Teresa Milbrodt, Fictioneer

One of her many adventures that was not included in LARISSA TAKES FLIGHT: STORIES

Larissa and the Neighbors

 The guy who lives next door to me in the apartment complex stands in my doorway with a plate of peanut butter cookies and says he learned the recipe from a nuclear physicist when he was a janitor at a bomb-making plant. She knew how to save the world by not blowing it up and that was why he loved her, but he left that job and became a bank teller since he knew life would be simpler. I nod and smile because his stories are never the same, so he could be hallucinating or lying or he’s filtered out lives from the television programs he watches at three in the morning. I hear him when I use the bathroom, his TV muttering through the wall, but he’s a lot saner than the conspiracy theorist who used to live next door and skulked to my welcome mat at ten o’clock at night to give me earnest pamphlets filled with stories of how the world was going to hell in a handbasket and the people who controlled everything were ones with money. I’m familiar with the arithmetic of haves and have-nots since I survive on a shoe store salary and my boyfriend quit his job at the insurance company to get one in a produce department and dispense his knowledge of Aristotle and Socrates and how to select a good melon. When I asked the conspiracy theorist how we should right the world’s economic wrongs and if he had a pamphlet with a twelve-step plan and easy to-follow-instructions he didn’t have much to say, but most people who like to complain are bad when it comes to proposing solutions and then having less to complain about, so I told him I needed to do some writing I’d put off for ten years, and he said he was working on a novel about a guy who saved humanity from destruction and the plot to convert us to a new unreality. I smiled and closed the door and played solitaire on my computer and wondered when he’d move to a Michigan commune, but in the end I don’t know where he went, just that he left in the middle of the night and the guy who replaced him will be back this evening with more cookies and an explanation of how he used to work on the Empire State Building and has connections to Superman, and if anyone had an easy twelve-step program on how to right the world’s wrongs it would probably be Superman but the guy next door seems to have forgotten his phone number. My philosopher boyfriend laughs when I tell him this, but most of us dream of being bigger than we are, and even if we can’t save the world we want to know people who can.