Apex Magazine: Issue 92 by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Apex Publications

Truth be told, Patsy gave no credence to Shaun’s strange, tear-stained speech of the previous day, expected nothing to come of it, which makes the knock on her door so early this morning that much more of a surprise.

Everyone promises to call on Patsy and her cats. No one ever does. And she makes sure they don’t need to. Every warm day, she makes sure they all have to see her bright-eyed, smiling face.

Most of her neighbors pretend to be kind to her, and she’s not blind to the pretense. They smile too long, won’t look her in the eye, say goodbye before she’s done talking. She’s always gracious about the subtle abuse—a compromise she offers to those who might be happiest if she gave into the disease slowly rendering her paralyzed, if she simply stayed in her home and withered away, died helpless and forgotten in her bed, a sacrifice to the flies.

One of the consequences of being inconsequential, a person looked past rather than seen—she has been cast as the neighborhood’s cheerful confessor, its motorized wheelchair-bound repository of secrets.

If she wanted to, she could make the whole neighborhood come apart at the seams. But, because she never breaches trust, never shares these sacred scraps, and because of the pity those with a glimmer of a conscience feel toward this woman with no friends, she is entrusted with so much. She knows so many things about people who care little to nothing about her.

She hears the elderly woman at the end of the street complaining about her tramp of a granddaughter. She hears Francene’s frettings about missing Denise, and her not-so-perfect son, and the suspicions about her husband that she doesn’t quite dare face head-on.

She hears Maria’s gripes about her many obnoxious boyfriends, enough that she can tell when someone’s about to get dumped. She hears about the fights with the ex, how he lords his custody of Davey over her, how he deprives Davey of things like comic books and field trips just to spite his mother, to show her how powerless she is.

Patsy even hears about the break-ups and reunions with Clive—Maria has never kept this secret, not from her.

And she hears from Barry the bulked-up, hunky weatherman about the annoying and adorable quirks of his latest boy toys. She hears the resentful whispers of the cop’s wife, and many, many more, even sometimes speaks to Lance’s withered and hateful mother, aged to twice her years, about what goes on in that hell of a household.

There is only one person with whom she shares these treasures. Withdrawn, crazy Benjamin, with his fenced-in house on the hill past the dead end. She talks to Benjamin because of all the ones she knows, he’s the one she pities. Because the rest of the neighborhood has forgotten him, the way they’d love to forget her. Because she has vowed to never be what he became, a thing so cut off from the world his blighted soul is barely recognizable as

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