My short story Dear Dad was published in Issue 2 of the literary magazine Cinder Quarterly, and you can get it here on Amazon. It’s arguably my strangest work yet, and serves as a prequel to the story The Bitterness of Honey in the anthology Appalling Stories: 13 Tales of Social Injustice. Don’t let the weirdness turn you off; it’s a solid, fun piece of work that stands on its own. Let me prove it with this excerpt:

Dear Dad:

That’s how you’re supposed to start a letter, right? With “dear.” Even though we haven’t been dear to each other since you kicked me out of the house. No, I’m not writing to rehash the same old shit, so you can keep reading. I know you thought you had good reasons for throwing me out. You and Mom. Maybe I’d’ve done the same thing in your position. I don’t know. I mean, I doubt it, because who puts his only son out on the street for flunking out of college? Other than you. Anyway, lately I’ve been doing some real thinking about this, and I get it now. You were testing me. Putting ice down the garbage disposal to sharpen the blades.

Well, guess what? It worked. You and your MAGA hat-wearing buddies bitch and moan all the time about millennials being weak, entitled, and lazy. Not me. Not anymore. Your snowflake millennial son’s responsible for the end of the whole world. How’s that for accomplishment, you asshole?

Sorry. It just slipped out. Amazing how the same cycles of behavior repeat themselves over and over. You harangue me, I call you names, you tell me to get out, I leave. I guess that’s why they’re called cycles of behavior instead of lines of behavior.

I won’t bother going over the old stuff, before I moved out of state. I’ve been Facebook-stalking Mom’s account, so I know that my “friends” were keeping tabs on me, telling her (and you) what I’ve been doing. I can’t let you know where I am now for reasons that’ll become clear soon, but I can say that I moved to Madison, Wisconsin a year and a half ago. Yes, the liberal paradise, where everyone drives a Prius and has tattoos and calls each other “zhe” and “xher.” Or, at least, that’s how you see it. You’d be surprised at how strait-laced it actually is, especially for a college town.

And now, you better be sitting down for this: I was working for…Greenpeace.

Ha! I’ll bet your face went all white. I wasn’t blocking Japanese ships from harpooning whales or anything like that. I was a canvasser. I walked around the suburbs with a clipboard and a partner and a credit card reader, asking for donations from decent people to keep not-decent people like you from fucking up the one planet we have to live on. As it turns out this was not only a gigantic waste of time, but actually contributed to the end of civilization, but I didn’t know that then. Unlike you, I was trying to make a difference, not a profit.

It’s a tasty blend of science fiction, horror, and environmentalism wrapped in a page-turning narrative crust, and you can get it, plus several other stories from some truly talented writers, for less than $2.00!