Read Thy Neighbor for Free Online Page A

eat. If I’m eating regular, sooner or later he’s bound to join me. Oh, and bring me some more weed, too, will you? That wheelchair weed you get that’s s’posed to make vegans crave corn dogs even when they’re on chemo. And trust me, that’s how he’s starting to look.”
    There’d be a pause here, with Kitty no doubt duped and mewling on the other end of the line.
    Then Dave would jump in, his greedy instincts getting the better of him, turning his tone desperate but still managing to make his grocery list sound like a call to arms rather than a fat boy’s food panic at full throttle.
    â€œPlease, Ma, just do what I tell you. And hurry.”
    I have to admit, it did help for a while in some hazy diabetic, opium den sort of way. I hardly ate, but I smoked like a five alarm, and when I did eat, the toxic array of carbohydrates we had in stock were so refined and saturated with chemicals that they were a drug in and of themselves, bringing on the kind of insulin shock once dispensed to mental patients. In combination with booze and gargantuan quantities of THC, you could get a jolt almost strong enough to reboot your brain.
    I suppose I should have been grateful for Dave’s intervention, but it just made me hate him more, mostly because he’d managed to make his Samaritan opportunism look like his own personal Via Dolorosa, even though he’d done nothing more strenuous than operate the microwave and nothing more self-sacrificial than crap in the upstairs bathroom. And he only conceded that last bit of unholy ground because I threatened to gouge his eyes out with a potato peeler if he ever again subjected me to the miasma of his outsized ass.
    Living with this prize primate for more than a month, and seeing all the filthy high jinks he was happy to get up to right out in the open in front of another person (albeit a person who had smoked enough ganja to have gone a shade of gangrene around the gills), made me wonder what he did when he thought no one was looking.
    The guy was double-jointed in the knees and would cut and clean his toenails with his teeth, like a baboon. No joke. Totally unconsciously, too, just watching the TV, gnawing away, savoring the Stilton that had been curing there for God only knew how long.
    When he was really bored, he’d sit with my old BB gun in my mom’s reading chair by the window in the living room and try to pick off squirrels and blue jays in the front yard. He rarely hit any. The accuracy on those things is for shit, and he was always too shaky or bleary to aim anyway. But he sent a lot of unsuspecting creatures flapping and scampering for cover while he cackled with delight.
    The day I evicted him, I found him in the kitchen with one of those gallon-size red rubber enema bags they sell in medical supply stores. He’d hung it from one of my mom’s old plant hooks on the low ceiling over the sink, and he was kowtowing beneath it naked on the linoleum floor, poring over one of my old porno magazines. He had the white hose of the enema bag planted in his upturned ass and a plastic bucket next to his hip.
    When I asked him what the fuck he was doing, all he said was:
    â€œCoffee enema, dude. Great buzz.”
    It might have been a surfeit of weed or it might have been the lack of it—I don’t remember—but this newly blithe and blatant insult threw me into a spiral of shame and disbelief that surprised even me. This could not be happening. Was my grief not enough? Did I deserve this demonic visitation as well?
    Exasperated, I spoke at last.
    â€œI have cups, you swine. Why didn’t you just drink it?”
    Dave grinned wickedly.
    â€œTotally different high when you shoot it. Mellowlike. Awesome. Plus it cleans you out like a meat grinder.”
    He said this fitfully, gasping and straining as you do when you’re exerting yourself in ways that other people shouldn’t see.
    Stay calm, said a good