THE MAN NEXT DOOR
HE GETS UP, turns off the lamp and walks slowly to the kitchen. When the strip light comes on it illuminates the hands of a dirty white clock – four fifty-eight, give or take – and he fills the kettle for his last cup of tea. In the yard a bird cheeps, then alights on the narrow wall between his house and the house of the man next door. It is almost time for his neighbour to be up and about.
As the kettle boils, he watches the sky and thinks about routines.
In college (forestry) and vacations (poverty) he shinned up a hundred-foot tower to watch for forest fires. Ten days on, ten off, at least until the last of the semester’s money ran dry and he retreated for weeks at a time. University in another country was a bustling adventure, but up there he welcomed the solitude, spareness and sky. On fine days he could see out to a distant strip of coast and beyond it to the headland, a wisp of blue. At night the stars waved like friends disappearing over the horizon.
He lived in cycles, only aware of the time when the night began to creep up more quickly or distance itself in great washes of yellow. When he thought of people at all it was solely to imagine his fellow watchers, balanced somewhere on another needle, studying the sky. Re-entering the city made him catch his breath. The colours and odd, small coincidences – two parting men stepping off the sidewalk at exactly the same time – were shocking in their immediacy. It took him days to readjust.
Now he lives in another country, another town, in a street packed close as a box of matches.
As he has no job, he keeps up the routine of the lookout tower. He doesn’t know what his neighbour does, or even his name, but feels a slight kinship exists between them at opposite ends of the candle. He sips his tea and lingers, waiting for the catch of light behind glass. It doesn’t come. After ten minutes he sits down in the dining room. He imagines a meeting – a shaking-hands across the yard – and it makes him smile. Twenty minutes more and he goes to bed. There is no sound. A few minutes later, red and blue light pulses through the gap in his curtains. They don’t meet.
First published in Flash Fiction Magazine (January 2015) and subsequently collected in Chopped Liver (Cyberwit, 2022)
Next: The Hat
A tight one. Almost poetry