A Pathetic Wretch

Crying eye

After her husband left, all she did was cry. Cry, cry cry. Noon: cry. 10:00pm: cry. 3:00am: cry.  Her pitiful bleating would pour through the thin wall between our apartments and drive me out of my mind.

I couldn’t sleep. My work suffered. I stared, eyes wide with restless hatred, at the ceiling in my uncomfortable bed as night after night was stolen from me.

Pounding on the wall did nothing but cause her to cry harder. Calls to the obese building superintendent brought castigation; not to my neighbor, but to me.

“How dare you be so heartless,” the super chided. In the rare cases she wasn’t speaking around a mouthful of food, it still sounded as if she were. “Her husband abandoned her!”

“I can’t sleep. I can’t even think!” I protested.

The thing on the other end of the line huffed. “Get some earplugs,” she suggested, and hung up.

This went on for months. Like any man in my situation, I reached the end of my rope. And, in a way, so did my neighbor.

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