York Tyrant, Epiphany, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. He edits fiction for Fence and Post Road, and paints houses in NY's Hudson Valley. Read more: harrislahti.com