A beat-up Bronco pulls over on the side of the road. The way-back window is busted up and covered with plastic wrap. The driver’s window is being held with tape. 

“DeAnn!” The door opens, and a man with a gray beard steps out, beer in hand. Not in a can but a real bottle; he has enough money for a real glass bottle. Another car— much nicer than the man’s—stops in the driveway (a generous term, a dirt spot next to the side of DeAnn’s house is more accurate). It’s new, she’s been pulling the car in and out all day, showing it off to the whole neighborhood. 

“The car looks great!”

She rolls her window down all the way and smiles at him. “Hey Bill.” 

They’ve both lived on this road since they were young and poor. Now they are old and poor, childless and divorced. And they still live on this road. 

They chat for a few minutes before DeAnn gets out of the car and puts on her rubber boots. Bill follows her, still talking. They like to flirt; they’ve been flirting for years. Once, when they were very young and still married to other people, they slept together. DeAnn knows Bill doesn’t have the guts to ask her out, and he probably never will. Maybe they’ll sleep together again; the winters can be bleak up here. Mostly though, he mows her lawn and cleans her gutters out in the fall. Once, he helped her shoot a groundhog that had been tearing up her lawn. He let her pick out the rifle she wanted to use from his collection. On this road, most of the men own guns. 

Eventually Bill gets into his car, careful not to slam the door too hard in case the tape on the window comes undone.

DeAnn trudges back onto the porch, which is covered in hanging plastic pots filled with flowers. Cheap ones, artificial pinks and yellows that couldn’t be grown in her garden. In March, when she gets depressed about the lack of life, she goes out and buys them from the grocery store. The flowers are her weak point, but they last well into October when the ones in her yard have been killed by frost.

DeAnn’s daughter called while she was busy with the car; she doesn’t call her back. The girl moved out two years ago, back to the big city where her father was born. Her mother’s garden and old white house weren’t enough to keep her home. She wants to be a playwright or an actress. Something big and grand which a small town can’t provide. DeAnn doesn’t have the heart to tell her that if she was truly inspired, she could write a great play from her bedroom. No need to see the world. 

The country is quiet, the hollyhocks have just begun to bloom. DeAnn sits on the porch with her iPad open and glowing. She has to call her daughter back eventually, the girl may be delusional but, after all, she is still a child. 

Her daughter tells her a heatwave has settled over The City. Upstate is still cool, and the kids across the street light a fire in the backyard and play charades all night. It’s the only noise for miles, except for the distance swoosh of the interstate. 

This town, this road, managed to escape the gentrification the pandemic brought to small towns. Somehow, the white-flighters with their six-figure salaries didn’t make it here. DeAnn is glad. She knows new people are a given, but rich people? They can be avoided. Not that she’s poor—she’s not. She’s middle class, like all Americans claim to be. Not poor enough to be pitied, not rich enough to be privileged. After all, she has enough to have bought this house and raised two good-for-nothing kids. Sure, the house has vinyl siding instead of wood, but she owns it so what does it matter? And the land is beautiful, with green hills and trees that have been around since the dawn of time. But DeAnn’s house faces away from all this. Her front porch looks onto the road. She sits out there, chatting on the phone or smoking her night-time cigarette, and keeps an eye on it all. The ultimate neighborhood watch.

She once took down a man who hit a little girl with his pickup truck. Right outside of DeAnn’s house, going fifty miles an hour on a country road. She was drinking a diet coke on her porch when she saw it happen and she snapped.

She’s not a large woman, but with a gardening shovel in hand DeAnn could’ve killed anyone. Not that she killed the man; she didn’t. But he was bleeding by the time she was through with him. After seeing the girl was being taken care of, DeAnn smashed through the windshield of the car using just her gardening shovel. She didn’t even let him get out before she was on top of it. With DeAnn on the lookout, no one worries about their children.

She’s the type of woman who wakes up at two in the morning, no questions asked, to watch the kids whose father needs to get his appendix removed. She wouldn’t do it for her own children, but she would do it for her neighbor’s.

“DeAnn!!” Someone calls out to her. She glances up from her iPad. The six-year-old boy who lives across the road is jumping up and down, waving. 

“Hey sweet pea!” She smiles. All children are ‘sweet pea’ to DeAnn. “What’s wrong?” He starts to run towards her house, but like a good kid he stops to look both ways before crossing the street. “What’s going on sweet pea?” There are tears on his pink cheeks.

“My daddy has a gun,” he says, running towards her porch. He is tearful and covered in snot, but his voice is clear. DeAnn frowns.

“Your daddy has a gun? Is he using it for something?” 

“Not anymore.” Not anymore? DeAnn gets up. Her daddy had a gun too; plenty of daddys have guns. A gun is no surprise, but a crying child and a gun is.  

“Why don’t we go check on your daddy?” She takes the little boy’s hand and they get down from her porch. Across the street, the door of his house is open. DeAnn knows the bugs will be trouble when he tries to go to sleep. 

The house is stuffy, even with the door open, and littered with old paper cups and plates. It smells that way too, like a place that has had its windows closed for far too long. DeAnn steps over a pile of dirty laundry and stands in the middle of the living room.

“Tom!” She calls out. “Tom?” The house stays silent. “Where’s your daddy, sweetpea?” DeAnn asks the boy. She can tell where he wiped away his tears, his hands have left streaks of dirt across his face.

“His bedroom.” The boy points to a door and DeAnn pushes it open. 

There is blood between the floorboards, inching slowly towards her. The mosquitoes have found it already, and they’re using the cracks as feeding troughs. Damn mosquitoes. 

And there is daddy, with his gun. Face down on the hardwood floor.

---

Lydia Bach is a writer living in New York City. Her work has been published in The Blotter Magazine, Girls Write Now 2025 anthology, and featured by Frazzled Lit as one of their best prose submissions. When she’s not writing, you can find Lydia singing or lying in bed worrying over the state of the world.