This was about a couple of neighbors, a man and a woman, who lived in a small Florida town, about fifty miles from the Gulf Coast, who’s ranch houses were less than half a mile from each other.

The two of them were suffering terrible insomnia.

The man, in his early 50s, a well-built, a ex-military man who’d served in the Iraq war was still deeply and actively mourning the loss of his beautiful wife who’d died a year ago.  She was one of those women who was perfect. She made love perfectly, kept house immaculately and cooked wonderful meals and took excellent care of their only son–going so far as to leave special snacks in his lunchbox that surprised and delighted not only the son but the father who always peaked in the lunchbox before the son did.

A great woman.

And somehow she managed to die perfectly, if you can imagine such a thing. One of those blood diseases that no chemo can correct, in which her beautiful long black hair didn’t fall out. The kind of disease where you keep conversing with her until the very end, unmarred by fever or nausea or coma. She did it all so well.

And he missed her terribly.

Now the other neighbor. She wasn’t as complicated. Unless you counted her menopause. Which she was not willing to do at that time. She wanted to believe that her sleeplessness was something more substantive. Something supernatural. Not as in ghostly…just, maybe more special than was necessary.

And see, this is what kept her up all hours; trying to explain something that was could not be, quite yet.

She stood on the porch, during one of her sleepless nights, in those wee hours, staring off across hat vacant orange grove that separated her house from the man’s house. Through one of those branch-rows she could see his porch light bleeding through. He was standing there too, like her, sleepless and wondering. His silhouette paced back and forth.

She wanted to call out to him. Or at least phone him.  She could, you know, since they were neighbors and since their two sons were best friends.

But it was so late. It would be inappropriate.

But she knew he was hurting, in that strange, quiet but interesting way that men did. But neither did she call out to him or phone him (of course knowing his number for those carpooling emergencies). Nor did she just walk over to his front porch.

That was something she thought and thought and thought about. She imagined walking very quietly and sometimes she would imagine that he’d expected her all this time. He would turn to her and smile and say something really profound like “I’ve waiting for you.”

She told herself to shut up.

And that’s all that happened that first night. Just two people who couldn’t sleep and thought they were the only ones in that small Florida hick town who were awake.

But there was someone else awake.  Someone watching them.

I hadn’t kissed a girl in twenty years old. I was forty now. Two decades of preoccupation with literature and video games and other guy things. It happens, you know. Life goes by so quickly that you forget the really important things.

   The great reminders come from children.  On April 4th, 2016.I was presented with my twenty year old son. I hadn’t known he’d existed until now. The girl I’d slept with never told me. And with good reason. I would have run screaming for the hills, made a complete mess of everything. She was smart enough to know this.

    So why now? I wondered. Why now? Did he need my bone marrow? Was he dying?

    “No,” he said at the Starbuck we’d decided to meet at. A lot, lot, lot more had happened before this. There was “The Call” and then “The Revelation” and then “DNA testing-Part Duh” until finally we found ourselves meeting for the first time.

    I was thrilled to realize he hadn’t taken after me. He was tall and gorgeous with his mother’s blond hair and gray-ish eyes. He was smart and well-mannered. Flawless personality.

   I felt more like shit than ever.

   “So what happened,” I explained to him, after taking a quick sip of my decaf Grande with Splenda. “Is that I was a fat fourteen year old who was really out at sea.”

   “Out at sea?” He asked. And naturally he would. Who says “out at sea” nowadays anyway? Except popular romance novelists and ne’er-do-well psychics?

   “I was confused,” I amend. “About a lot of things.”

   “You were just a kid,” he says.

   “Exactly!”  I said, appreciating this empathy. Or at least wanting to sense it.

   “We were all kids,” he said. He drinking a more complicated drink than I am. Something iced, with foamy specks of what looks like chocolate. He has a frothy moustache.

    “Gosh, I love you,” I blurt out.

    “I wish I could say the same thing.”

    I’m soaring and I feel the bottom drop out from under me. “I understand,” I force myself the thing to say. I cannot expect to be loved back, after what I’ve done or haven’t done for twenty years.

     “Maybe some day I will,” he says.

     And that feels better. Then comes the bombshell. Of course, why else would he want to see me?

     “It’s nothing bad,” he maintains. “It’s good, actually.”
     “Yeah?” I say, wanting to be hopeful. The whole event fell like a ballad, one of those top ten songs where someone is lamenting someting and–that’s all their doing. There is no solution. There might be an offer of one. But nothing that the singer attempts to accomplish.

Starry Knight used to be called Isabel Sanford by her most-worst nemesis, by a dog named Boo. But when a song came out about him, he retreated into obscurity and Starry’s life sort of went on an even keel from then on.

The courtship between Little Karl and the witch was practically nonexistence. A few hand holdings, precipitated by the application of Ben Gay to a withered hand; the adjoining of lips by sheer accident (one of them had dropped something–a shoe–although most likely it was a toe–for both had diabetes by then–and when they both bent their heads down, their faces were close together and one of them stole a kiss from another.) Very simple. And practical! Government checks to the same address; coupled shopping excursions to to the same pharmacies, clinics and grocery stores. Marriage made sense.  

    Hard to say who proposed to who. Easy to wonder who had the most power. The witch who by now was called Meef (no longer Tarantula, but something more close to her real name–but being a woman who’d lost all her teeth her and could not pronounce her own name very clearly and signed her name with an “X”–she was probably a Margaret or Bethanne, or something of the sort). And her spells had mostly dwindled. Mainly because they were trouble to conjure too Macbethian in nature. But there was one spell that was easy.  That of marriage proposal. And she’d chosen him, Little Karl–Now Big Karl–out of the thousands of men she’d known over the centuries.

    Their honeymoon was horrendous. Harrowing. Pus-filled. Full of aches and pains and many naps in between. By that time, there there was very little age difference between them. Both of them were old and haggard. But she was a bit stronger. “You belong to me forever,” she said. “Or else you die.”

   Nothing that alarmed him. He’d been hearing that from her since kindergarten. He found this mildly amusing. She didn’t like that. She wanted him to take her seriously.

   So she said, in a more ominous voice. “If you ever try to leave me, I’ll garnish your wages with parsley.”

   This made him chuckle. “Garnish my wages?”  he said, shifting in his seat, on that same glider of hers, of yore, now rusty and creaky, further hampering their hearing. “I’ve never had a job in my life” The government has always supported me.” It was true.  Apparently, back then at least, the Deal was that if you were ugly enough you got a check from Uncle Sam, from some obscure government-sponsored program bestowed to the descendants of people from the Pacific West who’d developed deformities because of the Goldrush.  It was a very short-lived program, after it concretely concluded that Gold or any other riches–or the lack or hunt or want or need of them deformities (although they really do, some people will argue) and so it seemed odd that Little/Big Karl was able to get these checks.

  Ah, and as if hit by a lightning bolt, he jolted upright from the glider and and turned with mouth slack with shock. “It was you wasn’t it?” He told his witch-wife on that quiet, cool, November afternoon. “You’ve been sending me money this entire time.”

 She smiled toothlessly. “What are witches for?” She said.

 And if he’d just kept his mouth shut, or maybe just thanked her, he might have lived another few more years. 

“You turned me into this. Into an ugly toad. The opposite of a fairy tale. A kiss that turned me into an ugly toad”

   “But you are my prince.”

   Another aaaah, this one deeper inside, rumbling his chest with its gravity, something unspeakable.  Searing emotions. Unfathomable regret spurting up, bursting forth like a heavy storm cloud. The glider shook. The porch shook. The whole house started to rock.

    People looked out of  their windows in order to make out the commotion coming from the witch’s house. They withdrew their attention from the highly rated television show Dallas on the night it was revealed “Who Shot J.R.?”–in order stare at the rocking sprigs of clematis over at the corner of the street. They thought they heard growls.

   There were growls. The retired witch who’d been a dutiful wife was now pissed.

   But so was Big Karl. Equal pissosity on both sides. No mystery here, who would win this argument.  Winning wasn’t really the issue. Payback was.

   “I don’t want to owe you,” he said.

   “Too late,” she said.

   “There’s one way I can pay you back,” he said.

   “You wouldn’t dare,” she said.

They’d begun to sound like Dallas. Within a shew-fart minutes she decided to kill him. He’d served his purpose, she reasoned. He’d kept her company, gotten old with her.  She shifted in her seat and said. “I hereby garnish your wages with parsley” and she threw a few sprigs on him. Yes, actual parsley she’d carried on her person all this time. Which was now brown and crumbly. But she was still powerful.

   Could such a thing be wrapped up after years of matrimony? Of course. That’s how many, many marriages ended in–death. If not murder. Big Karl shat and peed in his pants and keeled over. And that was all.

     But there’s more.

I wanted to be her when I grew up. Brunette, shapely, working as a flowerist.

Humping Jack Tripper.

Oh shit: it’s Florist.

Oh well.

Instead of being Janet, I’m just a guy who works at a start-up company that always seems to be going under. Right now it’s afloat. Thing are even good, the CEO says. And because we want to believe him, we start becoming more eager and frisky and looking forward to the rewards.

As for me I’m taking my hopes elsewhere. I’m taking it out of the office. I’m invading other offices.

But not for a job. I’m looking for love.

Unfortunately, most recently I’ve ended up having affairs with married men and women. Yes both. I’m pretty busy. And also a little shocked because they all in their thirties and have new kids–newborns, toddlers, none even yet in preschool. And so I ask myself as I ride the subway, still sweaty from the sex at my lunch hour. How do they do it?

Nowadays both parents have to be out there hustling, nine to fiving, and when do they get time for their affairs?

No one is having time to have affairs, is one of the argument. Children take up too much time. There’s no time such time, they say Or: “What? You can’t be serious. Cheating is wrong. It’s cheating!” They say.

But seriously, I want to say to them as I make my copies at Fedex or grab some more half and half at Startbucks. I know what I’m talking about. I’m the other woman. Or man, depending on how you look at it.

“Garnish your wages with parsley,” was what the witch first told him, Little Karl, who was only four years old. She’d just moved across the street from his family.  She was smart enough to know that it was a good idea for a witch to semi-retire here in this seaside town, where taxes were cheaper and the noise was less deafening and she could focus on a few select specimens to do her bidding. You could say she put all her eggs in one basket when she chose little Karl as her subject.

 She spoke jibberish as he far he was concerned. At his age, he knew nothing of “garnish” or “wages” and certainly didn’t plan on taking her advice to heart. Already, within a few hours of the Mayflower van leaving her belongings, the kids in the neighborhood had started calling her Tarantula. Her hair was spiky and frayed and dark as night. Her limbs were long and thin, burntly brown and glossed, as if by slime left by slugs. When he was a little older, when people started pointing to him too, and finding as many faults as they did with the witch, when they said he he smelled and walked funny and poked through his clothes like something broken and jagged, when they described his face like a tree that would never see spring, he began to notice her more. And she him. She stood up for him.  She called him a prince. At first Karl found it hard to take her compliments, that he was handsome and strong and smart.  She had no fucking basis for these opinions!  He’d already lost two front teeth in a fight. His father left home not last week, with a note saying he was going to another beach where “air was fresher” –a cheap crack at his body odor.  And if Karl believed in his own ugliness, he was an even more avid follower of those who were repulsed by the witch. The rumors ran rampant about her own bodily conditions. Parasites invading her ears. Her mind seething with maggots.  Her breath producing that sewer smell on foggy days.  Yet outwardly he was always polite to her, smiling at her as she spoke of his goodness, but really not making eye contact, in order to avoid curses, instead staring off  in a direction beyond her, feeling it was better to stare at something indeteminate like the rusty nails sticking out of her screen door than than screw his face up at the wild sayings of a witch.

    When Karl was forty-eight she murdered her own husband with a spell.

    How did he know?

    He was the husband.