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I had my neighbour for dinner

My neighbour scares me a little.

I’ve been generally lucky with housemates but I’ve had my share of odd neighbours. There were those fellow university students who would regularly trash their flat and kick down doors during drinking binges. My flat’s front door somehow escaped destruction but doors left and to the right of mine would hang crazily on their hinges or disappear completely come Sunday morning.

There was also the neighbour who jumped across from his window ledge onto mine (and we were three floors up) and banged on the window asking for marijuana at two o’clock in the morning.

There was one that would turn up at our door asking for antiseptic cream. He looked like he had been in a fight and lost. On good days he would barely speak to us because as he later confessed, his girlfriend was a very jealous woman. When the girlfriend was away, he would try to hit on my friend, whose boyfriend lived in the same building as us.

Then there was one who kept having fainting spells one summer, even tumbling down a flight of stairs once. I thought the guy had stopped breathing in my arms when we rushed him to hospital. It turned out that all the fainting was due to the fact that he had stopped eating because his girlfriend had dumped him.

I guess there was always some sort of chemical motivation or chemical inspiration to all those neighbours’ behaviours. Now this current neighbour, I think is rather sinister.

Take his house for example. He doesn’t have curtains. A sign of laziness perhaps, or exhibitionist tendencies or a disregard for aesthetics but that’s not the odd thing. He covers his windows and the sliding glass doors with newspapers. All of them. And they’re not the hastily put up, I’ll take it off when I get curtains type thing but ones that have been painstakingly arranged and taped so not a single ray of light can get in.

It was not easily noticed initially because all the houses here have darkened glass so you can’t see into the houses unless the lights are on and I’m not exactly a busybody. But it’s been nearly half a year now and those newspapers look like they are there to stay.

Just think how it looks like from the inside. I wonder if he’s got bodies stashed in the freezer or something.

Comments

Maryam said…
Ewwwwwwwww! I wish the folks would move back to PJ!
Kere said…
You would scream if you saw the old family home now. The new owners have chopped down all the trees and bricked up the balcony. Monstrous!
Anonymous said…
I thought mom picked green loving owners of the house. What about our lovely timber columns on the balcony??? NOOOOO

It's up to you to rescue our family
Kere said…
I save the family every day.

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