From Kurt:

                “This is ridiculous,” I said. I had been complaining all day. “Who are we, the Waltons?”

                She was drawing her face in makeup in the mirror above the bathroom sink, and she stopped. She looked at me through her reflection, the distance between us doubled by the depth of the mirror. “I don’t get the reference,” she said evenly. “Were they always going to neighborhood cookouts on The Waltons?”

                I didn’t know. I had never watched the show. I stepped out of the room to go pout downstairs, waiting for it to be time to leave. I wasn’t even sure what I was upset about, and I wasn’t particularly interested in figuring it out.

* * *

                The new neighbor – the reason we were all getting together – had a slight bit of celebrity status about him. As soon as it was learned who was buying the French Colonial at 214 – just two doors down and across the street from me – word had run rampant from one house to the next, and he was all that anybody had been talking about for weeks, now. On move-in day, the street was a slight wavering of everybody’s living room curtains being inched aside to get a look at him, carrying boxes in his grey t-shirt, darkening at the folds with sweat.

                The phenomenon had hit our house as well, and my wife and I kneeled side-by-side on the couch, peering out at him through the white gauze.

                “He looks so… fit,” my wife commented.

                I let silence speak for me momentarily while I studied the side of her face, studying him. “What?”

                She shrugged, “I don’t know. Like, we knew he was fit, obviously. But to see him in person like this, it’s just,” and she trailed off, letting her silence now speak for her. She bit her lip. It was difficult to tell when she was just fucking with me.

* * *

                I had been distracted during the week leading up to meeting the new neighbor. I had, perhaps, been distracted for even longer than that. But I hadn’t been paying attention, and I had gotten myself yelled at by my boss.

                I posted something to one period when it should have been posted to another, and then spent thirty minutes standing in explanation above a seated table of my supervisors and coworkers before having to stop, rub my chin, and say, “Oh, wait.”

                Dave, the biggest of my bosses, both in physical size and overbearing personality, slammed his hands down on the glass-topped conference room table and shouted, “Damn it! I don’t have time for this shit!”

                I was left standing there before their eyes, with nowhere to go. Quickly, my mind raced through my options, and just as quickly came to the understanding that I had none. I swallowed.

                Like a child, I stood there. I didn’t know that adulthood would be like this, with the same powerless fears of youth – shifting from one foot to the other, waiting for bad moments to pass.

* * *

                I came home from work that day wanting something to pick on. I wanted to crush something the way I had been crushed, make something small the way I had been made small. It’s times like these that I’d be glad I never had children.

                If my wife had been available to me, I would have pulled her hair, either in violence or in passion. But she was on the phone, not paying attention to me. Her yellow hair was combed into a harmlessly domestic ponytail, and I knew then that I wouldn’t have pulled it for any reason.

                I stood in the doorway, waiting for her to acknowledge me, but her eyes were far away, pointed outside of the window. She was lost in a conversation, and I might as well have been another shadow on the wall. She said into the receiver, “Can you imagine, five days like that? That’s almost a week!” I knew immediately what she was talking about.

                I changed quickly into my ragged clothes, and immediately retreated back out of the house. Cutting my grass would be my accomplishment for the day, like polishing my car, or trimming my hedges, or any of those continuous tasks that meant absolutely nothing.

                Bent over my rusted mower, pouring gasoline into its greasy tank, I heard Shelly, my real estate neighbor, saying to Frank, her husband and my unemployed best friend, “Bugs, I guess. But there isn’t any water in bugs, is there?” I wrenched the pull-string violently, and the engine sputtered loudly into life, drowning everything else out.

* * *

                “It’s only a hand,” he said, and he laughed, so we all laughed with him. “What’s a hand when compared to the rest of your life? What’s a hand when compared to,” and he paused. He looked up into the sun. Like a dope, I looked up, too. As though there was a tangible thing he was searching for there. As though, perhaps, I might be able to help him find it, and be the hero’s hero.

                Thank God for Frank, who said, albeit in a wistful voice, “What?” He asked the question before I had the chance to, and thus took the punishment.

                Steve, the new neighbor, the hero, shook himself out of his own self-induced reverie. “Excuse me?”

                Shelly, mortified, said, “For Christ’s sake, Frank.”

                Frank shrugged in defense, “What? I was just asking. What’s a hand when compared to what?”

                Steve laughed and said, “Exactly.” And we all laughed with him.

                He drank his beer with his surgically replaced claw hand. I stared at it with narrowed eyes.

                Dorothy, a sad, rather dumpy and increasingly desperate divorcee finally cracked the dam, stuck the pin in the balloon, as in hindsight I would have placed money that she would. She said, “I hate to bother you with this, I’m sure you get asked all the time. But could you tell the story? I know, I know – I’ve heard it a hundred times, so I’m sure you’ve told it a million. But,” and she clasped her hands in front of her chest, like a child, smiling idiotically.

                Steve looked at her for what felt a long time, as a tension swelled inside the group of us surrounding him – a classic storyteller’s trick, a motivational speaker scam. I looked at us all, the way we surrounded him like a football huddle. This circle hadn’t formed with intention, so how had it started? I was disgusted. His eyes drew in and his head cocked, like he was really considering the request, and then, as though against his better judgment, a huge smile violently split his face in two, perfect white teeth spawning from the fresh chasm of his mouth. And his voice sang, “Okay, okay, okay!” There was a gasp of pleasure from us, the crowd. And he said, “But only because I really like you guys, okay?” And his eyes winked as his grin twisted in coyness, and we all laughed like this was funny.

                “All I was looking for, really, was a quiet place to be alone,” he began. It was, verbatim, the way he began his story the first time I had heard it on the television news magazine, sitting in a maroon chair across from the earnest anchor. I had watched the episode when it first aired, and then secretly online four more times since the news broke that he was to be my neighbor. I silently said the words in my mind as he said them aloud, “And, boy, did I find a place to be alone.”

                In the canned laughter, I slunk away from the crowd.

* * *

                To celebrate graduating with a doctorate degree in something or other, he had gone backpack hiking, cliff climbing, and cavern exploring in the badlands of Utah. He went alone, looking for some solitude. He hadn’t told anybody where he was going, or even that he was going. “That,” he said with a knowing and cocky grin, “was the first in a line of pretty amateurish mistakes.”

                During the course of his adventuring, a boulder had come loose above him while he was in the belly of a canyon, crushing his hand beneath it when it landed. From over my shoulder, I heard the crowd of my neighbors gasp in unison. For days, he clung there, desperately and futilely trying to free himself, sure he was going to die. On the fourth day, he tried to cut himself free by amputating his own hand, but soon learned that he had neither the tools nor the fortitude to accomplish the feat. He chose to rather spend his time carving his own epitaph in the canyon wall. In the interview, the quaffed anchor leaned forward in his chair at this point. “Your own epitaph?” he said, a hint of shock in his voice that I noticed sounded rather similar to disgust. Steve nodded his head, eyebrows raised.

                When, against his own calculations, he was still not dead on the fifth day, dehydration and fear, desperation and lunacy made possible what hadn’t been the day before. Using his newly minted education, he torqued his body sickeningly, snapping the two bones running the length of his forearm, just above the wrist. From behind me comes another collective sucking of air. “It was easy after that,” he explained before smiling boyishly. “Well, maybe ‘easy’ isn’t the right word.” The anchor laughed, as I hear my wife laughing now, both smitten. “Soft tissue and nerves. Cutting through the nerves was bad, I guess. It felt a little like being electrocuted. But I was pretty out of it by this point, mentally.”

                Even after the amputation was complete, there was still a sheer 80-foot rock face that he had to scale down – starving, dehydrated, bleeding to death, and now one-handed. There was an eight mile hike back to his car. There were a lot of things that make you shake your head at this man, put yourself in his shoes, ask yourself hard questions.

                I had never even been to Utah. I had never made it further west than Cincinnati, where my parents had taken me to an amusement park as a child.

* * *

                I strolled the yard. I walked the perfect crosshatching of lawnmower tread. I wandered over to the food table.

                The picnic had been a hastily arranged bring-your-own-potluck. We had invited ourselves to this stranger’s house, so the least we could do was bring our own food. And I looked at it all set out before me. The pink tube hotdogs had been stacked and arranged in a perfect pyramid so that all of the ends stopped at the same flush point. The buns were stacked on a tray beside them in an even tower. Plastic bottles of ketchup and mustard were arranged in order – red, yellow, red, yellow. Someone had made a Kool-Aid punch, and brought it in a crystal cut bowl. There were four kinds of potato salad, six kinds of bean dip.

                I found myself laughing suddenly, but inside my guts was a terrible sadness. I thought of my house and my job and my wife and how little effort it had taken to get here. I thought of how little I had seen, or how little I would ever see. I thought about my own youth, and how little it had meant in hindsight, and how quickly it had passed. I shrugged, and I laughed, and I shrugged again. This was my time and place. This was the answer to the question of my childhood dreams. I shrugged against something bigger, and I waited for it to pass. And when it did, it left a calm in its place, a sickening calm.

* * *

                I returned to the group just as Steve was making his closing. He held his metallic hand up to the shimmer of the sun, and he said, “Everybody asks the same questions. ‘Did it take some getting used to?’ Yes, of course it did. People ask ridiculous questions, like, ‘Do you ever miss your hand?’ Do I ever miss my hand?” He laughed, and the crowd around him laughed, though I detected an unease, as though some among them had come close to asking this same thing. “But, look – what happened is what happened. And those five days made me who I am, absolutely. But the five days before those five made me who I am, too. All the days of my life have made me who I am. So, then, to answer the question I get asked the most, ‘Do you have any regrets?’” He stopped and looked slowly around to all of us. In a voice that we hadn’t heard before, lower and sincere and brimming with honesty, he said, “No. Absolutely not.”

                My gaze drifted over the faces of my neighbors as I tried to be accepting of the dumb awe that I found there. That was the end of the interview, the end of the script as I knew it. So I was surprised when he continued, “Do you know what word I hate the most?” My eyes snapped to him and my stomach dropped to find him looking dead at me. A moment of silence stretched out so long between us that I began to open my mouth to answer him, like I’d take a guess at answering his question. Mercifully, he spared me. “Dwell,” he said. “Don’t ever dwell. We never ‘dwell’ on accomplishments. We ‘dwell’ on mistakes or things that we’d do differently if we could. To dwell is to bring a cancer into your own personal history, to despise all the things that got you to where you are today. You have to let go.”

                I found myself nodding along with the group, and I couldn’t breathe until he looked away. Suddenly, the stone of his face shattered into that now-famous winning smile. “Hey,” he clapped his hands together, “how about we eat?” And the crowd crackled into a murmuring of positive chirping. Dorothy even applauded for a second before she realized she wasn’t supposed to.

                I took a step away, generally following the crowd towards the food, in no real hurry. His arm was suddenly around my shoulder without me knowing he was beside me. His metallic hand dropped against my chest, and I have to admit, for a brief moment I didn’t know what it was and it startled me. But I turned to find him there, beaming that smile. He said, “You’re Jacob, right?”

                I smiled and nodded, dumbly.

                “You live across the street?”

                “That’s right.”

                “I’m glad to meet you. I’ve wanted to stop by and introduce myself, but, well, you know how it is.”

                I wasn’t sure that I did, but I smiled and nodded again. In most social situations, this is all I know to do.

                He stopped walking then, but left his heavy hand on me, so that I had to turn and stop with him. In a voice slightly lowered, he said, “Let me ask you a question.” I thought something big was coming, and I leaned in. “Are you guys beer drinkers here?”

                I laughed. “Oh, sure!” I said, hating the sound of my voice as it came out.

                He laughed then, too. “Thank God! I was concerned. I noticed that nobody brought any and I was beginning to feel a little conspicuous.” He held his empty bottle up beside his chin and shook it. “I was concerned that you guys might be a little,” and he made a general waving motion towards the crowd gathered around the food table. I looked where he motioned, but didn’t see anything specific, unless he meant Dorothy spooning two of the different types of potato salad onto her plate, and perhaps he did.

                “Oh, no,” I assured him. “You’ll find more than your share of beer appreciators on this block.” I was really starting to hate myself, but I couldn’t stop. The suburbs had infected my blood.

                “Great! Then do me a favor,” he said. “I’ve got two cases of import sitting in a refrigerator in my garage over there. The door is open. Go grab them for me, please. And I’ll meet you right over there with a bottle opener.”

                “Okay!” I said, with too much excitement. To make matters worse, I had to add, “Will do!”

                I disappeared around the corner of the house, and I desired to just keep walking – down the driveway, across the street, across my lawn, into my house, into my bedroom, under the covers. But I couldn’t. I stepped into his garage, and I was temporarily blind from the sudden darkness. My brain was a tongue flicking against the inside of my skull, saying repeatedly, “Dwell, dwell, dwell.”

                In the refrigerator, I found the cases of expensive beer. I gauged them in my mind, wondering if I could carry them both at the same time without scratching his expensive red car.

                I’m not sure why I did it, but I pulled open the freezer door then. It was typical, at first. There were the individually wrapped hunks of meat, and two canisters of some sort of protein supplement milkshake, the tubes of orange juice concentrate. I’d almost closed the door, when the plastic bag caught my eye, trimmed in that pale orange ribbon that is only ever used by hospitals to point out when something is biohazardous.

With just the tips of my fingers, I repositioned a couple of things slightly. Gingerly, I pinched the corner of the bag with two fingers, lifting it slightly. I couldn’t comprehend it at first; it was not usual. It was crushed and mangled, and then frozen into an unnatural state of solidity. But then I noticed, unmistakably, a thumbnail, and the rest slowly came into focus. Five fingers, broken but aligned. There was a wrist and the chewed place where it had been disconnected by a frantic, panicked, amateur’s amputation. Carefully, I lowered the bag back to its shelf, then closed the door, the automated light of the freezer shutting off as I did, leaving the hand in its cold darkness.