My Neighbor Bill

My neighbor bill stopped by to return something. I was sitting on the porch and Bill was acting friendly so I offered to pour him a drink from a day-old pitcher of Manhattans I had lying around. He remarked about how big the rats in our yard were and said he was studying tae kwon do in order to get better at business. “You have to be fast with your arms.” He said. The drink was fairly weak because all the ice melted back on Tuesday.

After Bill spoke I turned to look at him and there was a metal circuit board sticking out of his shirt where his head had been before. It was full of blinking lights and wires and suddenly it was obvious that the face I saw earlier was just projection from this device and now (maybe because of the drink?) the projection wasn’t working. But Bill’s voice kept coming out from somewhere near his collar. It didn’t bother me much. The porch was a mess though.

What really bothers me is the trash on the lawn. The trucks come and empty the dumpsters from the corner store and half of it blows over from the alley and ends up in the goddamn hydrangeas. You clean it up one day, it’s back the next.

I don’t like to complain but I also can’t stand the stray cat named Charlie that lounges there in the sun on my front steps and licks his ass and then hisses at me when I come home, to my own house, the house that I am struggling to make the mortgage on.

I tell him to get the hell out of there and he tells me no and then I just go in and shut the door.

Some days at five thirty in the morning I wake up and all the sirens are still distant and the window shades are still all down the block and I put my face close enough to my coffee cup to feel the steam coming off and the family is still asleep and safe inside and things are OK. Things are pretty good.

Then I realize I nearly stepped on Charlie the cat and Charlie looks up at me and say “Go inside and get me some hard salami, sliced thin. And stop putting bricks on top of the trash cans it only makes a racket when I knock them off.”

And next thing I know here comes Bill with his jacket flapping around and a big dumb smile on his robot face and he says “Hey, did you get a cat?”