Photo by Mehmet Turgut Kirkgoz on Unsplash
There'd always been an abundance of mosquitoes around the house. It was like clockwork; sunset in early spring, and a wispy cloud of the little fuckers would begin to coalesce outside the kitchen window. The brood hived in a delicate hover round the mud puddles in the dirt driveway that divided Vick's house from the neighbor's home. They were nearly audible. The puddles were formed by remnants of the deep tire tracks from the neighbor's now-unmoving Jeep, which had begun a slow, rustic decomposition just outside Vick's kitchen window. Vick hadn't ever seen his neighbor long enough to catch wind of his name when he'd heard him clanging the wrench to the guts of the battered Jeep.
He'd also never bothered to ask for it.
It'd been a few weeks since Vick had heard much wind of anything from next door. Well, that wasn't entirely true; a couple weeks back, in fact, Vick had been awoken by what he thought were two people talking to each other just outside the house. His room was in the back of the house and would block out most sidewalk noise, but the faintest discernment of animated discourses seemed to be unfolding somewhere out there. It was enough to rouse Vick's pre-dawn curiosities.
"Don't fucking come near me! You hear me? I told you once already! Let me by!"
Vick sauntered blearily to the front window, folded back a corner of the cardboard curtains, and saw a man gesturing wildly, spouting a cavalcade of expletives.
To nobody at all, it appeared.
"Goddamn motherfucker...LET ME BY!"
And with the order, the man had fallen, almost as if pushed, onto the curbside and against a parked car's passenger side door. Vick recoiled from the scene, whipping the cardboard corner back so it covered the entirety of the window's view, and limped back to bed.
Odd occurrences in the middle of the night ought to have been remembered as dubious encounters at best. Vick's house was just round the corner from a kind of halfway home for rehabilitating nutcases. He'd been informed via letter a couple months back, in less troublesome vernacular. He'd chalked this bizarre incident up to the witching hour wanderings of a disturbed loon who'd become lost in the neighborhood somehow.
Vick's proximity to the nuthouse alone hadn't explained some of the other phenomena he'd observed at even ordinary hours of the day out front of the neighbor's house, though.
One afternoon a few days later, when Vick had been sitting in the dining room, he'd heard a clatter of engine groans, followed by what sounded like steam. As he lifted the aluminum foil from the kitchen window, he saw an old Volvo wagon stalled and overheated in its tracks in the middle of the road. Another morning, Vick facilitated a covert investigation of a yelp coming from the sidewalk at the end of the dirt driveway that separated his property from the neighbor's. An elderly pedestrian sat reeling in front of the neighbor's yard, moaning from a tumble and holding a limp wrist that looked as if surely broken.
Vick began to keep a notebook of the anomalies, and day by day lessened the cloak-black ambiance of his own home in order to better observe. A bicyclist's tire had seemingly burst while riding past the neighbor's; multiple dogs dragged their owners from wayward walking routes to come and piss in the neighbor's yard; the birdbath had not been refilled in weeks and in fact now harbored the rigor mortised carcass of a dead robin.
The portents seemed to be increasing as the days progressed. Vick remembered a little hand-drawn sign on legal paper in the neighbor's window facing his kitchen.
NEVER OPEN THE WINDOW, it read.
Vick had always assumed it had been in reference to the hundreds of plotting skeeters that reconvened for blood every evening. Now, he wasn't quite as sure.
There'd been church bells from the Lutheran congregation a few blocks away that would clang every morning at 6 a.m. and a few other times Vick never noted specifically. They'd been a kind of makeshift alarm clock for Vick in the morning, though. A few weeks prior, in the still wintertime doldrums of the town, the bells had ceased to ring. The gist of the cogs and ropes up the tower to the belfry seemed easy enough to fix, but the silence persisted despite a few half-hearted attempts at repair. Church bells were stodgy relics of a God-frenzied past, it seemed, anyway. No bellfounding rallied the devoted to the steeples and pews anymore. God was everywhere and nowhere all at once, hiding maybe, or just taking a prolonged break from the stresses of the complex dramas he'd purportedly arranged.
In God’s quieter moments, there was room for others to make noise.
**********
There'd been a time when Vick didn't crave the quiet. When he'd moved into the one-bedroom home on Klickitat Street, mini blinds sheathed the windows, and the humming of an AM radio could be heard softly serenading the confines of the sparsely furnished living room. The disability checks floated him as he navigated life after the war, and he tried as best as he could without resorting to substance abuse to block out his years in the desert as a helicopter mechanic with the U.S. Army Reserve. He'd needed the noise then to remind him to stay awake, cautious, sharp. He'd wished he could have been more of all three when the IED shredded through his battalion's sleepy dreams one humid early morning. Vick and company were mere weeks from being able to return home. Not as heroes, maybe, but at least alive.
Vick returned home to Ferndale with one less leg than what he'd left with. He'd come home alive, if unwhole.
Outfitted with an alloyed titanium prosthetic, Vick's own body was the reason the radio was often a scattered cacophony of hisses and clicks. No matter the eternal twisting of the dial in search of clarity, it had been a joyless activity to undertake, and Vick resolved to shut the damn thing off for good one evening. Before he did for the final time, however, he received a jolt of hope when a stuttered version of a Talking Heads song he could barely make out had become resuscitated. A muffled no-wave chorus flickered in and out, then retreated back to static.
His modest income wasn't enough to easily afford the rent, let alone various other modern amenities like cable television, or an internet connection. His attention had found solace in the revelatory multiverses of science fiction novels and detective noir pulp paperbacks. When the headaches came, he'd need breaks, but after a couple of years, the neat little collection of tomes had been digested. Since then, he'd preferred the silence. Without a television, the windows from his home became ersatz network primetime viewing, morning shows, reality programming and everything else. "The ol' fishbowl," Vick would sometimes call his entertainment intake.
When the headaches got worse, though, even the windows were forgotten. Cardboard boxes, bedspreads and aluminum foil had been employed as makeshift barriers from the ceaseless super bright sun, the oppressiveness of streetlights. The sound was deadened somewhat, too. The house was less like a fishbowl, then.
It was closer to a tomb.
****************
The ceaseless yelping of a distant mutt stirred Vick from sleep. He'd passed out at what he figured was a late hour. It'd been dark, he was sure of it. But then, it was always dark inside the house. Always musty. Still. The typical conditions that might indicate time and place were missing. Not like it'd been in the desert. There, you'd often wake before the sun rose on account of the looming heat, the constant whooshing of sand against the barrack walls. There was duty to attend to immediately upon waking that was previewed in nightmarish spirals inside Vick's brain for the majority of his slumber. Here, in the 'ol fishbowl, the second hands of the clocks remained silent. The flashing 8s of the microwave display mocked his migraines. His wristwatch had melted into the skin of his wrist when the explosive device catapulted his corpus like the flares from a fireworks display. He had not wanted to wear one since. The oval scar reminded him of the fleeting ruse that time perpetuated, and that was enough.
The time for senses had ended, as far as he was concerned. The very street he lived on seemed to hold its breath.
He roused himself by throwing his prosthetic off a haphazard row of couch cushions on the floor in the living room. The barking stopped the instant he woke up, and he sat up at his waist, taking in the hazy surreality of the room. He'd entertained himself prior to passing out by gazing at the house next door, and had been startled at the sight. The neighbor he'd not heard from in such a long while had at some point unbeknownst to Vick furnished his own windows with vision-blocking implements—cardboard, aluminum foil, even dark black blankets—so that even if Vick had wanted to get a glimpse inside, his surveillance inclinations would be quelled. Perhaps the neighbor, too—whatever he'd been doing—was tired of the attention that the instances of strange happenings had been bringing to his doorstep, nearly literally.
The mosquitoes had formed their evening shadow outside the kitchen window around the usual hour, and Vick had been observing them when he noticed the blocked windows.
Geez, I guess someone's hidin' from the fallout, thought Vick.
The inevitability of bated breath was ominous and real to those in the vicinity of the property line Vick shared with the neighbor. Its avoidance had become a topic of neighborhood-wide suspicion as afternoon walkers circled wide into the street from the bad juju-expanses of the neighbor's front yard. No one wanted to have to deal with confronting the homeowner should they become victim to some seemingly random accident on or near his lot. Word had spread, and the message was clear: Stay away from the old house with the rusted-out Jeep on Klickitat.
Still, Vick hadn't personally experienced any outwardly negative incidents. He'd observed a few unfortunate scenes, written them down in the book, and moved on to stew in his own panoramic inertness. He'd felt bad for those who'd been embroiled in some wild set of coincidences out there, but that wasn't his problem. Try getting your fucking leg blown off your body in a desert helping a war effort everyone you ever loved hates.
Sympathy was for cowards. Vick had often repeated this to himself when in isolated reflection. Demons and their deeds were omnipresent. He'd paid his penance to the invisible forces, he reasoned.
They won't get anything more outta me, thought Vick.
Awake and as near to his cognitive peak as he figured he was gonna get, Vick propped himself on his arm, swung his left leg up and pushed himself to standing. The house used to crackle at night. In the still moments of dawn, the subtleties of broken-ribbed breathing took form in a home-wide organic exhalation. It's easy in hindsight to fault the squeaky architecture of 100-year-old wooden structures wincing at a storm wind, producing the little thuds, the bloating of the walls, the whispers of lung-like respiration. There had been no storm that Vick recalled, and a quick inspection out the window through a torn bedspread confirmed the absence of bad weather. Vick seemed to float during times like this. When he was awoken from deep sleep and the whispers sounded like heavy breathing, it was tougher to remain indifferent. When the house rumbled in midnight stillness, it became inevitable for him to lean into the ravages of insomnia. He'd been sure he heard a dog, but it could have been anything, really. Everything sounded ominous. Dangerous. The vistas of his darkened abode were beginning to shake with his sleeplessness.
"Buster! Hey Buster! Where'd ya go? C'mere boy...c'mon out."
A voice pleaded in the night on the sidewalk. Vick's slumber had barely lasted the evening, then. He glanced out the window, careful not to call attention to his observance. The neon streetlight threw mind-splitting illumination to the ground where the man outside stood.
"Come the fuck on, Buster; I need to get to bed," he muttered a little under his breath. He looked up to Vick's house then, trying to train his eyes to the darkness. No porch light on there, but the man thought he saw the quick retreat of a barricaded window, a pair of eyes disappearing in a flash as he looked up at them.
"Hey there, neighbor! I'm sorry to bother ya...Jesus, it's 3 in the mornin', but I'm tryin' to find my dog...d'ya happen to see 'em?"
Vick froze, wishing the attention away. But the man continued to advance toward the front porch. Vick's door was trash, and had always had about a half-inch gap between the bottom and the frame. The presence of the stranger's two front legs beneath the front door were backdropped by the offensive streetlight gleam.
"Sorry, there, maybe yer just off from graveyard or somethin', but would you mind doin' me a solid and lettin' me in the backyard?"
Vick was a shadow melting into a wall. He held his breath. Kept the weight of his faux leg from shifting. It squeaked sometimes. Vick was a lampshade. Vick was a jacket on a chair. Vick was a cushion on the floor. An inanimate, noiseless, unliving thing.
A bright flash popped suddenly from the direction of the front porch of the neighbor's house. The sound of heavy, plodding bootsteps clacketed down the stairs, then along the concrete sidewalk, then seemed to be nearing Vick's porch. The shadows of two legs showing beneath the door became four, and then disappeared entirely.
The voice from the other side of the door morphed its tone.
"Listen, you ratshit motherfucker; I know you have that dog in there. Move your fuckin' broken, limpin' ass to this door and let me the fuck in.
"In fact," the voice continued, "I don't really give a good goddamn if the piece o' shit is in there at all. But you're gonna let me in, anyway. Aren'tcha...Victor."
The strobe of the neighbor's front porch light was now popping in some kind of sinister Morse. The perimeter of the windows that were uncovered by Vick's blackout implementations was glowing now, white hot, relentless. The house sighed around him, and the room began to shimmer, water-like. No one had called Vick Victor since the desert. The voice outside wasn't talking now, only breathing as if broken-ribbed, seething spittle through clenched teeth at the door.
"We've all got our secrets, Victor," whispered the voice. The bark of a dog returned and sharpened, getting closer and closer, it sounded like, to running up the steps to Vick's front porch. The sound was just as suddenly snuffed out by a quick whimper. The sound of being struck. The heavy afterworld sound of silence followed.
"You can smile, Victor. It's fine by us..."
Vick was aware enough through the coursing terror of his place to notice the pluralization of us versus me.
"It's fun to have a secret... You can smile... But remember, Vic...tor. Sometimes a sec...ret smiles back..."
The streetlight flickered and flashed itself dead, and the glow from around the cardboard curtains, the bedspreads, the aluminum foil all ceased. The house settled its respiratory horror. The bootfall began again at the sidewalk in front of Vick's house, and retreated until it sounded more like something sliding along toward the neighbor's house. Vick finally took a purposeful breath, shaking from the energy it had taken him to remain that still, that invisible. He dared another look outside through the tear in the bedspread.
Pawprints forged in blood pocked the sidewalk, visible in the low light of the moon in lieu of the streetlight. A frayed leash, blackened by some kind of soot sat next to the prints. In Vick's periphery, he could see a set of bright white eyes looking back at him from the neighbor's side window. Vick squinted his eyes to see without moving his entire head. The handwritten sign in the window facing his home had been replaced.
SMILE, it now read. The squint-cornered eyes looking back seemed to be attached to a face obliging the directive.
******************
Vick closed his eyes, as he so often did these days. Not in meditation or rehabilitation, but from the necessity to temporarily out-maneuver fear. Closing his eyes was like turning off the lights, blocking out the life outside his windows. It was something he could control, usually. But the act was getting as tired as the whole of Vick's body. The insomnia was obviously raging out of control now. What had he been seeing? Hearing? The absurdity of denial didn't make sense to him, but sense was in short supply around here.
Vick opened his eyes. An act of defiance. A statement to the threats from which he'd been enduring so many strange premonitive experiences. With something of a smile, Vick vacated the position he'd sought solace in during the approaching of the stranger outside. It was still plenty dark in the house, but Vick's night vision kicked in and he was able to navigate the ramshackle innards of his home with little issue, despite his disability. He did not conduct this task frantically, but with as little noise as possible. The squeaking of his bad leg was minute, but noticeable.
In search of his notebook, Vick rifled through a mound of fetid clothing in the corner of his bedroom proper—any space could be considered a bedroom in the house these days—next to his bedside table. He found it tucked beneath the green T-shirt he'd for days worn upon his return home from the war, and not on the table where he'd last remembered putting it. The shirt read "U.S. Army" on the front, and was in bad need of laundering. Something like mud splatter caked its sides and front, and a few flies buzzed around the aroma. Vick paused to consider the T-shirt, its stains and memories, then threw it off with his good foot and grabbed the notebook.
He opened the book and flipped through a few of the first few pages without investigating too closely. He stopped flipping when he noticed there were now sketches in the book. His notes had been replaced. The fear returned and Vick thought about closing his eyes again, but decided to confront the anomaly. The first drawing was of a car stopped in the middle of the street with smoke billowing out from beneath its hood, a look of despondency on the riders inside. The next featured a squiggly, abstract view of a robin flailing in a bird bath in a neighboring yard, with an old Jeep in the foreground. The next, well-detailed in red pencil, was from the perspective of someone looking out of their own window, and showed a next-door window scene with a pair of glinting eyes peering from around a corner of cardboard. On the window's sill sat a handwritten sign, with the words "Never open the window" on it.
Vick recognized the handwriting on the sign as his own.
"Goddamn it!"
Vick allowed himself the outburst, despite wanting to remain quiet. Further perusal of the notebook found drawings of Vick's house, in greater detail as the pages were ingested. More colors were eventually employed to detail the evolution from the state of the happy-looking home when Vick had arrived, to the dilapidated state it was surely in now. Vick shook at the paranormality of his find.
How the hell is this possible? he thought. I've never drawn a day in my life.
Vick flipped to the last drawing in the book and gasped. Amidst the ravages of an enveloping house fire glared two glowing white eyes, appearing as if alive somehow in defiance of the swirling flames licking around the indefinable body that housed them. They seemed, upon further inspection, to be floating unattached at the apex of the spiralic inferno, undeterred and powerful, staring straight through the paper, through the flames, and into Vick.
Below the crackling eyes, just the faintest hint of charred lips curled in a grin could be detected. A gruesome smile with a secret.
******************
The house was still, and the night outside matched it frame by unmoving frame. Vick's internal monologues were blunted. He was afraid, certainly now, but refused to close his eyes. The sensations came on all the same.
Seated on his bed, the notebook next to him, Vick began to smell smoke.
What now? he ventured, hazily.
He noticed a steam beginning to emanate from the walls. The room grew aggressively hotter, and Vick stood up in a panic.
"Come out o' there you piece o' shit!" yelled a familiar voice from beyond the walls. "You come the fuck outta there, you rag-tag motherfucker, and you bring me MY fuckin' drawings!"
Vick clenched his body tightly and looked for the notebook. It had moved again, returning to beneath the stained Army T-shirt in the pile of clothes in Vick's room. The shirt now appeared less dingy, and the mud splatter took on a different hue than before. The stains now appeared freshly wet. Their redness now popped from the expanses of the Army greenery. The smoke started to pour in like waves crushing a vulnerable shoreline.
"How you gonna get outta there, gimp!" the voice continued to shout. Its tirade was stuttered, but punctuated by bouts of phlegmic hacking and what sounded like stifled laughter. "Ya got nowhere to go...and only one fuckin' leg to try to get to nowhere with!"
Vick ran for the door as best he could. Both smoke and sash-cloth darkness made navigating difficult, but Vick managed to exit the room. When he did, he found himself in a kitchen he did not recognize. The floorspace was freshly broomed, and every spotless new dimension of the space smelled like lemon cleaner. A shallow panting came within earshot, and a medium-sized boxer lazily ambled from an unseen room through a hall. It looked back in the direction where Vick stood frozen like an intruder, trying not to be seen. The old boxer growled intently, fixing its eyes on Vick's presence. The pendant on the collar clearly read "Buster" in a font made up from inter-connected dog bones.
"That goddamn freak neighbor is at it again," said a voice from yet another unseen room. "Don't you pay him no mind, Buster; he's just bitter, that's all. Shit, I'd be bitter, too, if I'd got my whole leg ripped off in the war. Stupid asshole shouldn'ta been there anyway. No one shoulda.
"Now look at 'im: puttin' up more of those goddamn cardboard boxes in the windas. What's he think he's gonna hide from? No one but hisself, that's who. Right, Buster? ...Buster? You there, boy?"
Vick heard steps as he stayed stock still in the corner of his dreamstate spying. The steps moved away from him, and toward what he thought was the front door.
"Buster? Buster! Fuck, serves me right leavin' the fuckin' door open. Goddamn it."
The door slammed shut with an alarming thud, and the scenery dissolved. Vick stood in his own kitchen again, panting shallowly.
He limped slowly, purposefully, to the bathroom sink to splash water over his face. His eyes were rimmed red, and he looked ghoulish. Somehow alien. After taking two long palmfuls of water to the face, he straightened up to get a better look at himself. In the reflection stood the same Vick he'd always known, only this one was wearing a blood-stained Army T-shirt.
***********
The wall around Vick's mirror began to shimmer, ripple, become translucent then reconvene as the wall again. The steady face he'd leveled his gaze upon was beginning to morph into a Munchian alarm, some obtuse, gelatinous organism squiggling at itself as the heat returned to the house. Vick fled his bathroom, plunked his way down the short hall and looked around for the source of the heat. Beyond the windows, he could see the flicker of what looked like close-by flames. The paint on the interior walls began to bubble, pop and slide down to the carpet, where it pooled and burned through to the hardwood. Vick ran to the kitchen sink and checked the cabinet beneath for a fire extinguisher.
He found it, its hose caked in the white sodium bicarbonate from its insides. Spent. Used up. Vick could relate.
The walls began to pulsate now, breathe, like Vick had sensed before in the recesses of his nighttime hauntings. Here it was, then, heaving to burst, its structure bowing, its skin melting before him. Thick black smoke filled the dining room and dusted the entirety of the home with the oppressive, choking soot. Vick grabbed the empty fire extinguisher, and in a panic of survival, heaved it as hard as he could through the window, its velocity barely blunted by the cardboard boxes covering it. A little fire extinguisher-sized hole to the outside snapped the house's imminent engulfment dead. The flickers receded. The smoke evanesced.
A few precious seconds of silence befell Vick's world. He dared a breath, and its intake sounded a little like weak buzzing. Before the next breath's tone could be dissected, the mosquitoes flew into the house through the broken window in a fog of ill intentions. They came straight for Vick in a mist of tiny wings, little suckers, weightless but for their blinding numbers. They surrounded Vick in such a mass that upon their devourment, he had begun to feel each and every little bite, hundreds of them, as they sank their tiny proboscises into the epidermis of his body. Vick felt immobilized, and heard a dog barking incessantly, seemingly somewhere inside his house. He fled for the bathroom again, reacclimated himself to the warbling, roiling walls still tuned to their demonic rippling, and jumped into his shower, desperately trying to shoo the mosquitoes from his eyes to find the showerhead. Every time Vick opened an eye, a little skeeter found its way in and parked itself there to die in the macula goo of his eyeball juices. The Army tee was now becoming redder from the copious bites Vick was enduring. He couldn't help but scratch at them as they'd been delivered. It was a sadistic reflex.
Vick found the showerhead with closed eyes after a few eternal seconds, but the water wouldn't come. The blood left in Vick's body drained from his face, and with it, the mosquitoes facilitated an abrupt disappearing act. Now there was only the barking. Closer. Louder. More rabid. More depraved. Ungodly.
"Can you find my dog for me, now, you sunuvabitch?" Again, the detached voice rumbled. "You scum-suckin' Army brat prick, was it the Jeep? That old motherfucker trigger yer synapses sos you thought you was back in the desert? Well, you WEREN'T, asshole! You was right here on Klickitat the whole time!"
Vick's heart pounded as the clouds began to clear a little in his brain. Pieces began to reattach themselves in his short-term memory. The dog in his backyard. The neighbor searching for him. Vick's squeaky leg alerting the neighbor to the yard after the first few yelps. All the signs Vick had been seeing. Hearing. What had that final song from the radio been squawking just before the gap in his recollection...
There has got to be a way... {static}...Dreams walking in broad daylight {static}...It was once upon a place sometimes...what did you expect...Gonna burst into flame {static}...Don't wanna hurt nobody…
{statiiiiiic} Burning down the house...
***************
Vick lifted himself out of the bathtub, naked as they day he'd been deloused when he entered Basic. The Army tee was shredded in tatters at his feet, and a slow-trickle drainage of blood and a little hair made its way to the rusted drain of the tub. The world seemed to be on pause for a moment, and for all he knew it was. The fantasia of Vick's interludes was proving more than hallucinatory; the unfolding episodes were like jumper cables to his memory, allowing the full thrust of his body's engine to sputter, start and hold steady. Now idled, Vick blinked his eyes in soporific stupor, readjusting to the sorry state of his shambled home, the dregs of its putrid nature surrounding him. He felt as if were about to vomit, even seemed to anticipate—even hear—a gurgling hack before it hit him. The cough never came, though. At least not for him.
"We're in it together now, ain't we Victor?" coughed a detached voice from all around Vick. "Did you enjoy your peace while you had it? How much do you remember, you're thinkin', and to that, I ask, 'does it really matter?'"
Vick obeyed no emotion. Weighed no pros and cons. His was a visage of acceptance, a posture of conceded defeat. The walls of his home now dissolved entirely, and Victor stood in the charred plot of an empty lot where a house used to be. The burned-out hull of a Jeep sat empty next to him. Next door, he could see his own home, its insides blocked from view from outside. As Victor stood, immobilized, observant, stupefied, the breezy ashes around him began to drift into each other. They started slowly at first, and then picked up speed and began to conjoin, reassemble, and become skeletal structures of foundation, framing, pieces of furniture. The pieces de-ashed, and became flame, the walls began to rebuild around him, and with them the possessions that furnished the interior. Then the alabaster skeletons of dog and man, re-jointing and re-skinning themselves in a gruesome rewind, until every stitch of fabric, every microbe of home, every sinewy semblance of human and canine had reappeared before Victor.
The old dog body and the old man body dragged themselves up off the ground and ran in circles around each other a while, coughing in reverse, undying. They ran backward to the window and Victor could see the smoke beginning to coil into the home. A sign across the driveway in his home read "Smile," and Victor could see himself smiling at what he'd created, only the rewind made him look even more detached. Even more ungodly. His revenge exacted in a misplaced psychosis he only now realized had been the tip of the iceberg.
"How much further back you wanna go, Victor?" the body of the man next door now asked him directly. The rewinding simulation paused itself. How often does life seem to start and stop, pause, rewind and fast forward itself until you're not sure where you are? When you are?
"You wanna go all the way back to the desert? When that little bomb scrambled yer brains for good?
"Or do you just wanna stay right here, Victor? Right here with me and Buster. Right here on Klickitat where we can go back and forth and back and forth forever and ever like a record skippin' on a shitty record player?"
The man next door growled now, coaxing Buster to do the same. It nearly sounded like laughter, like the low gargle of a chainsmoker's chortling. Like the sound of mosquitoes flapping tiny wings in unison. Or all three, maybe.
The reformed lamps in the living room popped and danced themselves awake, then asleep, ad nauseum. They danced like that until the simulated rewind began again, only slower this time, to when Buddy and Buster walked back into their house after Buddy found the dog in the neighbor's backyard, a moment away from being kicked another time by Victor's squeaky alloyed titanium leg.
Buddy held Buster like a baby in his arms, and the dog licked his owner's hands in appreciation. Down the street, church bells reverberated throughout the neighborhood.
Ryan J. Prado is a freelance writer and editor whose music journalism work has been featured in Paste, Submerge, The Portland Mercury, Chico News and Review, Vortex and many other publications. He resides in Portland, Oregon, with his partner (Buzz) and cat (Ms. Queen Fitzgerald), and writes fiction and poetry from a century-old clapboard garage.