Gwendolyn Greene and the Moondog Coronation Ball of 1957: Lost Colony, #2.2

By M.E. Pickett

An extraordinary dog. A nation watching. A secret plea for help.

 

Time to Read: about 1 hour

 

When Gwendolyn Greene's Australian shepherd McKenna is selected to be the first animal in space, they are on a path to Cold War glory and worldwide stardom. So why did she beg her childhood friend to come rescue her from it all? 

Lost Colony is a quarterly magazine of masterfully crafted mid-length (10,000 to 25,000 words) science fiction and fantasy in all of their varieties. This ebook edition includes an Editor's Note in which the editor explains why this story was chosen for publication.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lost Colony Books
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215608173

Book preview

Gwendolyn Greene and the Moondog Coronation Ball of 1957 © 2023 Kevin P. Keating

Editor’s Note © 2023 M.E. Pickett

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the copyright holder, except for brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

Cover image by Stone36 via Shutterstock

Cover and interior design by M.E. Pickett

Lost Colony is a publication of Lost Colony Books, a division of Great Pond, LLC

www.lostcolonymagazine.com

www.lostcolonybooks.com

Lost Colony and its colophon are trademarks of Great Pond, LLC

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Volume 2, Issue 2

Spring 2023

Contents

About Lost Colony

Gwendolyn Greene and the Moondog Coronation Ball of 1957

About the Author

Editor’s Note

About the Editor

About Lost Colony

Lost Colony publishes one masterfully crafted piece of mid-length (10,000-25,000 words) speculative fiction (science fiction and fantasy in all of their manifestations) every quarter. Quarterly stories are published for free on our website (with ads) and for one or two dollars as an ebook (without ads). Once a year, all four of the stories that have appeared in the magazine are published in an annual anthology, both electronically and in print. If you buy the ebook of either the quarterly story or the annual anthology, or if you buy the print version of the annual anthology, you will also get editor’s notes that explain why each story was chosen for publication.

I started Lost Colony after I wrote a mid-length story and very quickly ran out of outlets to submit it to. I thought that the mid-length story should get more love, so I decided to launch this little publication.

I named it Lost Colony because I had moved to Roanoke, Virginia, shortly before launching it. Roanoke, Virginia, has nothing to do with the lost colony of Roanoke (which was in North Carolina), but it was the first thing that I thought of when I learned about the city, so it made sense to me. It also evokes a sense of mystery, the supernatural, or even the exploration of the cosmos, so it fits nicely with what I’m looking for in the stories that I publish (for more details on what I’m looking for, check out the Submission Guidelines).

Gwendolyn Greene and the Moondog Coronation Ball of 1957

by Kevin P. Keating

-1-

On a dusty country lane, leaning toward an otherwise unremarkable farmhouse of indeterminate age, stands a solitary historical marker that, at least in theory, is meant to attract the attention of passing motorists. With its easily forgotten names and dates, the marker may soon vanish beneath a sea of tall grass, and no one will be any the wiser, including a few of the committee members who helped raise funds to have it placed there. If, by chance, a few lost travelers, trying to find their way back to the interstate after a day of antiquing in town or a weekend of camping in the nearby state park, do stop to read the succinct paragraph inscribed on its bronze plaque, they will learn of a girl who, many years ago, lived in this house and made a sacrifice to human progress, though I’m not sure she would have appreciated my use of the word progress.

For a time, the committee considered purchasing the property from the current occupants and converting the house into a museum, but Heavenly Hill, tucked away in the remote foothills of rural Ohio, was unlikely to attract enough visitors to warrant the restoration costs. Still, the members unanimously agreed that something needed to be done to keep Gwendolyn’s memory alive. During her lifetime, she never craved recognition, and I’m doubtful she would have wanted a historical marker outside her childhood home. Trivial facts, she once told me, had nothing to do with reality because they failed to tell a meaningful story. For this reason and others, Gwendolyn disliked history, or maybe I should say distrusted it. She was skeptical of authority in general and could be strident in her views.

The house sits half an acre from the road on a ridge overlooking Lost Village Lake. Like so many of the homes in Heavenly Hill, this one needs a fresh coat of paint, new windows, gutters, roof, and masonry work. The foundation’s handmade bricks have started to buckle and crumble, and whenever a ferocious summer storm sweeps over the lake, the tiles peel from the rooftop and sail into the weeds and wildflowers. In 1957, when Gwendolyn Greene lived here, the house had been in slightly better condition. Her mother, suffering from a chronic case of