This one is a case of cart before horse but writerly – it’s a case of cover before story – there’s a section on the website called The Serials Next Door, a collection of seven short novellas plus one placeholder, imaginary until today. I added it to appease my brain which prefers visual balance. So I designed the cover for The Widow Next Door, the eighth book in the series, before I started the story. I’m fond of the cover, so I had to write to story to fit, the house had to be concrete, with visible staircases, and there’s a spookiness to the cover so I made the story spooky, too, just a little for now, most of The Next Doors are softly spooky and mildly strange, there will be four or five more chapters. Feels good to write with restrictions once in a while, I usually am totally freeeeeeee, everything is winged, I wasn’t sure I liked how this turned out so I took the recording and went and walked up and down the beach a couple of times and listened. I recorded it in the back yard pretty early this morning because I like it when you can hear birds but there are two planes before the birds. Also. You know money has its own language, right? Good because I adhered to that principle, you’ll hear it, I meant to say languishing but said languaging, not sure why this happens, sort of an audio typo, a verbal glitch, the old deer in the headlights scenario, in this case I am the headlights.

And here’s a riddle, the   on y keyboard is issing. Autocorrect caught I hope all of the culprits but you might see some dangling hatter.

Thanks for being here.

The Widow Next Door – 1 by Sherry Cassells

I had lunch in a penthouse apartment overlooking the neighbourhood in which I grew up and now I think I know how God feels.

I saw our old house, the backyard that bit by bit and then all at once became forest. One September we discovered a monarch butterfly sanctuary back there and if there is a heaven after all this, it will almost certainly pale in comparison. I remembered it the other way, too, coming back home, the forest disintegrated into our backyard, I could feel my savagery flake away and obedience take its place.

 After lunch that day I drove past the old place, everything felt delicate and small, there was something of a carousel about it, surely it hadn’t been so orderly then. I think suburbia has got itself into a rut, it used to be colourful and now it is carefully bland. But still there’s a quaintness about it possibly due to the small houses, nothing like the monsters they build now, and it’s the time of day, too, there’s a lean of gold in the summer air, billowing shadows, enormous trees, a flock of starlings in the purpling sky, a train whistle in the distance, cicadas.

 I remembered who had lived where, their names through my head like birdcalls, then I turned down Windy Lake Road, the dead end street that led to the forest and eventually the bird cliffs and finally the lake where we spent our endless summers. Windy Lake. We used to steal the bottom sheets from our beds and toss them from the cliffs, they’d hump like airborne jellyfish, we tied carefully chosen rocks to weigh their corners down just enough, we'd head down to the beach where they'd eventually land and we’d climb back up to launch them again. I mention this climb casually; it was anything but. The cliff was sheer and often sandy, we shoved the toes of our runners into starling holes and held on to scrappy roots when we could. We did this five or six times a day, only once did I lose a sheet, it caught a gust and rose high high high, its stripes blended into the sky until it disappeared. Throughout the day I’d catch glimpses of it and get a wild sort of joy that it had escaped, that night I spotted it again from our backyard, a perfect rectangle in the sky. I wished it well.

 The houses on Windy Lake Road were a completely different sort, modern and huge – we used to say it was where the movie stars lived – they were built from concrete, flat roofed, with staircases on the outsides going from square balcony to square balcony like a game of snakes and ladders.

 The house second from the end on the left was for sale, the sign small, designed like an invitation, dark green with gold lettering. I parked in front of it. Talk about celestial it practically floated. I drove back to my apartment in the city and went straight to bed, that house orbited in my head all night. The next morning I called the number and put in an offer at asking price, I took the day off work so that I could worry freely, I drove there again that night and the following day the real estate agent called and I could barely say hello, she said the house had been taken off the market, I waited for the punchline, for her to say BECAUSE IT’S YOURS! but she didn’t, she offered no explanation, she just said she’d call if anything else came up.

 Maybe this is what a broken heart feels like.

 I try to console myself counting the ways in which the purchase would have ruined me, I build up a case of mold and rot, ruthless carpenter ants, dangerous spiders and bees sharpening behind walls, lurking raccoons, coyotes, drunken teenagers, vagabonds, asbestos.

 But I keep going back.

 And I keep turning down Windy Lake Road, stalking the house like a jilted lover, once or twice I catch sight of the owner and her shadow, I park at the end of the street and walk through the thin pathway into the bowl of forest before the cliffs – this route is too much for today’s children – the lake is beautiful in the moonlight, it looks perfectly round, through the bushes I catch glimpses not of the house I wanted but its neighbour, the one beside the forest, and surely the more valuable of the two.

 I grew up with parents who argued, I knew those silhouettes through the window with their gaping mouths, each night they carried on, occasionally struggling to the floor, my parents had not gone that far.

 Not getting the house had become an obsession, I decided to let it go, and on what was to be my final foray into the forest I saw the couple again. There was a violence to their shapes that had not before been present. When I heard a gunshot I'm ashamed to admit that the first thing I thought was that the house might go up for sale.

 It took three months but it happened. The agent called. She gave me the address and said meet you there this afternoon? I was early, she was under obligation, she explained, to tell me there had been a murder there, I pretend-balked, I continued throughout the tour heaving and recoiling sort of like the jellyfish sheets, my accountant said they might have trouble selling it, I got it for a song. My final condition was that they install new hardwood floors throughout, I didn’t mention blood but didn’t have to, and the entire place repainted, my final final condition was for new windows throughout, I said I was looking into hiring an exorcist but she was on to me by then, she said it wouldn’t bring the price down.

In the end I paid less than half of what I had offered for the house next door, again I sheepishly admit I felt no remorse for the circumstances that allowed such a steal, I was only grateful, I didn't care that my money languished in the bank account of a jailbird.

 There’s two of them next door. I thought it was just one woman and her shadow but it’s sisters. There are a couple of acres between our houses and I see them at night like Lady Macbeths up and down their staircases they go from balcony to balcony like they are chasing one another, like we did at the bird cliffs, I thought it might be a good idea to invite them for tea, I knocked on their door like some Victorian gentleman, they both answered and I handed them an invitation.

 They came last night.

 Forget the tea Connie said, she plunked down a half bottle of bourbon. I went to the kitchen for glasses, when I came back Stella was standing right where the blood would have been, she spun on the very spot and said with her arms wide I love what you’ve done with the place. I hadn’t done much, really, but the floors were dark and gorgeous, and the new windows, beautiful.

 I supposed they’d known their former neighbours, I was about to ask but Stella, she was wobbly either from spinning or bourbon or both, whispered, not to me nor to her sister, but with her arms wide, to the house itself, I used to live here.

pssst… if you want to see the cover go here and scroll down