THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR
Word Count: 323
The lady next door asked if she could put one bag of trash into my own garbage bin. She and her husband were elderly and had opted for the smaller bins when the town came around to establish a standard. I said, of course.
It seemed she had one bag a week to add to our own and I certainly didn’t mind but it did seem a bit odd that two little old people would fill up even the small version of the trash bin each week.
They’d moved into the neighborhood before we did though I rarely ran into him except out in his own yard mowing or shoveling until the last year, when they paid a neighborhood boy. I hadn’t seen him for several months when she called for help because he had fallen. It was quite a shock to see him laying in front of a wheelchair, legs cut off at his knees. She explained to me that it’d been an accident at his part-time job. I told her how sorry I was and assured her she could ask for help anytime.
The next time I saw him he’d lost both arms at the elbows. I asked him but he wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t even look up at me. She told me it was a slip in the bandsaw down in the cellar. He built birdhouses, she said, as a hobby. Later I found out he’d lost his tongue. Cancer, she said.
Then his eyes, gaping and empty sockets beneath sunken lids. She said glass eyes were not covered by their insurance. I should have gotten suspicious but she seemed so attentive, so caring and dedicated to all his needs.
And then one day, he was gone. Hung himself, she’d said sadly, despondent over his health. She was devastated, you could see that plain enough.
Though now I wonder why I didn’t think at the time to ask, how?
Strange how we just fall into a story. I questioned nothing until something made me envision an armless, mostly legless man tying a noose, and then climbing atop a chair in order to properly position himself to let the rope and gravity do their work.
I wasn’t sure what was happening here, either. Then the end just fell into place.