I stand up. The porch step creaks. My hands are shaking, not from fear but from the raw, physical effort of not ripping this letter into confetti and eating it.
This is a hit job. A surgical, bureaucratic assassination. Valerius can't evict us outright—I checked the bylaws—so he's built a competition where he controls the scoring, enrolled us without consent, and made the penalty for losing everything.
My property. My lawn. My eleven years of edge work and aeration schedules and hand-sanded cedar fencing.
A screen door bangs next door. Junia is on her porch, holding an identical cream envelope. She's already torn it open—torn it, like an animal—and is reading with her lips moving.
Her face goes white under the potting soil.
"Flynn."
"I know."
"He can't do this."
"He just did."
"He can't LEGALLY?—"
"Page two, paragraph four. He amended the HOA charter last month. Emergency powers clause. I missed it because I was busy quarantining your vine."
She stares at me over the fence. The fence I built. The fence that separates my world from hers.
"Neighborhood harmony," she says. "Forty percent."
"Subjective scoring."
"By him."
"By him."
She looks down at her yard. The flamingo craters. The half-planted wildflower beds. The post-hole digger still lying on its side in the dirt. Then she looks at my yard. The peck marks. The cracked sidewalk. The green blood drying on the steps.
"We're the lowest scorers," she says. "Both of us. He's going to take our homes."
I fold the letter precisely in thirds and slide it into my right cargo pocket.
"Not mine."
The letter sits in my cargo pocket like a live grenade. I pace the perimeter of my property three times, cataloging every blade of grass, every edge, every angle. The damage report is worse than I thought.
Seventeen flamingo peck marks across the front lawn. Each one a divot approximately two inches deep and three inches wide. The sidewalk has four stress fractures from the gargoyle incident. My boxwood hedge wall—which I have maintained at exactly forty-two inches for six consecutive years—has a gap where Junia shoved that vine pot through just yesterday.
I crouch at the hedge line and run my thumb along the damaged branch. Clean break. Recoverable. But the growing season is wrong for aggressive pruning, and three weeks is barely enough time to coax new growth.
One week.
I stand up and look across the street.
Valerius's property occupies the corner lot. Double-wide. The lawn is not grass. It's a living carpet of enchanted moss that shifts color with the time of day—emerald at dawn, deep forest at noon, silver-tinged at dusk. His hedges don't grow. They were sculpted from a single piece of living topiary magic, andthey reshape themselves every morning into whatever geometric pattern he's selected from his rotating design catalog.
Last month they were spiraling obelisks. This morning they're interlocking Celtic knots.
His flower beds bloom year-round. Not because he planted seasonal rotations—I PLANT seasonal rotations—but because each flower is enchanted to exist in a permanent state of peak bloom. No wilting. No browning. No natural decay of any kind. His roses have been open for fourteen months. I counted.
His lawn has never been mowed. It doesn't need to be. The enchanted moss maintains itself at a uniform height of exactly one and three-quarter inches. I measured it once at 2 AM with a laser level.
One and three-quarter inches.
