Neighborhood Conspiracies 

Creative Non-Fiction by ​​​Wendy BooydeGraaff

1. In winter when the flowering crab, the lilac, the service berry, the mulberry, the silver maple have lost their leaves, our backyard sightline increases. We see beyond their bareness, across the park-mown expanse. The kitchen is dark December mornings. Our light shines out from above the sink. A neighbour on the adjacent side of the park tells another neighbour we’ve been spying on her. She sees us in our lighted kitchen, watching her, she says. We can only see inside her garage, the vast boxiness of it. Weekdays between 7:15 and 7:45 AM, an old model sedan backs out the sloped driveway, bottoms out on the curb, and drives away. We can identify it but not her.

2. In the garden by the front door we put up the Black Lives Matter sign. Across the street, the shades go down for the first time on the windows facing our house. I didn’t know they owned window coverings. Young neighbours, children my tweens used to babysit, exit the van inside the garage, after the squeaking door closes. They used to tumble out onto the driveway and immediately into the front yard, swinging from the huge silver maples. Now they play within their white privacy fence. On Goodreads, their mother logs a sexual-orientation conversion memoir. The lines have been drawn down the middle of our street and neither of us are crossing.

3. The squirrels in the backyard chatter at me while I sit on the lounge chair in the April sun. Petrulia, Bleacher, Chopsticks. They race around the yard, balance atop the fence, steal seeds from the bird feeder. They cross streets and boundaries without heeding who voted for whom, or who is watching from the front door window. Before these three: Jenny, who preceded Micawber, who was flattened in the street by a car, his mouth open in a silent scream. Someone trumpets mournful echoes across the basin of the park. Squirrels believe cars and drivers are sci-fi-esque tools of Squirrel Armageddon. Do they grasp that I, too, drive a car?

4. Neighbours, winter, spring, Michigan, suburbia, squirrels: integral to the plot. The other neighbour who talks to the one who believes I’m a spy told me she debunked our mutual neighbor’s conspiracy theory, though our mutual neighbor may well believe her theories regardless. I believe mine. When you come up with a good idea, no one can dissuade you from it. I would like to make friends with the Blue Jay who chees so loud her gullet must hurt. I never could play the trumpet. We live in proximity without ever becoming friends. I suppose it’s lonely there in the buffer of space between us, the politeness of distance, the privacy of dispute. 

Wendy BooydeGraaff

Wendy BooydeGraaff’s short fiction, poems, and essays have been included in X-R-A-Y, Welter,
LIT, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. She is the author of Salad Pie (Chicago Review
Press/Ripple Grove Press), a children’s picture book, and her middle grade short story “The
Michigan Triangle” is anthologized in The Haunted States of America (Henry Holt/Godwin
Books).