When I get home from work on Friday afternoon, I discover a black envelope slipped under the front door of my house. Inside the envelope is a letter from a person who claims to be my long lost brother named Bennton. Though I am an only child, I read the letter out of curiosity.
In the letter, Bennton writes that he has been searching for me for the past twenty-eight years, and that this grueling search has plunged him into an inescapable black hole of depression and sorrow. He writes that because of this depression, he has developed a crippling addiction to Hershey’s Special Dark Chocolate Bars with Almonds. He writes that he is eating one such chocolate bar right now, as he is scribbling this very sentence, but it is the last bar in his possession, and he greatly fears the withdrawal symptoms that will soon follow, because they are horrific and tortuous and entirely not fatal. He writes that he possesses a, “very impressive and very valuable,” (his words, not mine) antique knife collection, and that he is willing to sell/trade any and all of these knives for money that can be used to buy more chocolate bars. He writes that he is very excited to finally meet me after so many years of searching, but then he veers into a tangent explaining that his earlier reference to his knife collection was in no way intended to be athreat, and if he accidentally conveyed that impression to me, he greatly apologizes. He writes that he can’t wait to meet me, his long lost brother, his only surviving blood in this world. He writes that he is waiting for me in my bedroom at the end of the hallway, and he strongly recommends I bring a very large amount of the aforementioned chocolate bars when I return to my bedroom to greet him, because he has laid out his knife collection on top of the soft cotton comforter of my bed, and there are many shameful and horrendous things he has done in the past when starving for a fix.
Steve Gergley is the author of The Great Atlantic Highway & Other Stories (Malarkey Books ’24), Skyscraper (West Vine Press ’23), and A Quick Primer on Wallowing in Despair (Leftover Books ’22). His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, Pithead Chapel, Maudlin House, Passages North, Always Crashing, Rejection Letters, and others. In addition to writing fiction, he has composed and recorded five albums of original music. He tweets @GergleySteve. His fiction can be found at: https://stevegergleyauthor.wordpress.com/
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