The Red Spruce Inn and Wellness Center - Part One

This story was accepted for publication in the spring 2026 issue (Vol. 57) of ellipsis . . . literature and art, the literary journal of Westminster University. Literary journals, which exist mostly inside the MFA or literature programs of universities, are the fertile ground in which short fiction writers like me hope to find root. But if you imagine the number of aspiring writers as countless seeds from a sprouting flower--lets say, a milkweed--thousands of milkweeds--blown by the wind, you will naturally understand that only a faction find a place to settle down and flourish. Accordingly, the acceptance rate at most journals is generally between three and five percent. Rarely more. Often less. So every acceptance is a reason to carve off some of the roast and share it with the dog. I was particularly delighted to be featured in ellipsis.

I think I should not tell you what I think these stories are about when I post them. You should decide for yourself. I'm always happy to hear your thoughts.

Red Spruce Inn should run in three parts. Enjoy.

The Red Spruce Inn and Wellness Center had managed to keep itself obscure across every variety of internet navigation device. It had no website or social media presence, only a brochure that arrived by U.S. mail, which meant having the address or telephone number to request one, both of which were unpublished. Booking a stay was like digging a hole, stopping every so often to remove a rock. The process was part marketing strategy, part privacy policy, designed to admit only the serious-minded and prevent reprisals and harassment among guests following their stay.

The inn was over a hundred years old, but in the past ten years it had reinvented itself as a wellness center for “antagonists.” At the inn, the brochure explained, people come to experience their differences from others in closer proximity to what they scorn. Unpack your animosity, it invited.  “Feel the burn”. Guests self-identified as being of one sort of mind or the other—politically, socially, spiritually—and were provided the chance to face others of the opposite point of view, or lifestyle, keeping to restricted areas, so there could be no actual contact. Verbal taunting and gesturing was permitted with some restrictions. Physical contact, including throwing objects (explicit in the reservation agreement), was forbidden, swiftly enforced by calls to the local police. 

I could have lived out my days happily without knowing anything about the Red Spruce Inn and Wellness Center. But the editor of Adventure Travel Magazine, a small publication with a few rooms in a midtown Manhattan building, appealed to me. The editor, Marty, had been an adventure traveler, a skydiver, scuba diver, Gumball 3000 enthusiast, balloonist. Other things. But these days, he was a gaunt man trying to keep his magazine alive, forced to ask me if I would go to New Hampshire to write a story on the inn. Such requests always came at a low point in the arc of his publication. He knew I would rather be blogging about the bar scene in Brooklyn, had no interest in adventure travel, and it was only because I was his little brother.