A Neighborhood Novella

Shortly after midnight a while back* I heard people talking out on the street. I looked out my window to see a guy and a girl walking back to a car that I had earlier noticed parked on the street in front of my house. Nothing too unusual about that. I saw the guy open the passenger door for the girl before I closed the blinds. I heard the door close and listened for the driver's door to close, expecting them to drive away at that point. That second door didn't sound, though.

 

After a few minutes, I got up to look out again, vaguely curious to know why the guy hadn't gotten into the driver's side. With creeping apprehension I noticed that there was movement in the back seats of this fairly small car.



Let me back up a bit, though. We bought this house about a year and a half ago. The house we wanted had to meet a few requirements: full basement, proximity to work and shops, a certain price range... and not on a cul-de-sac. See, dead-end streets attract families with kids, because they're safer: drivers don't speed on cul-de-sacs since there's nowhere to go. And they're usually short (the cul-de-sacs, not the drivers). We wanted to avoid large small-children populations, so cul-de-sacs were out.



This house, the one we got, is on a through street. It's even at a T-intersection. Various cars (and motorcycles) drive quite fast up and down our street, in fact (the through one; driving fast on the more minor road of the T is not advisable, but that's a different chapter). Several months ago, around 3 am or so, some motorcycles passed by my house going quite quickly. Based on the sound of it, I guessed it was upwards of 100 mph. Whatever.



So, here we are, on a through street, shortly after midnight, and the car is still parked outside my house. I know it was a small car and that they were a guy and a girl, and that they were both fairly tall, and that she was wearing a somewhat blue flowing evening gown, because my street is well-lit. Even after night falls, the abundant street lamps do a bang-up job of lighting up my front yard, my front porch, both streets at the T for several hundred feet, etc.



Have you got the scene at this point? Is the layout and blocking pretty clear? Because this bit's fairly important. For the curious, my house is pale-yellow, the front door faces north, overlooking the minor street of this T intersection, and my front yard is on the east side, abutting the more major, through street. But none of that stuff is relevant, it's just if you needed to get your cardinals straight.



I could describe a lot of the streets and intersections around my neighborhood and they wouldn't all be the same. For instance, you could go about 3 blocks north and take a left on a quite narrow little road. It runs several blocks east, but it's not well-connected to any of the major thoroughfares, so it's sleepy and obscure. You could go south a block and take a left (going east) until you got to a city park that takes up a few blocks and has a little driveway that dead-ends at a little playground within the park, surrounded by some trees.



But last night, sometime after midnight but not too much later, it's my street, at the T intersection in front of my house, that we need to picture. And we need to include in that picture this small car that, in the roughly 500 previous nights I've ever spent picturing my front yard after dark, bathed in that weird utility-yellow street-light glow, has never been included before.



Because, at this point, in the time it's taken you to read this, that little car (whose drivers-side door has yet to open and shut again) has begun to buck side-to-side. Other cars speed by now and then, moving as cars usually do generally forward and onward. But not this one, this small car of no particular note, beside possibly not having tinted windows.



Now, friends, we're in public here, possibly in the presence of minors. This is not prime-time TV and you're not watching Cops. Any dramatic endings, any flashy bits before a denouement will be left as an exercise for the reader. This is not a work of fiction, though. This does fairly well describe the tail-end of my otherwise pedestrian evening at home. And I relate it to you here because I'm not sure what should follow. Is there a graceful ending to such a scenario? I do know what all else I witnessed myself last night, before I later went to sleep. But that was just me.

* This  essay was originally posted to a Facebook note, but properly belongs here.