Glenn Armocida

Glenn Armocida resides in western Pennsylvania. His first book, Tales of East and West Sparrow and Other Stories, will be published in the summer of 2025 by Atmosphere Press. He was a finalist in the Rash Award in Fiction (2024 and 2022). His recent work appears in The Broad River Review, Black Moon Magazine, Havik, The Watershed Journal, and The Ground Up. In the 1980s, Glenn attended the University of Pittsburgh as an English major in the Creative Writing Program. During this time, he published poems in various journals and feature articles in Pittsburgh Magazine, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Executive Report. He has worked as a mill laborer, cook, radio news anchor, printer, technical and business writer, editor, and the past 33 years as an investment manager. When he is not writing, Glenn is with his family, serving the homeless, tending his gardens, or pursuing outdoor life.

an excerpt from “The Caretaker of Cemetery Hill”

At sunrise the next morning, Tom loaded the 1962 Plymouth station wagon he inherited, the family transport of his youth. He knew his truck would be the sensible vehicle to use and certainly easier to load. But the station wagon served well enough, he reasoned, and its link to his past was a comfort, as were his Saturday duties. He tuned the AM radio to the station in Warren for its Hank Williams program. He crossed Sparrow Bridge onto Route 39, drove through East Sparrow to Cemetery Hill Road, a tar-and-stone-chip lane that devolved into a gravel and dirt track where the mountain levelled off at the old cemetery. He sat in his wagon, mesmerized, staring at the crumbling, bleached headstones and splintering wooden crosses, the spring wildflowers pushing life up from the dead and nodding in the breeze, as if they were affirming the betrayal that had taken root in his life.

These thoughts dissolved. He reflected that he, too, would die in this Pennsylvania forest and hold the ground until Celia joined him. Their sons, he hoped, would tend to his and Celia’s graves as he now tended to the grave of his long-dead, volatile Grandpap, the last person to be buried in this old cemetery, in 1974. 

This was his third cut of the new season and the grass was supple and lush now. Honey locust and wild rose washed the air and dandelions arose boasting their pure yellow blossoms. By the afternoon Tom had groomed all twelve rows of twenty grave sites each. He returned to the station wagon, mopped his head with a bandana, loaded his gear, and sat on the tailgate, listening to the ball game in Pittsburgh, fading in and out on the radio’s tuner while eating the lunch Celia had packed for him. He finished and snapped closed the lunch pail. He sipped coffee from his thermos and lit his Saturday cigar, and from the flask stashed in the glove box, sipped rye whiskey in between everything else. The letter returned to his thoughts and he leaned and spat, for it left a rancid taste on his tongue and in his heart.

The whiskey settled and arranged his thoughts, something his mind had demanded of him since he discovered the letter, a letter unknown to Tom and that had patiently awaited the proper day to be revealed to him. Another swig of the rye soon gave him the wherewithal to return to nineteen seventy-four, to the hospital in Warren where his grandfather made his last stand, withered, agitated, yet still dangerous in his own way.

Read more of “The Caretaker of Cemetery Hill” in Solum Journal Volume VI: Doubt (forthcoming).