◐ The Neighbor ◑
Short fiction by Larissa Thomas © 2018
I hear you.
Been an unwilling eavesdropper since I slammed balls-deep into the dripping, hard maleness of my pubescent voyage. One day outta nowhere, and I suddenly knew that Mr. Burke, my history teacher, intentionally left his trousers unzipped during tests. I knew that Sarah Lye contemplated suicide over a boy not loving her, and that same boy planned on opening fire on a bathhouse years later but changed his mind when he got promoted at McDonald's. The things about your mother that you want people to think you think—I don’t hear those. I hear the things you think about your mother and her stretched-out beige panties. The tampon you dug out of her garbage. That time you sprayed your balls with her Aqua Net and made your girlfriend go down on you.
You’re phony. Not like, Catcher in the Rye phony. It’s on a DNA level. Your thoughts don’t match your mouth phony. You walk through life doing the things you think you have to do, to tell yourself you’re a good person. You’ve become good at letting your thoughts flow like water from a sewage treatment plant. It’s a perfect system with very little upkeep. The bad thoughts go in, and purified filth comes out. No one’s any wiser.
Except me. I hear all of the bad things. The bats inside of your head, shriek and shit, and it echoes and bounces around in my brain.
And three weeks ago, everything got worse.
After the old woman occupying the apartment next to mine - whose thoughts were quiet and sporadic worried loops about her negligent daughter’s parenting skills - died and someone else moved in.
The woman in apartment 3C.
I don’t hear the drag-clomp of her uneven legs as she enters the building, one shoe with a leaden platform-sole. What I hear are the rat-maggots writhing around in her coppery, moist darkness.
I hear her coming, and I run.
Two steps to avoid the book pile that's been there since Grandma Jean died and left me this one-room cookie tin--
3C’s home early. Told her boss she wasn’t feeling well. She was lying.
I can taste 3C’s mind like a stale piece of bubblegum tucked up behind a rotting tooth. Six more steps to the hill of unfolded clothes. Three steps, turn to avoid the edge of the table.
--and where can she get mealworms--
--and does she have packing tape--
--and that old bitch, Mrs. Kranick, not holding open the door for her a minute ago--
She’s mad at Leslie with the big knockers in the office. She fuckin’ hates that maniac nitwit kid in 2D and his stupid toy fire truck that’s always in the way, and she’s pissed at her pud foot cuz she wants a pair of purple open-toe heels.
Gogogo fast as I can. But the thing about living inside walls with furniture piled on dust piled on furniture is it makes it real hard to escape. Fire? I’m fucked. Earthquake? Dead in the time it takes to wake from a nightmare.
I wedge my feet inside beat-up blue sneakers, fist a pile of change from the dish atop the coffee table Jenga, and get halfway down the first flight of stairs before--
--I'm free-falling through her mind. I’m a strawberry floating in a bowl of fruit punch. She’s been spiked, pissed in, and left to bog over. In the murky pink liquid, I see that one time when her brother tried to pour chlorine down her throat. That time when she pulled a hibernating frog from a snowbank and peeled its skin from its bones while it was still--
I’m outside, on the back pathway. Exhale. I spit her out onto the pavement, where she pops and hisses and fades with each footstep in the opposite direction. When she first moved in, I considered abandoning my rent-controlled birthright, but long-term unemployment coupled with depression—I’m waiting her out. People like her, they can’t stay happy in one place for long.
At first, I’d sit at a greasy spoon four blocks away. Then, three blocks at a laundromat. Now a comfortable one-and-a-quarter, in a vegetarian cafe.
I enter the warmth of the Generous Helping. A Pinterest curation of sandpapered whites and pewters. It smells like health, and it feels like safety. The Hummus-eaters and the Mock Meat Jocks and the Yoga Pants, they’re elevated. They’re better than me, they’re better than you, and they’re certainly better than 3C. The bad thoughts in here are a different brand—Terrible Lite.
...Shut up about how veganism has transformed your complexion, Becky. We all know you shovel BBQ chicken into your mouth while watching The Bachelorette-- If only I had married Mark, my child wouldn’t be this autistic fucking-- I’ve gone through three plastic bags and four plastic bottles this week and I don’t give a shit--
Breathe.
Count to ten.
Ommmm.
And they’re all good people again.
I watch 3C through her window while picking at a Quixotic Quinoa Carrot Muffin and sipping Feeling Grounded Matcha Meditation Tea. I’m getting centered in my hunger and thinking of the freezer-burned shrimp ring waiting for me at home.
3C's ritual is always the same: Orchestrate, execute, reward. This process takes anywhere from twenty minutes to six hours.
She gathers her Dollarama paper bows and ribbons, and then she's gone. Out of frame.
Back in frame, she peels out of the lot in her Honda. A black beetle scuttling across the bathroom tile.
Phase one: Complete.
I finish my muffin and wait. And wait. Tired from a long day of masturbating to the big-titted chicks of Tumblr, and applying to jobs I don’t want. I give up. I wave and thank Mavis the barista. Thank you, Mavis, for the pleasant service. Thank you for being a happy, well-adjusted person whose only blah thoughts are directed at espresso machines and sticky trays.
It’s raining and dark. I pull my T-shirt up to my ears. My sneakers already soaked through by the time I get to the parking lot. Squish. Squash.
Four steps to the edge of the concrete slab, a two-inch rise, then—
Down I go.
As I hit the ground, my body twists in a Shavasana or Lotus or Panting Horny Humping Dog pose. I look to the Generous Helping storefront as if it will tell me. Then to my left: A red fire truck.
Sigh.
The boy in 2D.
The rain feels nice for a while, but the plum around my ankle begins to ache. Time to go back to my cave full of tarnished silver stalagmites and jumbo-sized No-Name pork rinds. I roll over, crawling toward the six-step walk up, one spaghetti noodle, two spaghetti noodle. I reach for the rusted handrail, the asphalt shredding my skin. Just a few—
Drag-clomp.
I blink.
A cough, not twenty yards behind me. Jangling keys.
Drag-clomp.
Hate that kid. Want to rip his fucking eyeballs out, spoon-feed them to oh look, oh look, oh look—
I turn. Chin over shoulder, nose over chin, eyes over nose.
It’s 3B, it’s 3B, it’s 3B, it’s 3B--
Drag—
There she stands with a jack-o-lantern smile.
—Clomp.
“I knew someone was gonna trip on that. I was gonna move it, but then I thought I’d get lucky and the mom in 2D would slip and break her neck. That would really teach that kid a lesson.” Apartment 3C says, then stomps on the truck with her short leg, quartering the plastic. “Little fucker.”
I play dead.
She reaches for me, her other hand clasping a package addressed to Mrs. Kranick. “You’re bleeding.”
My forearms are scarlet.
She moves closer. I let it happen. I put my cold wet in her warm dry, and she clomps and I limp. We’re twins. She guides me through the hallway that smells like curry in one breath and tuna casserole in another. I watch as she places the box outside of 1B.
Phase two complete.
She chuckles, then we’re up the stairwell full of ‘no smoking’ signs. It smells like cigarettes.
She pauses to light a Du Maurier. Inhales. Blows the smoke in my face. Smiles when I cough. “Sorry.”
“I’ve seen you watching me from across the street,” she says. “You’re 3B.”
I watch 3C and listen. But I can’t hear a thing.
“You don’t look vegetarian.” She squints at me.
We reach the third floor.
“You know,” she says, turning, her cotton dress giving way to jutting hips. “I think you’re cute, too.”
We stop outside of her chipped, warped door. She unlocks it.
“Wanna come in? My place is dirty, so don’t worry about getting blood on anything.” Releasing my hand, she backs inside, beckoning to me. She'd be a big hit on Tumblr.
I choke on my words.
“I’ve got choco-peanut butter ice cream.”
And now it’s time for phase three: The reward.
She waits.
I wait, too. I wait for her to think about how she wants to boil me alive for being a pig-man vermin ruining her night. How rotten smells waft under my door and into her home. How I play my Collective Soul album too loud and she can tell I probably have a small cock.
But there’s nothing.
Just the pleasant din of static.
She laughs. Her throat nicotine-hardened. Unfiltered. Untreated. She is what she is. Her purification system is flawed; one pipe in and straight out the other side. Her sewage smells authentic, teeming with sulfur and bacteria. She is perfection.
“So, you wanna come in?”
Yeah, I guess I kind of do.
© Larissa Thomas, 2018