They say there’s safety in numbers.

But sometimes you’re better off alone…

From the collection Stories with a Scowl comes Rough Company, available for individual sale.

Never having found a job, Amory Robinson has stayed home to focus on his hobbies. His favorite of all is collecting greeting cards, which he hangs in picture frames. The rainbows, cartoon animals, and cheerful mottos on their covers decorate the walls of the townhouse he shares with his parents and pet canary.

His grandmother’s outlook is very different. “It’s a wicked world out there,” she says, as she warns him that he’s been going out in the city alone too much. But Amory can’t share her fear and pessimism. Like his greeting cards say, the world’s not as bad as all that, and he’s just a geek who never bothers anyone. He’ll be fine.

So when four strange men approach Amory in a doughnut shop, he gladly accepts their invitation to go birdwatching. Not until they’re deep in the forest does he notice they aren’t quite what he took them for. They’ve got some unsettling ideas about the world, and they know an awful lot about a recent crime wave—a series of unsolved knifings.

Out in this forest, we might learn that nature—and human nature—can be deceptively dangerous.