Filed on September 19, 2026
(Satire. Fiction. No real HOA, Board, person, or mulch — only the idea of a neighborhood that is definitely not this one. Entertainment only.)
The emergency session was called at 6:02 PM on a Tuesday — how the Covened know something serious has happened: unscheduled, unannounced, and with the Board President straight from a chiropractor appointment.
The matter was Reference 19.2 — the Mulch Color Dispute — and the room was fuller than for any inspection in living memory.
At issue were three landscape beds at the entrance of Sempergreen Way. In the spring, a resident of House Flamingo had laid dyed-red mulch. In the early summer, a resident of House Gnome had, in retaliation, laid dyed-black mulch. The two beds faced one another across the main drive, and to everyone’s horror they had become a single, unapproved tableau: red on one side, black on the other, like two armies before a battle — and between them, a single plastic flamingo, as if to say, I have no stake in this.
The Coven took the floor first. They do not take the floor; they take the record.
“Covenant 9.7(c),” the reading began, “states that mulching materials shall be of a single, uniform, reasonable, and historically consistent shade. The Board must determine, for the good of the Hollow, whether those beds constitute one violation or two.”
“Two,” said House Gnome, coldly. “My black is a humble shade. Their red is a declaration.”
“One,” said House Flamingo. “My red is a tomato. Their black is a scorch mark.”
The Board President held up a single photocopied sheet on which someone, in the dead of night, had printed a color wheel. This was the kind of artifact that gave the whole affair the gravity it did not deserve. The room leaned in. A man in the back row took a bite of a ham sandwich, solemnly.
“Reference 19.2,” the President said, “is reduced to one question. Is this a matter of taste, or a matter of color?”
The room went silent.
The Coven’s head, who had never once been wrong about anything, set down her clipboard the way a knight sets down his sword. “It is a matter of jurisdiction,” she said. “And the Hollow’s does not end at the curb. It ends where our patience does.”
And then the Board voted. It was 4 to 3, and the motion carried: henceforward, all mulch in the Hollow shall be a single approved brown, both parties shall remove their offending beds within ten days, and the flamingo — the Board noted, with a sigh — shall remain, because there was, tragically, no by-law against it yet.
That night, the Board ordered a consultation on a by-law that would close the loophole. And the neighborhood remembered that the smallest color is always the one worth fighting over.