Amy Kiger-Williams – Vol. 1 Brooklyn

mower

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.

You Never Know

cropped image of bullets

You Never Know
by Amy Kiger-Williams

1978

My dad keeps a rifle in the coat closet in the laundry room. I don’t know why he has it. He doesn’t like hunting or fishing like his father does. He likes Captain Beefheart and Mad Magazine and British racing cars and Monty Python and wearing aviator sunglasses and playing with chemicals in his photographic darkroom in the basement. I cannot imagine a time when my father has ever fired this gun, and I never ask him why it’s there or what he’s done with it. But I take it out of the closet when my parents aren’t home. I take it out of the closet and inspect it, its simple design, the metal barrel, the length of it. I am afraid to touch the barrel, but I do, I touch it with my finger tip, just tapping it lightly as if it’s on fire.

Sunday Stories: “Neighborly”

You Never Know