Cookie-cutter houses. Summer heat. The smell of barbecue and garbage. A kid rides a bicycle with a warped wheel. He has to hold the handlebar sideways to go straight. Earlier that morning, he threw newspapers at houses and missed sixty-eight percent of the time. His father had been a paper boy when he was his age. Nowadays he sold used cars at a small dealership. There was a shotgun in their basement, just in case. Shingles littered the lawn of a house. They were falling from the roof gradually over time, makeshift clockwork. The family couldn’t afford to pay for repairs. The mailboxes were mostly made of metal, save for one which was shaped like a beagle’s head made of wood. The north end of the street had a flattened squirrel caressing a crosswalk paint-line. A sedan had hit it while it was being towed for unpaid traffic tickets. A middle-aged man with Down’s syndrome sat on the curb and picked his nose, singing a nursery rhyme with made-up words. It was June and the sun went down late. A couple has sex on their balcony with little regard for the two toddlers living next door with their single mother as the primary guardian. The father left the spring before, going out for the current copy of Weekly World News (something that he, in reality, read every week) and never coming back. He had been sleeping with a seventeen-year-old girl that walked around the neighborhood with her Jehovah’s Witness mother from time to time, trying to convert the occupants. That news had quietly spread through the urban city blocks like a subtle cancer. A homeless man and woman walked through the neighborhood on trash days and gathered plastic bottles in a wobbly shopping cart. They were covered in filth and grease. They didn’t bother anyone. Nobody bothered them beyond glances of discomfort.
The high-school kids were getting ready for graduation. It was the last day of school and as soon as the last bell rang, they were out seeding through the city, hell-bent on means of celebration. The pot-dealers make more money than they had in weeks. Diners sell cheeseburgers and vegan meals with pregnant tip jars ready to burst. Thirty-packs of beer are purchased by older brothers for ten bucks interest. Gravestones are kicked over. Fire hydrants are broken open to cool down from the heat. Taillights are shattered with jagged walking sticks. Packs of condoms are five-fingered from bodega shelves and handed out among friends. They talk about how they’re going to get lucky with girls they’ve had their eyes on. Those same girls hang out with their few best friends, picking out clothes and putting on makeup, getting ready for the parties held in houses in which parents would be absent. At the end of the night, the hospitals will be filled with victims of drunk driving and pumped stomachs, broken bones and blood and bruises from fights over nonsense. It would be remembered and then forgotten by those leaving high school behind.
Someone had written Dr. Dre lyrics in spray-paint on the sidewalk at the intersection. A few blocks away, a pentagram was spray-painted in a different color, fading as time went by. The culprit had graduated years prior and gave up their Satan-worshipping to become an accountant. The mailman was pushing sixty and no view of retirement was in the foreseeable future. He has never been married. His kid, conceived after a drunk night with a girl in a green dress twenty-two years prior, refuses to talk to him. The mailman doesn’t live in the neighborhood but in an even worse one. The route created great feelings of envy. In the basement he kept a noose tied, just in case.
An aspiring comedian lives in the middle of the neighborhood. She practices her material in front of the bathroom mirror. She falls asleep high off too many pills of zolpidem and dreams of an audience that won’t laugh at her jokes. She wakes up in cold sweats. A couple lives above a retired chiropractor. The young woman is pregnant and she never leaves the couch. She’s never angry, but she gets emotional. Sad about her past. Sick to her stomach. Hungry for chocolate and beer-nuts and mangos. Her husband is a longshoreman. His older colleagues tell stories sometimes of a guy who would come in drunk but still manage to get his job done. He got injured and never showed up again. They say he’s now addicted to heroin or something along those lines. He has no idea why so many flies gather in the crawlspace above their hallway. Mr. Henderson used to be a chef that had to retire early due to a heart condition. He whips up whole meals for just one person. Usually, he ends up throwing away the majority of helpings. Beer can after beer can gathers underneath his back porch during the summer and in his empty spare bedroom during the colder months. A prostitute named Trixie shows up to his house twice a week at midnight in a drab-colored shitbox. She has to go slow due to his heart condition. After he climaxes, he has to take one of his pills. He’s been close to dying a few times. He passes it off as anxiety.
The neighborhood does not see that it is decaying or at the very least chooses to ignore its own deterioration. Its residents water their lawns and put ornaments in the grass. They plant flowers in the mulch along their foundations. They wave to each other and smile. They visit each others’ yard sales. They watch each others’ kids when the parents want to go out to dinner or rent cheap hotel rooms by the hour. They get their dogs together to wrestle while they drink martinis and talk sports or gossip about the other women occupying the neighborhood. How they gained weight, how that weight wears out the elasticity of their asses, how they heard they got fired from their jobs. They drive hybrid cars to “help save the environment”. They come to complete stops at the signs. They recycle and go to church. They rake their leaves and shovel their driveways. They support the “cause”: girl scout cookies, collection plates, bowling alley charity events, Christmas cards for the school bus drivers. All seems well, all seems whole. The venom and the gutter-water are hidden behind concrete eyelids.
They close the blinds. They sit on the couch and clog their arteries. They contemplate suicide and memories riddled with bad decisions due to college drug use. They want to come out as homosexuals but feel they can’t due to neighborly opinion. They scream into pillows at night. They look over at their husbands and think to themselves, “How the fuck did it come to this?” They wish they were older. They wish they were younger. They wish they were prettier, they wish they were smarter, they wish they were better fit for a dog-eat-dog world. Ghosts hung out in every home on the block. They laughed. They wondered when the living souls would join them. The living souls wondered that, too.
