The Old Man’s Neighbor

By Gordon Dunleavy

“Hey Margie,” Morris, a thin-framed man residing on the back eighth of the bell curve of life, calls to his wife who’s having a snack in the kitchen. “The new neighbor is moving in. You care to watch with me?”

“No, thank you, honey.”

“You suppose this one will stay more than a week?”

“I doubt it, Morry. The last ones didn’t even stay the night.” Marge is ten years Morris’ junior, but anyone who’s met them would tell you it’s got to be at least thirty. Marge has Top Ramen hair and a way about her that makes anyone around her feel special. Morris is always impressed with how she carries herself, both in life and when she walks. Even sitting in a recliner, you can tell she has perfect posture.

The U-Haul truck beeps as it backs into the driveway next to Morris’. The old man watches, rocking in his chair. The Monday newspaper in his hands goes unread due to the orange and white truck distraction. He pushes his glasses down his nose to inspect the goings-on. The porch boards creak below him as his blue house with the blue door stands behind him.

Neighbors have come and gone over the last forty-odd years. Most have stayed for ten years at a time, but over the last year, none have stayed for more than a month, and more than a handful have left overnight in the predawn hours of the morning.

Here today, gone tomorrow.

Morris has always done the neighborly thing by introducing himself and the love of his life, Marge, for the past six decades to all the newcomers. He always tells them all about the great nearby restaurants over a batch of his family-famous macaroons he has baked for them.

Marge has stopped the visits nine neighbors ago.

Morris has stopped after six.

When the last three he’s introduced himself to leaves without so much as a head-nod goodbye, Marge tells him to give the new neighbors time to settle before introducing them to the community.

“If they last three months,” Morris tells Marge after a neighbor leaving overnight has gotten him riled up, “then I’ll do my due diligence as the community leader. But if they don’t last that long, then I’ll save my time and cholesterol from all those extra macaroons I will make for us.”

Morris has watched thirty-two neighbors come and go in the last two years. His macaroons have never left the kitchen.

This neighbor is different. There’s something about him that makes Morris think he’ll break the curse.

The man sits alone in the truck, nobody there to help him. There are no kids running around yelling, no old friends in athletic shorts and white t-shirts helping with the heavy things. There’s only the driver who sits like a gargoyle in the cab of a truck that’s big enough to hold the contents of a three-bedroom house.

Morris never makes eye contact with the man behind the wheel, he can’t. He wants to, but the man won’t take his eyes off the nothingness he’s staring at. The welcome-to-the-neighborhood wave Morris holds at the ready goes unused.

The early-evening breeze cools Morris’ glistening forehead. He goes back to reading his newspaper on the porch when the man finally gets out of his truck and begins unloading. Morris wants to keep watching his new neighbor and catches his eye for a quick hello, but with the truck butting up against the garage, Morris can only listen to the new neighbor moving their things inside.

“Morry?” Marge calls from the living room through the screened window. “What’s got you out there on the porch so long? Don’t think anything in that paper can be that gripping. Come back inside and join me for a while.”

“I’ll be in soon. Just trying to figure out if the new neighbor is good people or not.”

“You and those neighbors, Morry. You might be a little obsessed.”

“Just concerned is all, honey.”

As the day moves on, the rocking chair rocks slower and slower as Morris’ head bobs with tiredness. The newspaper falls to his lap when the steady, even breaths of sleep take over. He’s almost all the way under until he jolts awake from the noise of the sliding back door of the moving truck slamming shut, and the lock thunking home into the latch. The paper he’s been reading falls to the boards of his porch. His heart beats faster than it has had in thirty years, and the sweat that has been whisked away from the crisp breeze appears once more.

When Morris’ mind catches up to reality, the big truck is still parked in the driveway. And as still as a statue, the neighbor sits in the same spot Morris has last seen him. Though this time he stares, not at the nothingness, but directly into Morris’ eyes.

How long has he been staring at me? Morris isn’t sure if he wants his question answered because seeing the man’s face straight on has him worried for both of their souls.

The skin on Morris’ body shrinks with gooseflesh as the glare from the neighbor refuses to relent.

COOL AIR

BY PETER CRONSBERRY

Evelyn Holmes worked the crevice in her forehead the way a kid picked away at a scab. This wrinkle was so deep, a mother spider could have laid eggs in it. Or so she thought.

“I may be seventy-five, but I’m not going to look seventy-five,” she rasped out at her reflection in her bathroom’s medicine-cabinet mirror.

With gnarled fingers, she gripped the basin as tight as her late husband, George, gripped the steering wheel before he crashed their car and killed himself. Heart attack. Dead before his car hit the bridge abutment. Those business trips all over the country she thought he was on? Casino slot machines had never lost their appetites.

The downtown life and that three-thousand-square-foot condo in swish Lincoln Park was in Evelyn’s rearview mirror. She’s been a midtown gal for a few years, now. She’d shared a second-floor rental apartment with a mouse that played hide-and-seek, where paint had curled in hard-to-reach places, where the mechanical groans of her fridge signaled it had reached its best-before date, and where central air had been nothing but a pipedream—cruel punishment on a July day, where a breeze felt like a blast from a hairdryer.

She held dear her photos, memories, the illusions of yesteryear’s marriage, and some newly-made friends who knew more about the treasures found in thrift stores than the contents that once filled her Gucci handbag. Strange as it seemed, she accepted her circumstances, part of which would change when she heard the eventual snap of the mousetrap.

Evelyn was always a people person. Her bird’s-eye view of the street directly below was home to a dry-cleaner’s, a fabric shop, and a health food store that cozied up to a gym where she admired the svelte and the chiseled as they came and went through its front entrance.

Her pension check covered the rent. There was enough money to put food on her table, buy the yarn for her knitting and the crossword-puzzle books she hoped would keep her mind sharp.

But way back when she turned fifty, thoughts of trying to keep Death’s bony hand off her shoulder always filled her head. Now, when she went to the druggist’s for her prescription, she bought what her budget allowed in the way of lotions, potions, ointments, and herbal remedies as she tried to keep her appearance. Too bad that gravity and the calendar had other plans.

To Evelyn, getting old had as much appeal as curdled milk. And as George’s car barreled at a hundred clicks toward that bridge with one hand clutching his chest, she had her hand on the telephone to call Dr. Wilcox, who she’d heard seemed to work miracles with injections, but indecision stopped her dead in her own tracks, so to speak. She also believed in luck, and if there was a pocket in any of her garments, a penny was surely tucked inside. Why, there wasn’t a table, nightstand, bookstand, or countertop in her apartment that wasn’t topped with an acorn or dice or even a wee figurine of an elephant she’d saved from a box of Red Rose tea. All were feel-good objects that helped her cope in the down-market life that defined her days on this rock.

So, there she was, dressed in a white, floral sundress, big sunglasses that shielded her baby blues and her pumps that cushioned her tender tootsies as she strolled along a sidewalk of an old part of downtown where dollar stores, burger joints, and supposed antique stores studded the streetscape.

She called it luck that she happened upon one of those supposed antique stores. She sidestepped a fallen bird’s nest and cast her eyes up above a mud-colored wooden door and read the paint-chipped wooden sign: Uncle Odds Emporium of Curios and Antiques. Then she looked at the front window of the place, and when she saw a mannequin of a faceless magician, a mottled, slab tombstone, and even a model crypt with a pair of hands that grabbed on to barred doors—from the inside—she knew she had found something special. Intrigue grabbed her by the throat, and she pushed against the door that screamed against warped wooden floorboards.

Once inside, she was greeted with a scratchy-sounding, “hullo” from the back of the place. She walked over to the front of a broken-tiled aisle and discovered what was behind the disembodied voice.