This is a preview of the short story A Healthy Dose Of, written 2008.
No one’s been out here in over forty years. You open the door of this dilapidated house half expecting to find rainbows behind the cracked windows and peeling paint. You want a story you can tell your crackpot friends in the city, you want whirlwind photos to accompany your compelling narrative of exploration and the thrill of life. What you find instead is “quaint,” as you’d put it: a desert of a living room, with dust in all the places you’d expect it to be, air as stale as if no one had ever lived there. It’s exciting nonetheless, apparently, or at least will have to do. You’ll search for something big and ignore the details; I know the type. There’s a couch in the corner, oddly small and at a strange angle to the floor. Sagging with age, you assume. What they say about assumptions is true, honey, except that no one’s making an ass out of me.