The longer a piece gets, the more lies you have to remember. I mean you can’t talk about the milky moonlight, which I do, on a snowy night, which I also do.
I gotta tell you I am loving this newest Next Door, writing it I mean, I can’t stop. Can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning. What a summer! Hope you are enjoying it, too, the summer and the story.
Thanks for being here!
The Widow Next Door – Part 3 by Sherry Cassells
Hex always said she could never get a good breath but it got serious last year, she started passing out. Why can’t I breathe? she asked and I shrugged, I only shrugged, she was too fragile for me to tell her the truth. She couldn’t breathe because she was stuffed with horror.
There’s something about bad mother stories, everybody turned to us dying for one, hungry for a dollop of that particular madness, but a dollop’s about all they can take, they liked the one about the frying pan and how she heated it first, another favourite was the one about the spidery basement, but there was a limit to what they accepted, their sense of decency swooped in and they convinced themselves we’d said ache not pain, them not us, anything but burn – but there were some who heard what we said – monster not mother. They did nothing to stop it but they stuffed rolled up money in our dirty little pockets or apples into our grubby little fists.
We were beggar children who sold horror for money and nourishment.
We warmed up with the smaller stuff, the expired meat, cut-off utilities, the religious rantings, some shit-talk about how she boiled everything to death and never changed the sheets, how she threatened us under her breath, and told us to fackoff like a crow.
There was nothing physically wrong with Hex but a heart murmur they were casual about, they believed her respiratory malfunction to be stress-related and she was referred to a shrink. I went with her to the first appointment. I wanted to hear the guy say the privacy oath which she did, Dr. Theo Rice was a woman, but she couldn’t take it, she resigned the case after the second meeting and that’s when Dr. L. Starling practically apparitioned, such a strange cat he looked like a lime, he was German from Oklahoma, his accent was unbearable but he was the real deal, he saw not through us but into us, I couldn’t believe how small his mouth got when he talked, Hex said it’s like he’s talking through his arsehole, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, she liked him and so did I.
When he lifted his purple glasses and assured me his devotion to his creed, he held up one crooked nicotine-stained finger to his green lips and uttered a bubbly shhhh, and then he said particularly puckery and straight into me – listen Trench, you might need some therapy too – I noticed he had one eye brown the other blue.
I like a shrink with faults.
He's a lawyer, too, his name is Larabee Berlin Starling – but we call him Lime.
I told him how we got rich. The truth I mean. I’ve made up some great lies about it, ask me sometime, but he's the only one who knows the truth. He screwed up his mouth and hollered you’re kidding! he issued a bubbly little collapsing sound, he never just laughed but seemed to cry, too, his mouth a constrictor knot.
My neighbours came over three days after our bourbon debut and invited me to dinner, they stood a little shaky at my door, fidgeting and impatient they waited for me like children. I took a jar from the fridge so full it looked empty, they must have wondered why I tucked a jar of cold air inside my coat. We walked single-file between our houses, the forest was denser than it looked – just like most people – but I was hoping the widows, note the pluralization, would be an exception.
The jar was full of moonshine.
Did I mention our father was a moonshiner?
T H E F I R S T R O U N D
Charlotte screwed up her face and said it taste like sin, neighbour, breathless Stella agreed heartily, everything tastes like iron to me, which is definitely in sin’s ballpark.
Their house was the same as mine but if the blueprints were stacked one over the other some lines would be off, a few walls were longer or shorter, one stair greater here and lesser there, some angles more generous other stingy, and as a result it seemed to me slightly off kilter, there was an Alice in Wonderland feel to it, and whatever two acres of forested distance lends or takes from the sun, it shone differently in this house, the sky came through their eroded windows more threateningly than it did through mine. I wished I’d worn my boots.
T H E S E C O N D R O U N D
What is the silt? Stella noticed the thin line of grey that appeared in the liquid as it poured, like an effervescent chain, the tiny bubbles hung in the glass like a galaxy. I said the distillation was imperfect but safe, I’d had it many times before, it was from my old balcony still in the city, I promised the clarity of future moonshine, I told them I had a brand new still in my forest, they said it’s not my forest, I begged to differ but didn’t.
They drank with gusto.
Their living room was sunken, mine was not, there was no need for furniture as there was a cushiony ledge all around yet the sisters had the place stuffed, two of everything, two unnecessary couches, too many chairs, I went to the fridge with difficulty at first it was like trespassing between houses I could not find an opening, in the kitchen there were two fridges, I kept pulling open the wrong fridge, if Hex were there I would have thought she were tricking me.
R O U N D T H R E E
Jesus this stuff is like quicksand!
They gave me a tour, the bedrooms upstairs a replica of mine but for the pale paint, like faded flowers, mine were white white white, their bathrooms were decaying but decorated, mine were solid and barren and cold, their kitchen floor was ancient linoleum with pathways that provided a topographical map of their do-si-do triangle from fridges to sink to stoves. The joint was in general disrepair, on the cusp of becoming a fixer-upper, Stella admitted she was still paying the mortgage on the house next door.
F O U R
It’s snowing. Let’s go for a walk.
But it didn’t end up a walk so much as a climb, from balcony to balcony they showed me the way the milky moonlight leaned into each one, and the way those at the back gave different views of the forest and the lake beyond it, we each had a lantern, we called one another Jeckel, Hyde, Jack the Ripper, Sherlock, Charlotte said last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again, the speckle of my house through the snowy lace of forest gave me, well, it gave me a dollop of pleasure.
F I V E
I have an offer. You can make quite a lot of money if you are interested. It will be shocking at first no doubt but given your history –
I can't remember if they said what history!?!?!? or simply swallowed it along with their quicksand.
S I X
Stella cockeyed her sister and said I think we can manage that don’t you sweetheart? or maybe it was Charlotte.
S E V E N
*
(that is not a portrait of Lime's arse but an indication of my utter forgetfullness)
I woke up with wet feet on a rug of sheepskin upon my living room floor, everything around me was white, I wondered if the windows were air or snow, I got to my knees and shuffled over to see the sisters placing white laundry into white snow, and if we can dip inside their heads for a moment I believe they were thinking how lucky they were to have a neighbour like me, a rich man willing to write them into his will to the tune of a million dollars apiece, and all they had to do was kill me.
We met three days later at the offices of Drum, Starling & Croxon, Lime had revised my will and listed the conditions of our upcoming enterprise, the sisters were early, when I walked into the fluorescent office they looked quite citric themselves, one was lemon the other orange they sat across from Lime with his whistle-tight lips.
Jesus Christ he said when he saw me – I knew I looked awful I’d been over at Hex’s the night before for a drunken séance – you look like you’ve seen a ghost.