Free SHUDDERVILLE by Mia Zabrisky Page A

like a security blanket, tiptoed over to the living room wall and rested her ear against the painted wood. Tharrrrrump! It sounded as if the goateed man was pushing all his furniture over. It sounded like he was wrestling elephants.
    Then she heard another sound, a persistent bang-bang-bang , like a fist hitting a wall. And a voice rising in anger.
    Sophie went into the kitchen, scooped a glass out of the dishwasher, hurried back and rested the glass against the wall. She could hear even better now. Two men were arguing, their dueling voices like a needle flicking across a radio dial—all static and loud bursts. She couldn’t make out the words, just muffled outrage and indignation. Then the voices stopped and a door slammed.
    Sophie stood blinking numbly. She wanted the voices to come back. She wanted to eavesdrop on other people’s lives. She was sick of thinking about her own tragic life. She put the glass back in the dishwasher and dropped the Stoli in the trash, then noticed her hands were sticky from the orange juice. She washed them in the kitchen sink and plucked a paper towel off the roll.
    Bang-bang-bang . Somebody was pounding on her front door. Visitors! Great. She ran into the foyer and said almost too anxiously, “Yes? Who is it?”
    “It’s your neighbor, for Pete’s sake,” a grumpy male voice hollered from the hallway. “Tobias Mandelbaum!”
    “Just a second.” She straightened her T-shirt and swung the door open and there on the threshold stood a little old man with twinkling blue eyes and a soft peak of white hair on top of his head. He wore a plaid short-sleeve shirt, brown corduroy pants that bagged at the crotch and canvas shoes the color of moss. “Well, hello, young lady!” he bellowed.
    “Um… hello,” she said.
    His face was cragged and bony and he leaned heavily on a wooden cane. “I came to see if that young man was driving you nuts, too?”
    “What young man?” she asked, although she knew perfectly well what young man he meant.
    “The one who moved in between us!” He held out his liver-spotted hand. “My name’s Tobias Mandelbaum, by the way. Apartment 204.”
    “Oh. Hello.” They shook hands. “Sophie McKnight.”
    “Sophie, now there’s a name. You don’t get a lot of Sophie’s nowadays.” He smiled and scratched his chin. “Sounds sort of familiar, like I should know you.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “No? We’ve never met?”
    She wasn’t surprised he recognized her name. The accident had made the six o’clock news. A shot of Sophie running from reporters had looped on Channel 9. An old photograph of Peter taken during his graduate school days had graced Channel 37’s Eye-Witness News. Peter’s blood-alcohol level at the time of the accident had been reported in the Daily Sun. She’d won her fifteen minutes of fame and had paid dearly for it.
    “Sounds like somebody’s dropping A-bombs next door,” Mandelbaum grumbled. “It feels like I’m getting kicked in the behind!” He squinted inside, his gaze shifting from the dirty clothes strewn across the floor to the flat grey eye of the television set. “It’s so dark in here.”
    “I like it dark,” she said.
    “Did I tell you my name’s Tobias?”
    “Yes,” she said. “You did.”
    “Oh. Well, I’d like to continue this conversation, but it’s getting pretty late.” He smiled at her, exposing his long yellow teeth. “What time is it anyway?”
    “It’s one o’clock in the morning.”
    “One in the morning?” He chuckled and wagged a gnarly old finger at her as if he didn’t believe her. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
    “Good-night,” she said and shut the door.
    *
    On Thursday evening, Sophie drank a six-pack while watching National Geographic specials back-to-back on TV. The first show was about a family of polar bears that migrated through a small Canadian town every winter, frightening the residents by rummaging in the town dump and sniffing around the schoolyard. The