Ryan Ridge

NEIGHBORS

     My neighbor, the librarian, throws quiet parties on the weekends. Word is she’s an avid speed-reader, her and her colleagues get hopped up on amphetamines and breeze through Ulysses in a night. The next day they play parlor games on the blue-green lawn, charading into the evening as I admire them from my panoptical kitchen window. They are certainly decent people despite what gets reported in the neighborhood newsletter editorials. You can tell by the forthright placement of their hands as they slow-dance in the equitable flush of a commonwealth sunset’s dying embers that these aren’t the kind of people you’d mind living next door to. I mean if they invited you to a party, you would go. I would.