By Monic Ductan
My apartment complex, Hillside Manor, a generous name for the little row of six apartments in a blonde brick building, sat near the town square. Though Hillside was far from the classiest neighborhood, the rent was cheap, which was a gift to someone like me, a twenty-two-year-old with student loan debt. Plus, I lived less than a mile from work, and I figured that when my old Toyota finally died I’d ride a bike or walk to work.
The apartment building was flanked on two sides by a crumbling, wooden, privacy fence. A vacant apartment sat to my right, but a family, the McClures, lived on my left. The McClures were friendly and waved whenever I saw them, though they sometimes annoyed me, as they had a habit of being boisterous. Some nights I’d hear them banging against our shared wall or yelling at each other. The McClure man, who smoked out on their porch, had a penchant for going shirtless, his saggy white skin drooping around his waist. Once I saw him at the gas station in town, both shirtless and shoeless. When the cashier told him not to come back unless fully clothed, McClure grumbled, “Shit, man, I ain’t never wore a damn shirt in the summertime.”
In the country, the insects are noisy at night. They make a mechanical sound. I loved to hear that sound as I sat out on the porch at night and read a book or flipped through a magazine. But I’d quickly quit the habit, as I grew tired of McClure’s cigarette smoke drifting over the railing and into my nostrils. Worse still, one night I went out there and looked next door to see the McClure woman in her husband’s lap on their porch, her t-shirt riding up so high I could see the crack of her ass and the tattoo above it.
My apartment had a back porch, too, but the view was desolate—a tiny square block of pavement that housed the two dumpsters. Scraggly stray cats usually roamed back there, and I once thought I saw a possum slinking away toward Patty’s Café.
On the evening of a supermoon, I drove home feeling tired and stuck in a going nowhere job. Country twanging my radio. My eyes misty with tears. I saw one of the McClure kids, a barefooted girl whose knees were scabbed and dirty, playing in the grass in front of the apartments. A neighbor had dumped a sofa in the grassy acre we all shared as a front yard. The McClure girl climbed onto the broken armrest of the sofa, which leaked foam stuffing onto the grass.
When I got out of the car, I turned. The yellow moon hung behind the McClure girl like a painting. Her hair shot out in front of it, pointing in all directions. Sun rays.
