The Neighbors

Jared Yates Sexton
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The neighbors are strange and prefer privacy to brotherhood. They keep to themselves. They sleep odd hours and complain to the police when I play my music loud. The only lights you ever see are in the basement. Connie thinks they have kinky sex down there. But I think it’s something worse. A week ago the news said a boy got found in a ditch. Not a thing on him. You never know.
Last winter Connie took a peach pie over there for the holidays. Little Asian girl opened the door and said no thanks. Just no thanks. Really. Connie brought that damn pie back with her, put it on the table in the kitchen and got the binoculars out of the cabinet where we left them. She peered out of our window and into theirs.
“I don’t understand it,” she said, moving up on her tiptoes. “You’d think I was giving them a bomb.” She paused and said, “Maybe I should give them a bomb.”
I was half flipping through a magazine in the living room. I knew things were coming to a head. I’d seen them making love on their couch in the audacity of the afternoon sun. I’d seen them kneel and kiss their child in his crib. Sooner or later they would come. They would come, and it would be us or them

Jared Yates Sexton is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University and serves as Managing Editor at BULL. His first collection of stories, An End to All Things, was published by Atticus Books.