This is a vignette of what goes on in a neighborhood. There's some background but not much story development. Odd but familiar — 'Neighbors' by Zach Williams, published in The New Yorker on March 18, 2024. This vignette is drawn from the author's upcoming new book (coming in June 2024) of ten short stories titled 'Beautiful Days: Stories'.
The narrator and his wife Anna and their twin girls moved out to the San Francisco after she had an affair and in a bid to patch their rocky marriage. They got to know their neighbors, and on their left, lived an elderly woman named Bing.
They could hear Bing's tv turned on loud and her wall phone ring. They didn't get to meet her for the longest time till her youngest son Henry visited. To me, unfortunately, Henry and the narrator got a bit too pally. Henry now texts the narrator to go over to check on his mother if she doesn't answer the phone.
And I knew that when I checked my phone—which, to prevent distraction, I always left charging in the kitchen—I would find messages from Henry. It was inevitable. He’d explain that his mother wasn’t answering the phone and he was growing worried. His request that I knock on her door would be apologetic but insistent. And when she didn’t answer—of course she wouldn’t; why would she answer her door but not the phone?—he’d tell me where to find a key. Soon I would be on the other side of the wall, slowly climbing Bing’s stairs, calling her name. I had a bitter feeling about it, as if this outcome, this moment, had been waiting for me since I’d first seen Bing, and by extension long before that—since we’d found this house in the Outer Sunset, or since Anna had received the offer to go to California. I watched the ocean for another minute or two, then walked into the kitchen for my phone.
.....................
My phone buzzed. I can’t reach anyone else nearby. There’s a key under the flat stone beside the walk. Again am so sorry but would you please? Whatever protests I had—that this wasn’t my business, that Henry was the one who’d left his poor invalid mother so that he could scale cliffs in Tahoe, and that someone else should be appointed to do this, not me—ran on a distant parallel track in my mind. The key was there, pressed by the stone into the pale, dusty soil. I had to wrestle it some in the lock, but then the gate sprang open.
One fine night, the narrator went over to find Bing dead on the sofa in the living room. There was a man in the shadows of the room, or so he thought. But he didn't approach and the man disappeared back into the shadows till the narrator wasn't sure if there was actually a man in the house.
The narrator never said anything about the man to the police or the EMTs since the death seemed natural. He only told his wife. Eventually, they moved out and away from San Francisco.
Maybe he saw the Grim Reaper. In an interview with the magazine, the author was asked if he knew who this man in the shadows was. He said,
The encounter in the neighbor’s house involves (spoiler alert) an unknown man whose face is obscured. He is seemingly a real person, but his effect on the narrator of the story is perhaps more psychological or spiritual than concrete. The story never reveals who—or what—he is. Do you know?
No, I don’t, and it’s never really occurred to me to try to figure it out. Part of what I like about not knowing, in a story such as this one, is that it keeps me on equal footing with the characters. In fact, I think that’s one thing that attracts me to the form of fiction, broadly speaking: that a story can resolve, on its own terms, while leaving major questions unanswered. To me, that feels true to life.
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