"Heavenly Bamboo"
Rob Lopresti has contributed stories to several of my anthologies, and when he decided to edit a book of his own and invited me to submit, that gave me the opportunity to use a title I'd been wanting to use for quite some time.
The story is very loosely based on the next-door neighbors Laurie and I had when we lived in Herndon (VA), although I've changed the setting to Brandermill (also VA), where we relocated in 2020.
I should say that the story is loosely based on the next-door neighbors we didn't have, since we never actually met them. When we moved to 1539 Youngs Point Place, the house next door to ours was vacant and had apparently been vacant for some years. Neighborhood gossip had it that the place was owned by a couple who'd divorced acrimoniously, and neither one of them wanted the other one to reap half the proceeds from the sale of the house ... so they just let it sit there, abandoned and slowly going to rot. (As I write this website page, it's late 2024. Laurie and I were in Herndon about three weeks ago and drove by the house to see if the situation might finally have changed, but it was still an eyesore, still clearly unoccupied.)
Anyway, the protagonist of "Heavenly Bamboo" is a woman named Emily Kitchener, and she decides to take action against her terrible neighbor ... and does so.
Rob asked the contributors to his anthology to donate half of our royalties to a nonprofit organization working to make the world a better place, and after each story he included a brief essay from the author identifying the organization and explaining why it was chosen. I chose The Hunger Project, which I became involved with way back in 1978. When my first wife Lydia and I moved to Amsterdam the following year, we started a Dutch chapter of THP and ran it through the early '80s. I haven't been directly involved with the organization since then, but I continue to respect and admire the work it does and was happy to see a share of my royalties for this story go to support its mission.
You can order Crimes Against Nature here.
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