by Kyle SUNDBY

Tonight’s meet­ing will take care of that, she thought. If not, then the neigh­bor­hood newslet­ter bet­ter. Karin takes a deep breath and shifts her fo­cus to her ar­gu­ments, for and against, sleep­ing with that col­lege kid at Starbucks.

FOR	/	AGAINST
Take good care of my body-De­serve treat.	/	Hub­by would not be pleased.
He does­n’t live around here.	/	He is too young, in­ex­pe­ri­enced — lots of work
Would re­al­ly take the edge off.	/	Would re­al­ly take the edge off.

She con­tin­ues through the in­ter­sec­tion and pulls the Jet­ta in­to the garage, three hous­es down.

…

“But his name is no longer on the ac­count. Is it okay if I just come in to­mor­row with a mon­ey or­der?” It’s been two weeks since San­dra moved in and there’s a lit­tle prob­lem with the bill from her last res­i­dence for trash ser­vice, among oth­er things. Af­ter she gets off her cell phone, she knots the top of the kitchen garbage bag and car­ries it out front. It sits next to the over­stuffed can and two loose bags. The Jet­ta pulling in down the street match­es the emp­ty tis­sue box pok­ing up from the can. San­dra heads back in­side and locks the door.

…

Bryan shuts off the tele­vi­sion ear­ly in­to the third quar­ter. He is run­ning late and may not get the door to the Com­mu­ni­ty Rec Cen­ter un­locked be­fore Tra­cy ar­rives with the cof­fee ma­chine. It’s still twen­ty min­utes be­fore sev­en so it’s not yet crit­i­cal. But he re­mem­bers that tonight Tra­cy and one of her friends are go­ing to dis­cuss an is­sue con­cern­ing a new neigh­bor. His shoes are on quickly.

Hold­ing a slice of left­over piz­za, Bryan heads out the door. The wax pa­per that wrapped the piz­za is crushed and tossed from the dri­ver’s side window.

Filed under Fiction on April 23rd, 2005

—

Care to Share?

—§—

Previous Post

« Palmate Antlers for Bullwinkle

—

Next Post

The Very Painful Sui­cide of Dr. Philip Lyxzen »

Join our Irregular Mailing List