Our Neighbors, Our Own

by Katherine Gleason

 

[Editor’s Note: This piece is part of the “Topical” series, with each piece solely submitted to and chosen by the Final Reader Pietra Dunmore.] Story

 

I am returning this box of chocolates. I don’t want your chocolates. What I want is my time, my sleep. So, you and your friends, you keep it down. You spend six-hundred-some-thousand dollars on an apartment you think you’d have some manners, a sense of etiquette, or at least you’d bother to read the house rules. You know we do have house rules. We spent a long time—that would be Carrie and I—writing those rules. They’re a real thing, rules. They apply to everyone to protect us all. Oh, sure, it was like the Wild West out here when we moved in. The group of us, bought the building from the city for a dollar, then we put in the work. This place, your apartment, had no floor. You’ve probably heard the building history. I’m sure your “team” dug up all the dirt. This was Carrie’s home. That floor, the one your contractor ripped out, we put that in, plank by plank. She was painter. All she’d do was paint, days on end. Okay, maybe there were some amphetamines involved. Yeah, we made the rules but it’s not like we were nuns. But seriously why do you have to scream? The “woo hoo” and “aaaahhhhh,” noises you’d make at a sports event or if you were being murdered. We used to party, sure, but we didn’t scream. No, I don’t remember screaming. Sometimes I wish I could’ve screamed, but it’s not like making a lot of noise would’ve helped. Down the street Bryce, the handsome guy who sits out in his wheelchair on sunny days, his place was a sex club, gay, all men. You would’ve loved it. Or maybe not. Carrie and I, we taught his go-go boys how to dance right here, in your apartment. When the police closed the bathhouse up on Eleventh Street everyone came here, so a Saturday night on the block, it was pretty crazy. All over the city people were dying. Carrie taught safer sex workshops at the club and we distributed clean needles to the junkies in the park. We were just trying to take care of our neighbors, our own. We had our own heroin dealer right across the street. Your face just went a shade of pale! No, we weren’t using, not heroin, at least. The dealer—we always thought of him as our dealer—kept order on the block, no shooting up, no littering. Carrie was like you, thin-skinned, a sprinkle of freckles. A little butch and a bit femme; she’d throw a dress on over her jeans and combat boots. I’m sure she’s still like that. She sold her place, obviously, moved to Mexico years ago, but I hear she’s back. One time, she comes storming up the stairs to my place—we always kept separate apartments—it was easier, made sense, we both needed our space. How do you and your boyfriend—sorry, husband!—manage the two of you in one apartment? I never felt the need for marriage, didn’t want any state or any church in my business. But maybe a little community support, yeah, that could have been good. So, this time, she bursts in the door, she grabs me by the hair and she drags me down the stairs, and I’m like, What did I do? We get down on the street and our drug dealer sees the grip she has on me and he laughs. “Are you girls going to fight?” he says, and he has this gleam in his eye. “Cause if you two are going to fight, I want to watch.” And I’m like, Hello, we are not here for your entertainment, and Don’t you see she’s hurting me? She wore her hair like yours, super short on the sides and longer in front. We used to cut hair in the park. The bar across the street from the park, that’s where she’s hanging out or so I hear. I won’t go in there, can’t, not after the proprietor—I won’t deign to pronounce his name—he sold one of my paintings, a painting I’d bartered for drinks and cheese sandwiches, he sold it to an advertising executive—hey, maybe it was one of your bosses—and that ad guy put my painting, my work, in one of his ads. Talk about commercial exploitation! You work in the great advertising-industrial complex, doing what exactly, creating algorithms? Oh, I bet they love you at the office. Every year they can trot you out for diversity week. They probably even invite your boyfriend—husband!—to the Christmas party. When Carrie had me by the hair, freaking, it turns out I’d left the window of her truck opened. She said someone would steal her vehicle, her livelihood. She used to make deliveries, not pizza, but construction supplies, artwork, furniture. I’d put her in jeopardy. She was so alone, so unsupported. I mean if you’d seen her, a fistful of my hair in hand, dragging me along, wouldn’t you have checked in, said something. “Hey, what’s up? Or “Is everything okay?” Anyhow, here are your chocolates. You know they use children, slave labor in the harvest, right? I’ve seen you going into that bar to down a few. Next time you’re there, if you see her, my Carrie, you ask her to stop by. And in the meantime, keep it down. I have to get some sleep.

 

Katherine Gleason’s stories have appeared in journals such as Cheap Pop, Derelict Lit, Every Day Fiction, Gone Lawn, Juked, Jellyfish Review, and Menacing Hedge. She’s won first prize in the River Styx/Schlafly Beer Micro-Fiction Contest, garnered an honorable mention from Glimmer Train, and has been nominated for a Best of the Net award. Her play “The Toe Incident” won A&U Magazine’s Christopher Hewitt Award for Drama in 2020.

 

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