A Man With An Addiction

A Hand Affair

Lola Murphy had been my neighbour almost three years before I actually spoke to her. Her husband had recently passed on and she, much to my chagrin, chose me to unload on.

I had just returned from the market and noticed her sitting on her stoop. I nodded in acquaintance as I shifted my bags searching for the door key. "Hello, Mr Scott, how have you been?"

I paused, startled by her words. She had never spoken to me before. She had always treated me as though I were dirt. Once her husband had come to complain about a noise from my apartment, that noise is redundant now, he forced his way inside when I answered the door. "You stop whatever you are doing now Scott, or else."

Or else what? I had wondered but was not really intimidated enough to care. I bit my bottom lip and refused to respond. "What is that horrible stench? My God man, you should clean this hell hole you call home. You better not be attracting insects that invade ours."

I sighed and grinned sardonically. "Fine. Just get out. You won't hear anything else tonight." I offered as I led him toward the door. "Now, you leave or I will call the police for trespass."

He left and that was the last anyone in the neighbourhood spoke to me. I heard some women talking at the market a week or so before saying he had died in a horrible accident at work. I won't deny I got a sick pleasure from it. I hated that man and his superior attitude. I hated the fact he looked at me like scum every time we crossed paths.

Yet, here was his widow speaking to me as though I were an equal. "You have a moment to sit and talk?" she asked.

The old resentment tried to dominate but the new curiosity prevailed. I found myself sitting beside her on the stoop.

"You know Mike never meant you any harm, right?" she began. I nodded, though I knew better. He wanted me out of the neighbourhood at any cost; but he could never get anything on me that would hold up in court. "He was just concerned for me. He thought he was protecting me, which, in a way, he was, though a lot of the neighbours came to hate him for it.

"You know, it is funny he died in a freak accident. When I was 10 my cousin and I were playing by a creek. We were swinging on one of those rope swings over the water. The rope broke when I got on and dropped me into the shallow water. I hit my head on a rock and almost drowned before my cousin got to me. I still had a brain injury. I had a near death experience that day. After weeks in the hospital and a lot of rehab I got to go home.

"Since then I have never taken advantage of life," she said as she watched the traffic crawl slowly past us. "You ever been married, Mr Scott?"

I shook my head, "No, and you can call me Jaime." She smiled and called me by my name. Then she started talking, after a while, I could not even hear her anymore. I was thinking about her near death experience. How she had cheated death. She cheated it, and it, in turn, did what? It obviously wasn't like the movies and came after her. It did nothing? Years later her husband died, no, too far apart to be connected. There had to be at least thirty years between the two events.

The darkness crept toward us an inch at a time. It consumed the landscape leaving an empty, black, wall looming over us. I watched it, imagining what it would be like to hurl someone into the blackness. My thoughts suddenly inverted themselves back toward Lola Murphy. She should be part of that darkness. Who had taken her place?

She startled me by grabbing my arm just above the elbow. "I'm sorry. I have been rattling on and on for two hours. You must have other things to do. I'll see you later," she patted my arm gently then stood quickly and went inside.

I sat just a few minutes longer, my legs were stiff from sitting. Eventually I got to my feet and limped inside. I locked the door and took an envelope from a drawer in the kitchen. I opened it with reckless anticipation.