by Chris Cocca
The kids next door have names like Jess and Jordan. Jayden. Jalen, maybe. Something with a J. 20, maybe 21, same age as my wife and me when we met in college, but Jess and Jordan work. We’re not that much older. We found this house a year ago and bought it for the nursery because Heather was still pregnant.
It’s the last house in the row, ten blocks west of center city where our folks grew up but don’t go, ten blocks from where they think things have gotten bad. Things can get bad anywhere, I try to tell them, and they tell me not to get like that, they’re just looking out, just worried. The neighborhood is quiet, mostly. There are small dogs in the alley, Mr. Johnson’s, they bark at the Moldonado kids who seem to live in tank-tops and on scooters. They’re seven, maybe eight. Mr. Johnson, his house starts the next row, has a little garden with petunias and wax peppers. There are five more houses between his house and the street, a valley of dishes and antennas, then the bar and grade school. The Moldonados are Italian, and Johnson is a prick about their runny noses and the sweat stains on their clothing. He says they’re secret Puerto Ricans. The Js don’t hide their contempt for Mr. Johnson, facsist dick, they call him, motherfucking racist. Old bigot, I say, when we talk over the waist-high fence between our yards. Sometimes we walk our dogs together, my Australian Shepherd has a thing for their sleek pit. We walk past the bar, the school, our dogs piss on sycamores that line the boulevard in and out of town, on high grass growing through the spaces in the pavement.
Heather and I can almost always hear them, Jess and Jordan. Radical politics, mostly, loud sex once or twice. Since last night it’s eight-ball, nine-ball, maybe snooker. Resin balls cracking, dropping in pockets, rolling in plastic tubes towards the front.
Our doors both have windows, their curtain is black, a signal, I think, when I’m being like that, to all other pirates, you can parlay here, we can talk about shit, underground hip hop and hardcore, we belong to the Industrial Workers of the World, we occupy more than space, we live rent-free in the brains of our landlords and bosses, you belong, too, and so on. Our curtain, new since the miscarriage, is white. There's a TV in their front room, but we have new furniture that matches our walls and trim. The loud breaks and rolls, the laughing when Jayden scratches on eight, when Jalen or Jordan or Jess smear blue chalk on their face, those come from the other side of our dining room wall, where we have antique pecan chairs and a table and hutch with good glass and china.
We sit in the living room and hear their TV and we talk about our day and how we're depressed. Heather’s sick this week. I hate my job, talk about quitting. The cat buries herself in the fringed needlework pillows that match our new sofa.
"I think they got a pool table," I say.
We should move the pecan set downstairs and bring up the TV. That way we can eat and watch cartoons and Cheers like we used to. That way we can crash upstairs on old couches and smoke and play pool and 8-bit Nintendo with games from the 80s. We'll put action figures in the hutch and put our china and glass in the coal room. In the spring we'll watch baseball with the windows all open even when it rains.
These things won't happen. I don’t say them. We are young professionals. The house is still an investment. Heather starts to cough. The cat lifts her head and sinks back in the pillow. Cars strobe light from outside through the curtain. Heather coughs again, interrupts whatever I was saying.
“What’s that?” she says.
“Nothing. I think I’ll go to bed.”
Upstairs, I still hear them. “Jesus, Jordan,” one says, “get your nutsack off the table!”
“It’s like I told you, brother. One way or another, we’re all behind the eight.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Cocca's work has been published or is forthcoming at venues including Hobart, Brevity, Pindeldyboz, elimae, The Huffington Post, O:JAL, Rejection Letters, Mineral Lit Mag, and Perhappened. He is a recipient of the Creager Prize for Creative Writing at Ursinus College and earned his MFA at The New School.