The only part of this house that I find myself actually appreciating is the garden out front. I grow cucumbers, soaking them in a solution of vinegar and herbs and making homemade pickles. I pluck berries, every so often, the tupperware piling up on the fridge’s top shelf. And, most importantly, I water the beautiful flowers that collect in the front, the bright colors a nice contrast against the dull, gray walls that taint my otherwise alright-looking home. And the word home is a stretch–to be honest, it’s merely the place where me and my husband live. He probably doesn’t feel that way, but within the five months that we’ve been renting the place, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to see what he sees in this place. Truly, the front yard is almost like my safe space. Every morning, I look forward to filling up my vibrant red watering can in the sink, practically skipping outside, and seeing the pile of garbage that is spilt all over the sidewalk.

Huh. It’s an interesting sight–there’s no trash can that’s been tipped over at all, and there definitely wasn’t any sort of storm, or tornado, or even earthquake that had happened last night to make the trash collect over here. And the thing is, it’s not even spilt over the entire sidewalk–it’s just the chunk that’s in front of our house. As soon as the pile reaches that point where our driveway ends and our neighbors’ bushes begin, it abruptly stops. I could draw a straight line down the sides, and it would be in perfect alignment.

I’m not sure what my next move should be. Do I try to throw it all away? Or should I keep it there as evidence, and report it to the HOA or whoever else is meant to deal with this sort of thing? As I’m trying to wrap my head around the whole situation, I hear the front door open from behind me.

“The hell is that?” the voice behind me says. My husband.

“I have no clue,” I tell him, “I just walked outside and saw it.” He stares at the pile for a long moment, seemingly lost in thought.

“Did the truck drop it or something?” Right. It’s garbage day. Although I don’t think the truck makes its loop around just yet, and the lids on our bins are still flipped closed.

“I don’t know.” I reply, making my way over to the front of the house, Jeremy trailing behind me. I stealthily tip toe around the pile, trying my hardest to stay as far away from it as possible. From the corner of my eye, I can see Jeremy plugging his nose, despite it not even having much of a stench. My husband, as lovable as he is, is something that my father would describe as “allergic to life”. Not like actual allergies, but more so extremely wary of everyday things. He’s a germaphobe. A vegan. He’s scared of horror films. And heights. And water. And walking at night–practically everything a ten year old probably would be. It never really bothered me, at least not enough to prevent him from putting a ring on my finger, but it especially shines through in moments like these.

I place both hands on our blue bin, recycling.

“Moment of truth.” I say, lifting up the lid, being met with piles upon piles of plastic bottles and wrappers.

I let out a sigh. “Truck hasn’t come yet, I guess.”

“Don’t you want to make sure?” Jeremy asks, gesturing to the green bin.

I shoot him a look. “If you really want to, go ahead.”

He stares at me, silently pleading for me to be the one who opens it. Asking Jeremy to do as much as take out the trash is like asking a baby to write a five page essay about the American Revolution. Reluctantly, I go over to where he’s standing, and open the lid to the other bin. Yet again, it’s still full, this time a much less appealing sight.

“So it wasn’t that, then.”

“What about the last bin?” Jeremy asks, pointing somewhere behind me. I whip around, looking to where his finger is leading–another green bin, identical to the one I had just opened. Each house only has two bins, though; it’s clearly the neighbors’ that somehow made its way over here.

“That’s not ours, that’s the Thompsons’,” I tell him, “something you’d know if you actually took out the garbage once in a while.” I grab the bin, bracing my feet on the ground a bit, prepared for it to be as heavy as ours. When I push it off, though, it rolls off with little to no resistance, knocking with their blue one. I turn around, Jeremy already looking at me with a look of confusion that’s probably identical to mine. He brushes past me, jogging to where the bin had landed, ripping off the lid and–

It’s empty. It’s their trash on our sidewalk. Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that they’re the ones who decided to dump the garbage all over the concrete. That would be jumping to conclusions, and I’m sure my husband would agree that we should just go over and ask them about what happened. When Jeremy starts making his way up to their front door, I assume that we’re on the same page, and begin to walk after him. Practically stomping up the steps, Jeremy reaches the front door, wraps his fist around, and begins pounding on it. So I suppose that was wrong.

After a long while, the door swings open, Cassidy Thompson on the other side of it. Her confusion is evident on her face. Which makes sense, since I don’t think we’ve ever been the ones to initiate a conversation with her before.

“Hey there, neighbors,” she says, over-the-top glee in her voice, “what’s up?”

Jeremy doesn’t reply, wordlessly pointing behind him, letting the pile of trash speak for itself. Her eyebrows furrow even deeper.

“There’s…trash on your sidewalk?”

“Your trash is on our sidewalk.” I interject. I don’t think that the Thompsons would seek any pleasure in dumping their own trash in the street. But her obliviousness is currently making her seem all the more suspicious.

“Oh.”

A beat. Jeremy’s glare is losing its subtlety.

“Well I didn’t do anything, if that’s what you’re trying to get at.”

“Who would dump your garbage in front of our house?” I retaliated. Again, not totally sold that they’re the perpetrators. I’m just asking.

“What reason would I have to do that in the first place?” Jeremy takes a breath, getting ready to reply, when a voice is heard from inside the house.

“What’s going on here?” Her husband, dressed in business-casual.

Jeremy finally lets it out. “We’re just trying to figure out why your garbage was coincidentally dumped in front of only our house.”

“…Why would that have anything to do with us?” he asks. And I don’t think they’ve done it, I don’t! But they’re somehow growing more and more suspicious by the sentence.

“That’s exactly what I was trying to tell them–”

“It’s your garbage, why wouldn’t it have anything to do with you?” He might be acting a bit neurotic right now, but he has a point. There has to be some sort of connection between these two things.

“Look you guys,” the husband–Paris–interrupts. “I can see why you’re angry, but I’ve got to go to work. So if you could move off the porch, and bookmark this discussion, that’d be great.” Him and Cassidy make an interesting pair, for sure, because they’re both obnoxious in different ways. While she’s condescending in an overly-nice way, he’s condescending in a way that makes it glaringly obvious that he doesn’t find any sort of joy in talking to you. When we first moved here, Jeremy tried his hardest to win him over, engaging in conversation with him every chance he got. But all the answers he got out of him were curt, sometimes even patronizing. “You don’t eat any meat? Like, at all? That’s sad, man.”

The silent feud that he has with Mr. Thompson might be what’s making him go a little pink in the face, and I can tell he’s ramping up to say something most likely embarrassing, for me more so than him. So before he can get a word in, I end the conversation with,

“If you guys see anything weird, could you just let us know please?”

Cassidy places a hand on my arm. Insult to injury. “Of course, Lara. We hope something like this doesn’t happen again.”

“Right.” I say. “Let’s hope it doesn’t.”

---

It does happen again. Multiple times, in fact. It keeps getting worse, as well–rather than the garbage just being on our sidewalk, it’s appeared in our yard, on our porch, even on the welcome mat. It’s driving Jeremy insane.

“Ya know what I’ve noticed?” he asked me one morning, after he’d been forced to clean up the garbage on his own on account of me being at the grocery store.

“I’m listening.” I say, trying to find somewhere to fit the carton of eggs in the fridge.

“The wife always takes a walk in the morning.”

“Did you see her do it, then?”

“That’s the thing–no.” As I walk back and forth, grabbing items out of bags and going back to the fridge, he follows me, gesturing wildly like a madman. “I’ve been trying to wake up earlier, to try and catch the culprit in action.”

“Not your strongest suit.”

“Yeah, I guess not, because every time I see Cassidy out walking, the garbage is already in front of our house. And then she has the audacity to knock on our door, being all like, ‘Oh my god, have you found out who’s doing this yet?’”

“Okay, so then it’s probably not her.”

He gives me a look. “Come on, Lara. You’ve talked my ear off about how annoyingly fake you think this woman is every chance you’ve gotten since we moved here.”

I shrug. Didn’t realize my distaste for the woman was so overt. “That’s true, I guess. But that doesn’t mean I think she’d do something like this.”

“Yeah well, I’m not so sure.”

“And that’s your prerogative!” I swing the fridge door closed, making my way over to the spice cabinet.

“What kind of name is Paris, anyways?” he drills on.

“A pretentious one, that’s for sure.” Humoring him might be the only way to shut him up. “I don’t like their sons, either. Always too loud when they’re playing outside.”

“Don’t even get me started on that.” I wish that I hadn’t. “Do people just not teach their kids manners nowadays?”

“You know, I’m not sure what their deal with organic food is, but it’s really creepy. Maybe that’s why he hunts so much, because that’s the only meat they feel comfortable eating.” A visual comes into my mind of them sitting around the dinner table, napkins in their laps. The menu consists of rabbit, squirrel, and a full-size deer, all of which are still fully intact, like they could just be sleeping. Chilling.

“He’s a hunter?”

I look at him incredulously. “You didn’t know that?” If anyone would be concerned about the guy next door going out and slaughtering innocent animals, you’d think it would be him.

“Of course not! Jeez, I can’t believe I’ve shaken that guy’s hand before…”

Jeremy keeps on talking, but I’m not paying attention to the words that he’s saying. It’s hard to ignore how positively distraught he looks, sunken eyes and frizzled hair. He’s gesturing around like a mad man, so passionate about his vicious dislike for the guy, just about spiraling out of control.

“How about we just move then?” I interject, making him pause for a moment.

“Over the neighbors? Why would we do that?”

Once again, I look at him in disbelief. “…Because they’re driving you crazy?” I gesture around his general being, hoping he can understand what I’m getting at.

He shrugs, too calmly for someone who was going off the rails just a second ago. “Once we catch them in a lie, and get them to admit that they’re the culprits, then that won’t be a problem anymore.”

I turn to look him in the eye. I don’t even think he believes himself. “Alright then. Have fun playing detective until that happens.”

---

I don’t think that he intended to be ‘playing detective’ for as long as he has been, to be honest. It’s been weeks, and the same thing has still been happening–most notably, Jeremy had opened our mailbox one day and was met with a face full of the Thompson’s compost. Disgusting, but creative. He doesn’t involve me in it anymore, though, because everytime he brings up anything related to the situation, I turn it into a ploy to convince him into aborting the ship. In my eyes, it’s the clear solution to the problem, but I think he views leaving as us letting them ‘take the win’.

One morning, though, I’m forced to be involved, as I’m jolted awake by the sound of Jeremy screaming coming from downstairs. Immediately, I throw myself out of bed, dashing down the stairs to see what he’s yelling about, and I’m met with the sight of our entire house covered in eggs, yolk dripping down into the yard.

“What is all this?” I ask.

“What does it look like?” He grumbles. “The Thompsons totally egged our house!”

“How do you know it was them?”

“Look at the eggshells!” He plucks one of the shells off the ground, frantically shaking it in my face. It’s a normal looking eggshell, until you take into account the color. Bright blue, home grown.

“The hens.” I say. Because of course they have their own hens.

“Exactly.” Shell still pinched tightly around his fingers, hestorms up to the Thompson’s house, barely giving me enough time to jog after him before he’s pounding on the door with the same fervor he did after the first incident. When the door opens this time, neither Cassidy nor Paris are the ones on the other side. It’s…Phil? Dill? They’re practically identical, and I never really thought it was all that important to memorize the differences between my neighbor’s twin sons.

“Are either of your parents home?” I ask him.

“…Are you guys the neighbors?” he says back. Very helpful.

Jeremy scoffs. “Yes, we live next door. In the house that was just egged with your chicken’s eggs.” And to make matters worse, the kid starts laughing, eagerly peering out the door to get a good look at the monstrosity we call home.

“That’s awesome,” he says, as if we’d think the same thing, “but I didn’t do it, or anything.”

“Well, could we ask your mother if she knows anything about it?”

“I don’t think my mom would do something like that, either.”

“Oh I bet,” I say, mostly under my breath. “It’d be a good idea to tell her about how the eggs were stolen though, right?”

“Oh.” he replies. “That makes sense.” So loudly that my hands twitch at my sides, about to cover my ears, he screams, “MOM!” down the hall. After a moment, she comes sauntering over, looking as if she’s suppressing an eye roll before her face contorts itself into a beaming smile.

“Hey, guys! What’s up?” Her sing-songy voice makes me gag.

“Someone egged our house.” I tell her.

“With your eggs!” Jeremy adds, pointing to the eggshell in his palms as proof.

‘That’s…” she begins, her face now looking genuinely concerned, “That’s really weird, actually. But that couldn’t have been my hens, they haven’t been laying any eggs.”

“They haven’t?” Jeremy asks.

She shakes her head. “It’s sort of concerning, actually. I mean, they were supposed to lay them today, but…” she finishes off with a shrug.

“That’s mighty convenient.” I can’t help myself from saying. Because it is convenient, isn’t it? All signs point to her. She takes a step back, as if my words had physically pushed her. For the first time, Cassidy Thompson looks at me with a sour, offended expression.

“What, are you accusing me now?” Her tone is cold, like she’s getting ready to lunge at me for even insinuating that she had something to do with this.

I shake my head, even though that’s exactly what I was saying. “I–hope your hens get better.”

She smiles again, one that I can tell is forced. “Hope your mystery gets solved.”

---

It’s been sort of radio silent after that. If the Thompsons were the ones behind everything, they must have gotten cold feet over us coming close to sniffing them out with the whole eggshell thing. Jeremy’s still convinced that they’re to blame, adamant on there being too many signs for it to be a coincidence. I don’t really care who he thinks is behind it all–I’m too tired at this point to scheme along with him.

“I really think moving would be the better option.” I tell him one night. Which is true, right? Moving homes should be your natural instinct in this kind of situation. Well, I’m sure this situation isn’t common enough for there to be a general consensus on it, but nevertheless.

“What would the point of that be?” he replies, back turned towards me in favor of fiddling around at his desk. “Nothing’s happened in a while anyways.”

“But you still feel like something will happen, don’t you?” Despite our house being left untouched for the time being, his eye bags remain. I’m sure that if he continues on in this state, he’s going to start forming premature wrinkles, too.

He doesn’t reply. He knows I’m right.

“Do you really want to live the rest of your life paranoid that something’s going to happen?”

He spins around in his chair, looking me in the eye. “I’m not sure why you keep trying to push this, but I get that you want to move, okay Lara?” he tells me. “And I don’t know if it’s that this whole thing is scaring you into thinking that this house is unsafe, or if it’s some other odd reason, but–it’s just not going to happen. We throw out the garbage. We clean up the eggs. Who cares?”

“You don’t?” He could barely get through with wiping all that yolk off without gagging. I had to do the bulk of the cleaning, which makes his statement even more ironic.

“I find it gross, sure, but I’m a grown man. It’s not like any of those things are beyond disgusting anyways.” Liar. His assessment of the situation is all sorts of wonky.

“…I guess you’re right.” I find myself saying, despite it all. Arguing on this won’t help anyone.

“Right.” he agrees. “This is our home, Lara. Nothing is going to change that.”

---

Our small moment of peace has come to an end. They have returned. After our little conversation, Jeremy’s begun to put on a front about how affected he is by the never ending sequence of events. When I’m gardening in the morning, he holds out a thumbs up as he scoops up all the garbage with rubber-clad hands, flashing me a proud smile. I’m not sure who he thinks he’s fooling. I know he’s dying on the inside, holding his breath every time he reaches into the pile. It’s whatever, though, because it means that I’m no longer the person who has to clean up after whoever’s been doing this to us. For the first time in who knows how long, I’ve been able to sleep for more than four hours each night. I almost forgot what it felt like to be at peace–it feels like every since we’ve moved here, I’ve been having to put up with something 24/7.

And I guess I’ve spoken too soon, because I wake up to my body being shaken around, my husband standing over me.

“What is it?” I ask, groggily.

“Look outside.” I rise up to a sitting position, looking over his shoulder to glance out of the window. There’s something laying in our yard–something gray and red all over. When I look a bit closer, it looks like an–animal?

“Is that a rabbit?”

“I have no clue.”

I stare at him. “…So go check then?”

“If a dead animal is in our yard?” He sounds baffled. “Why would I do that?”

“Who cares?” rings through my ears. “Umm. Why wouldn’t you?”

We sat in silence for a bit, Jeremy fumbling for words.

“How about you come with me to go check?” He finally says. “That way we both figure it out at the same time. Aren’t you curious?”

It’s getting ridiculous at this point, how he pretends as if he isn’t freaking out on the inside every time something like this happens? I let out a sigh, ripping the sheets off of my body and sleepily stalking outside with him. He opens the front door, and low and behold, a dead rabbit is lying out in our yard. When I walk up closer, I see that there’s a note sitting next to it, written in bold black lettering.

“WE DON’T WANT YOU HERE.”

“Okay, this is freaking me out.” I say, reaching out next to me to grab onto Jeremy’s arm, but latching onto air. I whip around, and see that Jeremy’s back is to me, covering his eyes in horror.

“I don’t even want to look at the poor thing!” Guess this is his vegan guilt.

“…Did you see the–”

“Yes, I saw the note.” he says, monotone. I can hear the twinge of fear in his voice, though. As I’m trying to figure out what to do next, I hear a car pulling up to the left of us.

“HEY!” Jeremy yells, springing into action. “What the hell’s going on here?”

The front door slowly opens, Paris inching out. “Excuse me?”

“Why would you put a poor dead bunny on our grass?”

“Why would I do that?” I can see that Cassidy is sitting in the passenger’s seat, barely attempting to conceal her annoyance.

“Come on, Paris. I know that you go out hunting, man, you’re the only one who could have pulled this off.”

“I’ve been on a business trip for the past week!” He retorts. “I just got home, man, there’s no way I could’ve done any of this!” Jeremy tries to scream after him, demanding that he tell us the truth, but both him and his wife ignore us as they walk up the steps to their house, unlocking the door and slamming it once they’re inside.

“Okay.” Jeremy says after a minute. “Okay. So we’re moving.” He states. Casually, as if he hasn’t been fighting me on this for months. Sounding fully-assured of himself.

“We’re–what?”

“Moving. You were right, Lara, I can’t do this anymore.”

“…Are you sure?” I ask, tentatively. This is obviously exactly what I want to hear, but I don’t want him to act on hastiness.

He shakes his head, like I’ve just said something ridiculous. “A dead rabbit in my yard with some weird, cryptic message attached to it?” He asks, rhetorically. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

And then he’s storming past me, leaving me alone outside. He’s acting out, for sure, but that was as expected. I glance over at the bunny, a feeling of guilt washing over me. I feel the need to clarify that I’m not a monster, okay. I didn’t find any pleasure in pulling these little stunts, trust me, And I didn’t kill the poor thing myself, if that’s what you were getting at. I just picked it up off the side of the road, sticking it in our yard at an odd-some hour of the night, when I know Jeremy is sleeping, along with the rest of our neighborhood. Sure, it was disgusting, sent me into a bit of a moral dilemma, but I had to do something. The funny part about it all is, I really thought that the garbage would have done the trick. What sense does it make that the neighbor’s trash mysteriously kept showing up around our property? And brushing it off? I guess I underestimated the hold this house had on him. So much so that he wasn’t even aware of my clear disdain for the people next door when they showed up on our doorstep with a pie made from handmade crust and fake-sugar. And didn’t realize how much distress I went through each night, smushing my face in between my pillow as the constant squawking and feather-fluffing filled my ears.

It doesn’t matter anymore, though. I really hope that our next neighbors aren’t as infuriating, and really hope that I never have the displeasure of having a conversation with Cassidy Thompson for the rest of my life.