<span style="font-size: 15px">Henry Greene's wife, Kay, had died of cancer, two years ago.  It had been a relatively quick death.  She was a 'big girl'.  Fuck that, she was incredibly obese and her obesity meant that she couldn't fit her body into most modern high technology medical diagnosis apparatus.  Her compromised body might actually have killed him had she fallen as he helped her into and out of the large shower on a daily basis.  She'd had brushes with skin cancer in the past, which was easily detected.  The fatal cancer had been growing deep inside her, undetected, for probably the last three years of her life.  She was finally diagnosed in the month of August and the doctors started her on a chemotherapy program.  By the end of September, she'd left him alone.<br/>
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Alone, except for their creditors.  Unknown to Henry, Kay had credit cards she'd been opening and juggling behind his back.  It was bad enough that he worried and struggled in his job in sales.  They'd been selling his stocks he'd acquired from the company he worked at before he'd been fired and it was a tidy sum, but it disappeared far more quickly than Henry could understand.  After she was gone, the creditors swamped him with her unpaid bills for mail order items like dresses, shoes, home decoration items and gifts that she'd had sent to her friends and family.  Her insurance and the money that she'd been saving for her retirement didn't cover her bills and Henry had to sell the house.  That sounds like a good sum but they'd been forced to refinance the home a year earlier.  There was hardly any money left after the vultures had gotten their fill.<br/>
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Kay's family paid lip-service to Henry, her sister saying that Kay had promised money for the sister's daughter and Henry grudgingly paid it.  Her brother made phone calls but made no real effort to visit Henry.  Henry really didn't have any reason to stay in the city suburbs.  He couldn't afford it. <br/>
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He needed to move.  He was adrift in the world.  His self-identity as a husband was shattered.  There were no real jobs available for a fifty year old man.  People wanted to hire younger and more energetic employees.  Henry decided to move out of state, to a place that had a lower 'cost of living', while he waited to die.  Which was how Henry Greene ended up in Possum Hollow.<br/>
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The house that Henry leased was the second from the end of a line of houses and after that house next to his was the woods.  It had hand pump to bring water up from the ground and an old pot belly stove.  His rationed diet now consisted of things like jerky and dried produce.  He had lost a good deal of weight.  He now stood at five foot ten inches and weighed about two hundred pounds, solid framed, still well muscled but with some fat as well.  His brown hair was going gray, he didn't shave often and his hazel eyes generally needed glasses to read a newspaper or a book.<br/>
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Henry sometimes saw the white haired woman that was his next door neighbor, working in her garden.  He didn't bother her.  She seemed to be a loner, like Henry now was.  He'd learned that her name was "Cherry".  He wondered if maybe it was a bastardized form of the French word, "Chérie" or if it simple meant the cherry flower or fruit?<br/>
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Other neighbors stopped by to introduce themselves, to be "neighborly", but Henry knew that they were really sizing him up as potential trouble.  After brief visits, they all seemed satisfied that he wouldn't disturb them.  Some recognized Henry's need for privacy.  All of the visitors advised him to keep his back fence in good repair and to not go into the woods at night.  That shouldn't be hard as Henry's night vision was also beginning to weaken.</span><br/><br/>Some time passed and Henry began to fidget.  Maybe he ought to try to do something more than simply existing from day to day....