How to Murder Your Neighbor

Based on a true story

by Salem Withington

SALEM

We walked up the last steep hill in the orange dusk. Lav was in front of me and as we reached the cliff summit we stayed at a slight distance, surveying the precipitous edge. My life flashed in front of my eyes, or it could have been vertigo. Questions raced across my mind. What would prison really be like? What if I never got caught but had this on my conscience for the rest of my life? Could I live like that? Well, I couldn’t live like this anymore: with a toilet on Lav’s front steps and detritus from her extraordinary hoarder’s life scattered all over her front lawn and packed in the open garage—now reeking of mildew—and her various vehicles blocking part of our side of the driveway. Anything was preferable to living with that next door. If I made just one, quick, little move—oops!—she’d be gone and the property could be restored to its pristine condition, pre-Lav.

Lav stood a mere yard from the edge, overlooking the panorama of the deeply sunken dump: rotted and decomposed hills formed by decades of putrid, reeking garbage.

From behind her, heart slamming, I snatched up a small-but-sturdy-looking fallen branch, lunged forward and used it to give her a mighty shove in the middle of her back.

Lav lurched into the air, screaming as she free-fell, “You evil bitch!” Down, down she fell, landing in the garbage, which slowly swallowed her, filling her gaping yaw with rotting compost as she disappeared.

I moved closer and peered over and down, making certain that Lav was forever gone. Silence, no motion. I dropped the branch, making no move to wipe my prints from it, turned, and ran back down the woodsy hill toward my car. I tripped over a root, flew up into the air, headed for a tree face first, and awoke with a start.

* * *

When my husband, Earle, and I bought the house in Florida, we had good neighbors who cared about their house and property and were hardly ever here. We had twin houses, albeit decorated very differently on the inside. The houses had been built by a family that eventually had to downsize. Our good first neighbors had a home in Michigan and had bought the house next door to us partly for their own use but mostly as a Vacation Rental By Owner. We never had any trouble with their many short-term renters.

She, Gina, was an interior decorator, and her husband, Joe, was an information technology guy. They were young seniors, probably sixtyish, and seemed like a very solid couple. Joe and I once found ourselves outside our respective houses on the same night, and of course we fell into conversation. My husband emerged from the house and made a joke about Joe and me meeting in secret. It wasn’t until nine years later we discovered that Joe was indeed a serial philanderer. One evening Gina looked out the kitchen window to the lanai and witnessed him being inappropriate with another woman. They sold the house and moved away in opposite directions.

And then Lav moved in, and our quality of life went slowly spiraling downhill.

* * *

LAV

I just bought a house in Florida. We had a fire at our house in Tennessee, and it burned up our thirty-thousand-dollar mantelpiece. My husband has a lot of money. He’s, like, thirty years older than me but I don’t care. He said he’d take care of me and at first I didn’t believe him, but then I decided what the heck? What have I got to lose? I was a single mom and he wanted a wife. When we had the fire and we couldn’t live in the main house in Tennessee, he moved into the apartment over the garage and sent me down here to Florida. I have family in Cape Coral, but they get on my nerves, so I bought this house about an hour away. It has a pool and stuff and a really big front lawn. I share the driveway with the neighbors. They’re an older couple and there’s something about her that I don’t like. It seems like she thinks she’s better than I am. But her husband is nice. Men are attracted to me. We share the driveway so I guess we share everything else. I can’t wait to move in and make it mine: the house, the yard, everything.

* * *

SALEM

The first day I met Lav she was in the driveway with her sister and brother-in-law. She had bought the contents of the house for an additional twenty-five thousand dollars but had already started hauling our former neighbor’s pretty furnishings out onto the driveway. At first I thought this would stop within the week. Each time I drove into the driveway and saw the growing heap of stuff outside her garage I thought, Any day now, she’ll finish and clean up. Alas, it was not to be. In the end, it worsened over three years to a junkyard degree and my spirits sank into the two toilets she had outside: one on her front stoop and one on her front lawn. As the months and then two years passed my morale caved in like the dents in the U-Haul-type metal trailer next to her unregistered, plywood-sided truck.

“How is she doing?” I carefully asked her brother-in-law the day we all met.

“Oh, with Lav it’s always one step forward and two steps back,” he answered. Little did I know what a ludicrous understatement this would prove to be. Lav’s sister stood at a slight distance, smoking a cigarette and scratching her crotch. This didn’t bode well, either.

* * *

Where was my compassion? In due course, when I realized things were not going to improve, rather than offering help, I began to entertain ideas of revenge. When I thought of getting rid of Lav, it was like little fireworks exploding in my head. There were flashes of light and clarity, but then darkness, and I couldn’t tell what I was actually doing in the flashes. I wasn’t stabbing her: too intimate. I wasn’t shooting her: I had never handled a gun except for riflery class in summer camp when I was ten. I wasn’t pushing her off a cliff because surely they would find my handprint on her back with all the advances in forensic science. In my psyche she was just imploding. Reverse boom! Gurgle! She was gone. I wanted her to vanish. But didn’t want the responsibility.

If only I could commit the perfect murder. But what was that? According to the Artificial Intelligence Overview: “A perfect murder is generally defined as a homicide that is never detected as such, where the cause of death is misidentified as natural causes, suicide, or an accident, or one in which the perpetrator is never identified or convicted. It involves no witnesses, no trace evidence, and no connection between the killer and the victim.”

In short, I needed to use my imagination. And do some research.

* * *

And then came Hurricane Ian and the landscape was torn apart. Despite the loss of most of our trees, and water coming up the driveway, we had no flooding inside the house. Lav did, but the homeless man who eventually moved onto her lawn told us that Lav had saved all her TVs by putting them up on beds, etc. This despite Lav having told me when we first met that she never watched TV.

For ten days after Ian, we plugged Lav’s house into our generator, and she provided some of the gas for it. A fact she never let us forget. Earle helped her dispose of a fallen tree outside her front door, sawing it up so someone else could haul it away. When next we saw her, she ignored me and talked only to Earle.

* * *

The neighbor on the other side of Lav was texting to alert me, just as I looked out our front window and saw that there were eight emergency vehicles lined up, and the fire department hurrying up Lav’s driveway with several hoses.

I stepped outside to join a couple of neighbors and to bandy about the possibility of insurance fraud, due to Lav’s Tennessee fire. Or maybe her house was cursed!  It was from the Fire Captain, who eventually ambled over to me, that I learned that Lav had indeed been notified that her house was on fire but wasn’t hurrying home. We didn’t see her car in the driveway until the next morning.

“You wanna go inside and take a look?” The Fire Captain asked me this as we stood on our property and watched from a slight distance. The kitchen, where the fire had started, was just inside the front door. I thought about it for a moment and then realized how demoralizing it could be to see a twin kitchen burned to a blackened crisp. My morbid curiosity didn’t extend that far. I could also imagine Lav being told that I’d gone inside her house to gawk, and how furious she’d be. I declined.

Some of the sparks from her fire had come unnervingly close to our house. I began to feel unsafe.

* * *

LAV

It’s not my fault they decided to turn the power back on! How was I supposed to know? And there was something on the stove and I wasn’t home. We just had a hurricane! I guess there must have been a few things piled on the stove from when I was getting ready to evacuate. You know, I lifted everything up off the floor, especially all the TVs, in case there was flooding and I guess I put stuff on the counter and maybe it somehow got pushed over onto the stove. How should I know? So, then I left for the day to go see my sister in Cape Coral and the next thing I know I’m getting a call from a neighbor that my house is on fire. We were getting our eyebrows tattooed so there was nothing I could do! What was I supposed to do? Leave the shop with only one dark eyebrow? There’s a fire? Let the Fire Department handle it, that’s what they’re paid for! I was staying with my sister because we were having dinner at the Moose Club after the eyebrows.

* * *

SALEM

There is an adage that if you keep doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, you are mentally ill. For months and months I continued to hope and expect that Lav would clean up her property, which now looked like a badly organized rummage sale displayed on her lawn. But things only worsened.

After the house caught fire she brought a large Recreational Vehicle onto her lawn and moved into it. My spirits sank in the mud like the wheels on that monstrosity. And there was no sign of repair people arriving to work on the inside of her now-stripped house. In short, no progress. I felt no sympathy. Only frustration.

* * *

LAV

It’s not my fault my house caught fire! And the damn insurance company won’t give me even close to enough money to have it fixed. The smoke and water from the kitchen basically destroyed the inside. It’s torn down to the studs now and I gotta start fixing it up. Good thing I have this big yard because I can just start pulling everything out of the house and put it on the lawn. Who cares? This is all mine. I’m going shopping almost every day to get stuff for inside. I have money and I can buy whatever I want. I have to start all over again. I can get lots more stuff because there’s lots of space outside ever since I had that big tree ripped down. Anything that doesn’t fit inside the house I put outside because we’re not deed-restricted and I can do anything I want. I had the roof replaced and the stupid roofing company is suing me. They were supposed to put solar panels up there, too, but they won’t because I owe them money from the first job. So now there’s a lien on the house. I don’t care. I’m going to the beach in a string bikini today. Even though my husband says I have a fat ass. Anyway my husband isn’t here so what do I care? He’s been here once for two days in the past two years. My son just came over and left me his GMC because it doesn’t start and it isn’t registered but no one will ever notice. I parked the GMC right in the middle of the driveway. I share the driveway so I can really park anywhere I want, even on their side. I don’t speak to that snob next door. She is evil. She has a witch’s name. And I heard she’s supposed to be some kind of reverend! I’ll pray for her because I go to church.

* * *

SALEM

For three years Lav lived in the RV, illegally plugged into the power from her house. The dead GMC remained parked halfway on our side of the driveway, and the other unregistered vehicles were scattered around the lawn where there had once been a beautiful tree that blocked the noise and view from the road. But Lav mindlessly had the tree murdered when it was damaged in the hurricane, and some expensive out-of-state contractors came around in search of work and charged her a fortune to tear the magnificent tree apart and cart it away. The tree would have survived, Earle and I were fairly sure. I could only wish that they had hauled her away with the tree.

In the meantime, day after day, we saw Lav arriving in her new-but-now-dented pickup truck carrying more and more stuff: things she had picked up by the side of the road after Hurricane Ian and shopping bags bulging with God only knew what.

One day, as I sat in our front yard with a friend and her Golden Retriever, Lav emerged from her gutted house wearing a mini dress made of something silver and shiny with metallic stilettos. The view from the back, with her flapping saddlebag thighs hanging below the dress, was so appalling I still shudder when I think of it. I am bitter to this day that I didn’t get a photo of that sickening sight, which I could have made into a poster and distributed widely. I wondered then if perhaps she was getting all her money from turning tricks. I don’t condemn anyone who turns tricks for a living, as long as they’re thoughtful to their neighbors. Either way, this woman had no pride, no self-consciousness, no sense of propriety whatsoever. And she was incapable of cleaning up her act.

And then there was the day I saw her mowing her lawn in a string bikini as those thighs jiggled obscenely over the bumps. I felt vaguely nauseated and turned quickly away. Couldn’t I look out my picture window without being confronted by her utter lack of self-consciousness?

* * *

Why did I feel so inhumane toward Lav? Instead of any kindness, I plotted. I had a fantasy of bugging her house so that some night I could talk to her, from my house, in a ghostly voice and scare her right into being institutionalized. Forever. Or maybe into jumping off a cliff voluntarily. But how would I get into her house? I didn’t know if she had cameras.

Supposing I hired someone with nerves of steel to go into the house when Lav was out? I would need to find someone who was very savvy about bugging the house in reverse, so that she could hear me, but I didn’t have to listen to her. The thought of being able to hear what she said gave me the horrors. I could only begin to imagine the ignorance spewing mindlessly forth from her grossly limited perspective.

Lav’s front door was always open, from what we could tell. She was not the sort of person to lock or even close doors and often left the dead GMC door open, which was how a raccoon came to live in it. A giant Havahart trap now lived on her lawn with everything else. One of the GMC doors was tied partly shut with a piece of rope, and the windows remained open, even when it rained.

The person I would hire to bug her house—probably a big, dweeby guy who wasn’t good at talking to people but was brilliant at technology—would rig the house so that there was a concealed speaker in her bedroom. Once we knew she was in at night, and I had looked over the fence to see that her bedroom light had gone off, I could start haunting her. Although a male voice might be better. But this would have to be a plan I kept to myself. And the tech guy.

In a hoarse stage whisper I could taunt her, my disembodied voice filling her house and her head. “Get out of this house!” I would rasp. “This house doesn’t want you! Something evil is coming!” Etc.Then I could have the pleasure of witnessing, from a discreet distance, her panicked exit from the house as she ran onto the lawn, screaming.

I would do this night after night until she went mad and had to be carted away in a straitjacket. She would be taken to one of Trump’s new sanatoriums, never to emerge again.

But what if the tech guy told someone? When you hired someone to commit a crime for and with you, how could you ever be sure they wouldn’t rat? I just wasn’t made for subterfuge.

* * *

I am passing by our front window when, yet again, I see emergency vehicles lining the driveway. There’s a dead body in Lav’s house. Apparently, a workman was left alone in the house while his coworker went out to get them lunch. The lone man had a massive heart event and dropped dead instantly. But because it was “an unaccompanied death,” the emergency crews had to await the coroner, who had to determine that there was nothing suspicious about the situation. It took the coroner about six hours to arrive, during which time flashing lights called attention to the situation and a small crowd gathered. Although Lav wasn’t home and presumably couldn’t have bumped off the poor man, I felt I’d had enough, and it was time to contact the county.

The county proved to be about as useful as trying to catch the wind. I called twice, they sent someone out and Lav only got her wrist tapped, not even slapped. We were not deed-restricted and so she took that as confirmation that she could do whatever she wanted. No one seemed to take into account that she was violating several county zoning laws.

One day I headed down our long driveway to mail a letter, and Lav was waiting for me, boiling with hatred. “You got somethin’ ta say, say it ta my face,” she snarled.

There were so many things I could have said, but I suddenly felt fear. I forgot the cardinal rule of dealing with a lunatic, which is, Do Not Engage. So, I mentioned that we’d had a lovely life until she moved in. The conversation went downhill from there. She told me I was evil. I sank to her level and told her she was evil. Then I went inside my house, vibrating with stress, appalled that I had sunk so low, and fell into a depression.

* * *

LAV

I just told that bitch, Salem, off. She is a witch. She said everything was perfect here until I moved in! It’s not my fault my house has to be renovated! I told her we’re not deed-restricted so the county says I can do whatever I want. I’m trying to get contractors here to fix the house but everyone is busy. Or they come and have a look and give an estimate and I just laugh and tell them no thanks. I have it hard. I’ve had a lot of trouble since I moved here and everyone else has made a mess of everything. It’s taking me a lot of time to get stuff to replace the stuff that was destroyed. The garage is packed with furniture and things that were smoke damaged and the house is full, too, mostly with what I’ve bought since the fire. The workmen will just have to work around it. If they ever get here.

* * *

SALEM

At about this point I headed into some serious paranoia that Lav was going to have me whacked. She had a parade of downtrodden-looking people coming on the property, including at least two homeless people, one who bicycled up and down the driveway until Lav came out and handed him something—food?—and another who lived in his car beside our shared driveway. We knew of this man, who had been in trouble with the police. He came to Lav’s to do odd jobs, as far as we could tell, and wound up staying on the property, complaining bitterly about the heat. Finally, mercifully, she must have dismissed him, as one day he drove off never to return.

In the meantime, my husband had obtained his medical marijuana license, and I had never been so eager to get into an altered state. I had insomnia, so I took half a gummy at night to help me sleep. But before I fell asleep I would have vivid imaginings that Lav broke into our house and murdered me as I lay in bed. In the very early days, when we’d been civil to each other, she had come into my house twice, uninvited both times, but the first time at least she knocked, although she entered before I responded. She stared in amazement at our bookshelves and asked if the books were real. The second time Lav entered our house without knocking while Earle and I were both in the bathroom and I was in a state of undress. She walked in the front door and called my name, and I hollered back, “Not a good time!” To her credit she left immediately, but anything was possible. Needless to say I kept the doors locked.

I had nightmares that there was an abstract evil force coming to get me. I would be aware that I was in a nightmare and that some unseen, dark pressure was on top of me and I needed Earle to shake me awake, which he did on several occasions as I wailed and shrieked.

* * *

A friend of mine told me of a woman known as the White Witch who became successful in Los Angeles teaching corporate employees how to dispense with someone at work who was being hateful. This benevolent witch was hired to resolve issues which threatened to rip employees apart and make them, and thus their bosses, and so their bosses’ bosses, unhappy.

The White Witch’s suggested ritual was indeed fairly benign. You created a paper boat. Then you drew an effigy of the offending person, small enough to fit into the boat. Add three coins to the hull, and take the whole tiny works to a river. Send the object of your ritual all the best first, then wish that person far, far away and drop your emotionally loaded paper boat, with effigy and coins, into the river. With all the best intentions. That was the impossible part, at least for me.

However, this had worked for a friend of a friend and even seemed to help get rid of a horrid boss when the paper boat creators, rather than going to the trouble of traveling to a river, just flushed it all down an office toilet. The boss got transferred within a month.

Consulting YouTube regarding how to construct a paper boat, I succeeded on about the third try. I then made a flat, paper effigy of Lav, complete with monogrammed T-shirt, added coins to the miniature hull, and dropped it in the local river which was, unfortunately, only flowing, rather than raging, which I would have preferred. But try as I might, when I wished Lav well as I dropped her into the river, I just didn’t feel it. I only felt ill feelings toward her and no genuinely charitable thoughts whatsoever.

I have now completed this ritual twice, and it has yet to work. The first time, while driving, I aimed over a very high bridge and missed, and the boat landed on the highway and no doubt was run over ten thousand times before being ground completely away. So, I guess that didn’t count. That second time, when I drove to the nearest river, I dropped her in and watched her bob along for a moment before she went under. The White Witch never said anything about drowning the object of one’s distress, so maybe that one didn’t count, either. I’ll never know. And Lav stayed.

* * *

One rainy afternoon, as I passed by our front window, I saw two people hugging in the driveway. One was Lav and the other was a large, heavy, sloppy man, hugging Lav with one arm while squeezing her ass with his other hand. I promptly named him SqueezeButt, and so he came to be known among all our friends and family.

“Is SqueezeButt over there today?” they would ask. Or, “Any blatant butt-squeezing in your driveway today?”

Or I would volunteer, “SqueezeButt’s on site,” when I saw him drive, always too fast, up the driveway.

One day SqueezeButt stood beside his truck where we could clearly see him from the back as he changed his pants in the driveway. And one day I saw her berating him. No matter. He drove up the driveway more days than not. If Lav was still married to her sugar daddy in Tennessee, they must have had an open marriage. Or perhaps not.

In due course, SqueezeButt moved into Lav’s house, parking his dented truck on the lawn.

What if she sent him over here to squeeze me to death against his bulging paunch?

* * *

 LAV

Moose came to visit me today and he thinks we’re together. My husband dumped me and Moose dropped in after his noon beers and happened to find me crying. He said he couldn’t take my chaos anymore and we should officially separate. I mean, my husband said that not Moose. They call him Moose because he’s this big guy but his real name is Rob Scrod. He’s not good looking but I don’t care. He adores me. I mean, I didn’t love my husband or anything but he has a lot of money and he was taking care of me. He’ll have to keep taking care of me or he’ll have a lawsuit on his hands. I’m sure he doesn’t want that. I could get a lot of money out of him. My lawyer says it’s not a good time because I already have two other lawsuits going, one with the insurance company and one with the roofing company. Anyway I think I’ll just let Moose move in. He said he wants to. And he can park his truck in the driveway. Or on the lawn. I told him he has to take more showers because he smells bad.

* * *

SALEM

Two more hurricanes had come and gone, ripping the landscape apart. We stayed for Helene but evacuated for Milton. If you’ve never stayed around for a hurricane, I don’t recommend it. We had stayed put for Ian during one-hundred-and-fifty-five-mile-an-hour winds, and for five hours we couldn’t tell whether or not there was a train/tornado rushing at us. Nine of our thirteen trees were destroyed. The only one that remained was a pitiful excuse for a Tabebuia which had never really taken hold and was so scrawny that the wind just blew past it, headed for more sturdy targets. At the peak of the roaring wind during Ian, one of our hurricane shades—the newest thing since hurricane shutters—yanked free of its clip and the metal buckle began banging against the living room window. Concerned that the window would break, Earle insisted on going outside to fix it, hugging the house as he did for fear of being blown around. I felt I must accompany him in case he needed me, and I followed him outside. Some of the thin, metal soffits had blown out from under the roof overhang and were buried six inches in the ground by the force of the elements. Standing outside briefly in those Category Four or possibly Five winds I could only think of how people died like that, beheaded by flying debris. I hastened back inside, entreating Earle to do the same. Earle managed to re-secure the buckle and made it back inside unscathed.

* * *

I had tried, several times when we were still feigning civility, to talk to Lav, but found her amazingly difficult to reason with. There was a connection missing. She had misfiring synapses in her brain. Her eyes lacked awareness, not to mention intelligence. She really was partly undone.

Lav’s garbage often blew over onto our property. One day out front as I bent down to pick up a greasy paper plate and discarded wrapper that could only have come from her side of the driveway, she appeared and shouted, “That’s not mine!”

During Hurricanes Helene and Milton, Lav had all kinds of potential projectiles out on her lawn. As usual, she had no thought for her neighbors. We expected that our post-hurricane lawn would be peppered with trash and sharp objects from her side. In the end her outdoor “patio,” which consisted of rusted chairs, a rusted barbeque, presumably mildewed cushions, and something that looked like a broken, metal arbor with the backdrop of a rusted tractor mower, only tipped over but didn’t wind up with us.

* * *

I am an empath. And yet, where was my empathy? I had this fantasy that Lav stepped outside during the hurricane to put a tarp over her tractor mower and the tarp inflated like a parachute and Lav blew away. In gusts of one-hundred-and-fifty-mile-an-hour winds she was blown up into the air and through several trees that tore at her clothes and her hair. She blew across neighborhoods that were leaning, straining against the wind, and then she blew out over the gulf and sailed upward on a waterspout and then onto a tiny island where she lived out her days foraging for nuts and berries with no one else there whose life she could thoughtlessly ruin.

The other option was that she stepped outside and got pierced by all the projectiles she’d left out there, so she wound up like a giant pincushion, pinned to a tree, a greasy paper plate stuck to her head like a jaunty little hat. And thus she met her torturous end. I celebrated in my mind.

* * *

It was time, after three and a half years of aggravation, to appeal to the county again. I wrote a strong letter, enumerating the indignities we had suffered at the hands of our dreadful neighbor. Earle hand delivered the letter to the county zoning department while sitting down with someone who actually seemed to care.

Soon two strong and wonderful women from the county appeared at our door, nodding vehemently at our complaints and listing Lav’s clear and present code violations.

We saw her hurry to greet them in the driveway, hollering excuses.  Her side and back yard, separated by our privacy fence, were in such an appalling condition with trash and junk and grass waist-high by now, one of the county women expressed fear about walking through there and encountering snakes, rusty metal, and God only knew what else, but she had to. It was her job. When they were leaving, after posting some sort of fluorescent orange warning on her front door, we saw her run after them.

At the same time, the RV door was open and a putrid smell wafted across the driveway. According to the county women there were dead rats inside, trapped for months after Lav had moved back into the house. We had seen rats outside and, walking along the apex of her roof, a huge raccoon, silhouetted against the dusk sky. Subsequently it wound up in our side yard. We were fostering a very small hospice dog—smaller than the racoon—and never let her outside without us for fear she’d encounter the giant, possibly rabid creature.

Lav was defensive and, as the county later confirmed to us, she “lied about everything.” This vindicated me in a small way because I, too, had felt she was a liar. She said outrageous things like telling us her Jamaican gardener would come from Tennessee to clean up the palm tree bed between our houses and threatening us with her lawyer. The gardener never manifested, and we never heard from her lawyer who was probably lying down somewhere in the semi-dark with a cool cloth on his forehead.

* * *

We finally figured out that although we shared the driveway with Lav, the easement was on our side so we could put up a fence. Rather than spending thousands of dollars, we began by having a partial fence built, at least blocking the RV, the mess outside her garage, and then the garbage she soon leaned all along her side of the barrier, no doubt as a gesture of defiance.

I often wondered why I hadn’t tried harder with her. Why didn’t I try being friendly and providing support, as we had during Hurricane Ian when we plugged her house into our generator? Every time something uneasy came up between us she would haul out that card—“I got you gas for your generator!”—as if she would have had any power for ten days without us. I found her impossible and limited and just plain vapid. So, I gave up trying and withdrew, which is what I do when I don’t like someone. Despite the fact that I am indeed “some kind of reverend.” But my specialty is animal ministry, and by this point in the story one can surely see why.

There were, amazingly, some signs of improvement over the first months following our visitations from the county women. The grass in the front was mowed, some junk was removed from the driveway. Friends—when I wasn’t too embarrassed to have them over—even commented on the improvement.

But then Lav, who was incapable of completely or truly cleaning up, went into reverse, and within weeks her property looked as bad as it had before the county came.

Would I contact the county again? Or would that finally prompt her to murder me in my sleep, while shouting, “You’re supposed to be some kind of reverend!”

* * *

Apparently I was now a full-fledged member of our mean society, which I had actively spurned for decades. I had cartoonish fantasies of decking Lav. Or putting on boxing gloves and using her head, in fast motion, as a vibrating punching bag. What if I could call the county every day and they visited until she was driven to self-inflicted destruction? Then I wouldn’t have to suffer the direct blame. But surely she was already ingesting mold, mildew, toxic fumes, and other results of ripping apart a smoke- and water-damaged house and then filling it with junk.

Any good intentions I had in the very beginning were long gone from three and a half years of facing her stinking mess every time I stepped outside my house or drove in our driveway. And each time the rage would rush back up inside me, and I’d be right back where I’d started. Thinking not of how we could help, but how we could get rid of her. Wherever she was, she would destroy her property and thus degrade the lives of her neighbors. She must have lived in a trailer park—had she told me that?—and surely should be living in the worst sort of one now. I have nothing against those living in trailer parks, as long as they are thoughtful to their neighbors!

 But even trailer parks—or at least several in our town—had some sense of decency. The only place she would fit in was a dump.

* * *

One day as Earle walked past the junkyard he encountered Lav and told her that she needed to clean up things that were leaning against our fence and denting it. She began squawking like an angry bird, “Call the county! Call the county! That’s what she does! Call the county!” Lav later confessed to our young county woman that she had shouted at us. She had lied about so many things, including telling the county that she didn’t live here, she lived in Tennessee, we were amazed that she’d volunteered this information. Was she finally fearful of us? I had begun to feel that she was indeed intimidated by me, and I was delighted.

When Halloween rolled around this year, could I dress as some horrific character, get up on the stilts circus performers wear and leer at her from over and high above the fence, threatening her with an angry clean-up mob? This mob would be bearing shovels and giant garbage bags and come roaring onto her property to haul  junk away, as she stood, helplessly squawking, “Call the county!” In the meantime, what if she ran around the fence and knocked me off the stilts? It would be a far fall. I’d wind up in a wheelchair, and she’d have the last laugh.

As in Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, based on the book Strangers on a Train, maybe I needed to switch murders with someone. This would confuse the authorities so that neither of us would appear to have a motive. But I didn’t know anybody else who was feeling murderous.

* * *

In the end there was nothing to do except take the enormous loss of selling a pretty homestead next door to a hoarder’s paradise and move away. I had fantasized about moving back to New York, but there was the cold! And the taxes. We decided to sell the house, try a year elsewhere in Florida, and take it from there.

* * *

The day we drove down the long, partially divided driveway for the last time, Lav came running out the door of her house, screaming, “You evil bitch!” As we rounded the corner, her shouting stopped abruptly, and she was forever, and mercifully, lost from view.

We were later told that Lav had tripped as she ran after our car, fallen forward, hit her head on one of the toilets on her lawn, and died instantly. The lid slammed down on her as the final insult.

As I am envisioning this I awaken with a start.

I go to the front window and look out. Lav and SqueezeButt are in the driveway. Her mess is still there. And we are still here. My milk of human kindness is as dried up as the Atacama Desert.

It really is time to move.

But who will buy a lovely home beside a junkyard?

BIO

Salem Withington comes from a performing arts background. She wrote, produced and directed children’s comic stage performances in New York for twenty years and was Artist In Residence for various New York schools. Salem is founder and president of ONE MORE DAY, a non-profit hospice dog rescue. She lives in Sarasota County, Florida, with her husband, one sister and a rescue dog named Peaches.