Peter From My Neighbourhood

• Jie Rui Lin, Grade 12
• Short Story
• 2021

The night sky was closing in. I walked to the window to see the stripes of deep purple in the sky. Down below was Peter. He was on his front porch still in his suit. He had his tie off though and strangely his shirt was untucked. He had slippers on instead of his R.M. Williams’ boots. I had never seen him before in such a state of incongruity. Everything about him was refinement.

At this moment though, his whole body posture was closing in on itself. No moths would be circling around his charisma tonight. Then he did the strangest thing. He was pulling out the pot plants and just throwing them into the yard. I couldn’t hear him, but it seemed that there was a moan emanating from everything he did.

I wondered what he would think if he knew that Derek next door, Derek who he looked at with an air of condescension, was watching his world unfold behind the curtains.

He paced from one end of the porch to the other with his hands and thoughts pocketed, eventually seating himself on the steps. Then he bellowed something in frustration, grabbed a small shovel and just smashed the porch light. He disappeared for a moment and emerged from the darkness with a kerosene lamp. It burned a weak flame on the cusp of extinguishing itself, flickering and fretting at irregular intervals, clearly in agony. It cast a hazy shadow of himself. I could see the blackness within him. Just earlier today, he had berated me in the driveway. It was shared access, but he stormed towards me. By the time I had parked in my section, he was banging on the windscreen. There was nowhere to escape when I got out of the car.
“Really?” he said, his voice dripping. “This is my driveway!”
“Well, actually…” I began, but he interrupted.
“Does it not make sense to you Derek that this is my driveway and not yours?
He let it hang in the air. I didn’t know what to say, so I just shut him out. Yet he followed me halfway to my door before yelling: “Get out of here you nosy troublemaker.”

This wasn’t the Peter we had known for years. I looked down at him on that porch again and thought maybe this was some psychological episode. (Had he lost money? His job? Was there something wrong in the family?) His kerosene lamp was low on fuel, giving way to the dark. I was transfixed to a tragedy in the making.

Peter disappeared again, re-emerging just moments after. It seemed as though he was replacing the porch light. His silhouette fiddled with the timber structure of his porch. At last, the flame within him had been reignited. I waited for that confidence in him to re-emerge. His aura and charisma. Then, the strangest thing happened. He jerked. He conceded. In all the stillness of the tranquil night, I froze, and Peter’s body dangled in mid-air.