True Garbage

by Stanton McCaffery

About the Author: Stanton McCaffery's stories have been featured in Guilty, Thriller Magazine, Mystery Tribune, Vautrin, Shotgun Honey, Yellow Mama, and Out of the Gutter. He’s published two novels; Neighborhood of Dead Ends, and Into the Ocean. He is the editor-in-chief at Rock and a Hard Place Press.

Excerpt

Richard opened the manilla envelope. Before he could look inside, the dog barked at a passerby. “Henry, you have to stop that,” he said through an open window.

The envelope was in a waste-high pile of garbage. Inside, it wasn’t what he was looking for. It was a warranty for a fridge, not correspondence from his mother. He dropped it back into the pile of trash and brought his dead father’s dog inside his dead father’s house.

The man had passed two weeks prior, but he’d only known for a week. The mailman called it in, said mail was piling up and that the dog inside wouldn’t stop howling. Coroner said he had a stroke and laid on the floor for a week, was lucky the dog hadn’t started to eat him.

In another pile of trash, Richard found paper with handwriting. It was an assignment of his from grade school—fiction he portrayed as fact. A story about his dog. A dog he didn’t have—not at the time.

It was the first story he constructed to conceal his ugly life, from others and from himself.

“I inherited him,” Richard said to people at the dog park. He turned away from them, trying to hide the red patches on his face—eczema that flared up when he was stressed. He was trying as much as possible to avoid anyone looking at him. But there’s no avoiding stares with a dog like Henry, an over-sized Italian Pointer that loved to dig and bellow in the faces of other dogs.

“Maybe he’s anxious,” a woman said, from behind him.

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