Neighborly
by Amy Kiger-Williams

My new next door neighbor knocked on my front door. I looked through the peephole at him, as I had when I’d seen him moving in the week before. The fish-eye lens allowed me to see the rental van, my neighbor’s friends hauling boxes from the curb, and later, the neighbor, drinking a beer alone on the sidewalk after the friends had driven the truck away. I didn’t much like the fact that he drank on the sidewalk. I wondered if there’d be wild parties, reasons to call the police, but there hadn’t been anything yet. There was just the one time, dusk falling around him on late August evening, a beer in his hand, and I figured it didn’t hurt much to let a man break an open container law after he’d just spent a sweltering day moving.