Talking with the Neighbours
Assorted candy and a bottle of whiskey liqueur are good starting points for a neighbourly discourse.
She gazed at the flowerpots that had been neatly arrayed by the south wall of her late mother’s house, strewn across the gravel pathway in glum gobs of shard and earth. Bits and pieces of motley seedlings lay everywhere. She knelt and inspected the ground for footprints, sighing.
“Nova, Neva, come here immediately!” she called out to her daughters.
The six-year-old twins came charging from around the corner in their playtime dresses and leggings, followed by a pink-and-stubble-skinned Otto, the Lakeland Terrier. She had known trouble was in town as early as that morning when she found the dog huddled at the foot of the stairs, coatless, a silent victim of mysterious denuding.
“Did you have anything to do with this?”
She pointed sternly at the plant cemetery by her feet.
The girls looked at each other with wide blue eyes, tilted their heads in unison, as they tended to do when deliberating, and then sang out breathlessly.
“Shenanigans, Henanigans!”
She smiled thinly.
“So there were small ladies and gentlemen?”
The twins nodded, relieved that Mamma understood.
That evening, after she had put the girls to bed and locked Otto in her bedroom, she sat on the old rocking chair on the porch of her former home, which they now visited only twice a year, her father’s short-barrelled Ithaca Model 37 on her knees, loaded with buckshot.
The peace offering, a shoebox full of candy with a bottle of whiskey liqueur, rested on the nearby steps. As her mother had told her on a similar night three decades before, managing community relationships was a hands-on undertaking.
The above texts were first published on Twitter and are © 2023 by David Pahor.
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