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over my head. Not one bit.
    But before I could get the mask securely over my face, I was hit with something silent but deadly and oh so potent, heavily spiced with yesterday’s broccoli and sauerkraut, something that I was sure came shooting from the octogenarian sitting next to Typhoid Mary, rising up in a toxic attempt to smother and kill us all.
    Oh God, I thought as I held my breath. Someone help me. I’ve seen that Discovery Health Channel show, too.

 

    Love Thy Neighbor

    I f the envelope had been delivered to the wrong address, I would have torn into it with glee. But it’s never a happy event to get a letter from the police department delivered to the right address.
    Yours.
    Standing next to the mailbox off my front porch in the middle of summer, I held the envelope in my hands and wondered as a wave of dread washed over me. No one ever gets a nice, happy letter from the police department unless it begins with the words “Good news! The charges against you have been dropped!”
    And then I breathed a sigh of relief.
    How stupid am I? I laughed. Duh. I knew exactly what the letter was, because I had gotten several of them before. It had to be a notice that I was being fined because the alarm on my security system had gone off without reason. Much like the last time I was charged $150 because the alarm had sounded when a thief tried to kick in my back door, failed because of the dead bolt, ran away when the alarm went off, and was gone before the police got there three hours later. In the rule book of the Phoenix Police Department, apparently, if the hoodlum fails to gain access to your home and flees the scene but leaves a calling card of a split doorjamb, a footprint on both your back door and the door to your storage shed, you owe the city of Phoenix a nice little nondeductible donation/early Christmas gift. In the time it took the police to respond to the alarm that someone was breaking in to my house AND WAS BREAKING IN NOW, the thief could have entered my house, surprised me on the potty, tackled me as I tried to shuffle to safety but fell because of the pants around my ankles, hit me over the head with the Bigfoot mug my husband gave me for my birthday, then skinned me like big game with the paring knife in my Henckels set (which he was going to steal anyway), wore my skin like a dress around the house, watched Death to Smoochy on DVD, and farted into my couch cushions before he realized how boring my house was and left because it turned out that the $2.84 in coins he found scattered all over the hallway floor from my pants pockets was actually sufficient to buy a value combo meal and a shake at Jack in the Box.
    And, just after he left, that would be the moment when the police show up and make a note to fine me $150 for a false alarm.
    Great, I thought with a heavy sigh as I tore into the envelope; I didn’t even know I had been almost robbed again. I unfolded the letter and then gasped like I had just seen a parent naked.
    “COMMUNITY NOTIFICATION,” the letter announced in bold, all-capital letters, then went on to inform me that a notification must be made when certain sex offenders are released from Arizona State Prison and that one of them had recently moved into the neighborhood.
    Well, I said to myself as I tried to diminish my fear in any way possible. Surely, this guy, Kenny Ray Swain, whose picture was presented in grainy black and white, showing his devil-like eyebrows, his beady, glaring, pigeony eyes, and his tight, wide lips that curled in a snarl like a sinister comma, didn’t do anything too bad. Maybe he’s just one of those guys who courted a seventeen-year-old in a trailer park and she fibbed about her age, right? It could be something like that. Or maybe he was just doing some heavy breathing into a phone receiver late at night, or maybe he was simply stealing panties from clotheslines and dryers in Laundromats. It could be something like that, right? Right? It probably isn’t