When Death Won’t Cooperate

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

When Death Won’t Cooperate

By Plot Roach

I’m not a bad person, but I’ve tried to kill my neighbor at least five times now.

I like my privacy. I like my home to be my sanctuary away from the woes of reality. And I like to be able to come and go as I like without someone snooping into my business.

With a woman like Margareta, these things become impossible. It’s like she has some sort of sixth sense that tells her when I’m tiptoeing around her and trying to get some ‘alone’ time for myself.

If she does this to the other neighbors, no one had sympathized with me. Instead they all say that she’s an urban saint and we’re all blessed to have someone in the apartment complex like her to watch over us.

Demon from Hell is what I call her. What my neighbors fail to see is the horns holding up that tarnished halo of hers. In fact, I’m almost certain that if you took it off her head, you’d see someone else’s name stenciled on the inside of it with a ‘please call if found’ message on the side.

She’s evil, but the others don’t see it. Either because they don’t want to or because they are afraid to ban together and cast her out of our little building. She snoops through the mail, opening anything that might look interesting (say a check she can wash the name off of and cash herself or a letter from a bill collector which she can use for juicy gossip when talking to the other residents of our complex). She barges into your home, looking for food or alcohol she can mooch off of you, making you feel like a heel if you don’t invite her to dine at your table. She’ll borrow your car, and use up all the gas without offering to pay for more. She’ll take your clothes, and return them ruined. You get the picture. If you have anything of value, it is best to destroy it or sell it before she can get wind of it, or else you’ll never be rid of her.

I eat out, I take public transportation and none of my clothes will fit her. My home is as sparse as that of a nun’s. So the only thing she can take from me is my sanity.

“Howdy, neighbor!” she yells at the top of her lungs, no matter who she sees, or if she’s already seen you ad greeted you earlier that day. Her penchant for gossip keeps her talking most of the day. And she has a tendency to forget that the gossip she has shared has already been heard before, repeating herself even if you’ve told her that you know what she’s talking about.

She talks to me at least twenty minutes before work, snagging me as I try and slink out of the building. I’ve tried leaving earlier in the morning, but she’ll just talk to me that much more. She stops me at the mailbox, as I wonder which bill of mine she has 'accidentally' opened that day in order to find dirt on me to share with the others. And usually I can’t shake her off until another unsuspecting soul tries to enter the apartment and she leaps off of me onto them like a humongous flea draining away their life so that she can live another day.

I was so tired of her little games that I snapped one day. On the way out of the complex, she rushed up to ‘walk me out of the complex' and share a bit more of her toxic gossip about the neighbors on either side of me. As she began to descend the cement steps in front of the building, I stepped on the hem of her tent sized sundress. It jerked her off center and she fell the rest of the way down the steps. I panicked at my actions and flew down the steps, almost falling in the process myself.

She appeared to be fine, but one of the neighbors called an ambulance anyway and she was sent to the hospital. She was only there for an hour, so there was little rest from her chatter. In the end, she sued the building’s owner and not only got a settlement in the sum of six figures, but she insisted on staying in the complex. Which meant that the place had to be renovated for handicap access. A chair lift was placed at my end of the building to take her wheel chair from the bottom of the complex to her floor. It’s not as if she actually needs the chair, she just likes to use it to ‘rest in’, and doesn’t want to be without it. All of our rents were raised to pay for the lawsuit and the renovations. And to make matters worse, the engine of the lift hums and thumps right next to the wall of my apartment. It sounds like my bed is next to a bowling alley and no noise machine in the world will cover it. I would move, but since my rent has been raised, I can’t afford the security deposit on a new place, much less the moving van.

The next time I tried to kill her, I was ‘helping’ to clean her bathroom. I was still feeling bad about her little trip down the stairs and made the mistake of offering my help whenever she needed it. She asked me to do a little spot cleaning of her bathroom, so that she could have people over and not feel embarrassed. What I had thought would be light work, turned into a three hour hassle as I tried to chip dried cat crap off the floor with a screwdriver before I could even begin to mop the mess she called a lavatory. Before I left the apartment, I set the cleaning supplies in the kitchen. Some of the bottles were leaking and so I put them into the kitchen sink, not thinking much about it. It wasn’t until I heard the sirens that I put it together and remembered that mixing some household chemicals together can cause a toxic gas to form, killing you if you don’t have proper ventilation.

Margareta was overwhelmed with the fumes as she walked into her apartment, a neighbor found her passed out on the floor and called the ambulance. I hid in my apartment for days, hoping that no one would trace it back to me, since I hadn’t actually tried to kill her that time -it was just my negligence that caused her harm.

She healed and was back in the apartment in a few days. It was a few days I could have used for sleep, since the chair lift motor wasn’t grinding against my headboard. But guilt kept gnawing at my brain like an ice cream headache that wouldn’t go away. In the meantime I wondered if Death was avoiding her as well. Was it too much for him to cooperate a little and drag her off where she would never bother us again?

The next time she almost died, she took the keys from a neighbor’s place while he was out back taking out garbage. He had told me earlier that week that his car was making funny noises and wanted to get it checked before he went out on a long road trip. Margareta never asked for his permission, just taking things as she usually did. So I neglected to tell her about the odd noises of the car as I waved goodbye to her.

An hour later the police found the car in a ditch, turned over and on fire. The brakes had failed and gas tank had leaked. What was left of the burned out heap had been identified and my neighbor alerted to his missing cars’ whereabouts.

As for Margareta, she had actually stopped to fill the tank with gas (for the first time in her life) and had left the car idling. Teenagers stole the car and rolled it just off the freeway and into the ditch. Margareta was not only safe back at the gas station, but also got several news interviews and was flown out to a Hollywood studio to give her side of her ‘heroic’ story for an early morning talk show.

Then came the time that a man broke into her apartment to steal her electronics. I didn’t really have much to do with that one, except that one day I was on the bus, talking with a man just released from prison who was finding life on the outside a bit rougher than he remembered having left it. He told me of the times he would sneak into someone’s home, steal anything of value and be able to party for a month off of what he pawned it for. “It’s a good thing that you stopped doing that for a living then, since my handicapped neighbor would be such easy prey.” I said. I managed to work into the conversation which building I lived in, in case he was looking for a place to move to, and the number of Margareta’s apartment, since she was the ‘saint of the complex’ and would no doubt try and help him to settle in.

Yes, I know. I could not have given him better directions unless I had drawn a map for him and knocked Margareta out with chloroform to make her easy for the taking. What I had not planned on was that he did attempt to break in, only to have his skull bashed in by Margareta, usually a sound sleeper who was kept up that night by a bad cabbage stew she had eaten earlier that evening. To make matters worse, she used the award she had received from the talk show she had visited. When they learned that she had broken it by defending herself from this intruder, not only did they replace it, they flew her back out to Hollywood for another interview.

The last attempt to get death to alleviate our apartment complex of the plague who was Margareta resulted in a fire, an earthquake and a singing clown.

We had had an earthquake earlier in the week, and the manager sent a workman through each of the dwellings to check for damage. Margareta was out of her apartment at the time when the man checked out her apartment, leaving a notice that she should vacate for the time being while he worked to repair a leak in the gas line. He would be back in three days with the proper equipment and trusted the temporary seal to hold. But in the meantime, no one should use her stove. I snatched the note from her door and smiled at her as I passed her in the hallway.

It turns out that she put a frozen pizza in the oven and went downstairs to gossip with one of my neighbors to wait while it cooked. A singing telegram performer in the costume of a clown passed her on the way up to her apartment. It was a thank you message from the studio in Hollywood who had interviewed her twice. The man was unable to reach her by knocking, but was told by a neighbor that she would be back in twenty minutes. So he waited, sitting in front of the door to await her arrival. He pulled out a cigarette and a lighter, the flame sending him almost through the wall when it touched the gas leak from the stove. Again, Margareta was nowhere near the danger, but benefited from it. For she had everything insured the week before. As the ambulance scraped off clown bits from the hallway of the apartment complex, and the insurance company took copious pictures of the wreckage, Margareta was put up at a local motel for the rest of the week. Once the repairs were completed, she moved back into her apartment. And then no one saw her for three days.

She had a heart attack the very night she returned to her apartment and died in her sleep.

Her friends, neighbors and family were called together a week later for the reading of her will. Her daughter received a check for money -but unfortunately the taxes against her mother’s property cost more than the money she had left behind. The boat she had just purchased with the insurance check had a lien against it for more than it was worth, as her son found out belatedly. Various odd bits and pieces of the woman’s life were bequeathed to the people she loved to torture. I ended up with her parrot who was trained to say “Howdy Neighbor!” and nothing else. It was an ugly thing that had damn near pulled most of the feathers off its body and looked like a miniature game hen ready for baking.

A week of its shrill calls and I was about to roll the bastard thing in flour and deep fry it when there was a knock at the door. It was one of Margareta’s sons, Adam. He had not received a damn thing from his mother during the reading of the will. I thought that he got off better than the rest of us, plagued with useless and costly reminders of her.

I gave him the bird. The parrot, I mean. And he was so thrilled with a piece of his mother’s life he sat down on my couch to regale me for the next few hours about everything he remembered about his mother. And I sat and listened, a fake smile plastered to my face. I couldn’t say bad things about her to her son now that she was dead, right?

Deep into the night the one sided conversation continued, he cried, laughed and spoke adamantly about what a saint his mother had been, to touch so many people’s lives.

About an hour until dawn I wondered if I could use the same plan on him that I had set aside for the parrot. Rolling him in flour wouldn’t be the problem. But I would have to cut him into tiny little pieces if I wanted him to fit into my deep fryer.