“Come look at this,” David said. He was at the window, looking out over our yard. It...

“Come look at this,” David said.  He was at the window, looking out over our yard.  It was summer, and there were fireflies floating up and down over the grass.  ”What?  What is it?”  He pointed over the fence to the house on the other side.  ”Do you see her?”  It was our neighbor.  She was naked and her blinds were up in her bedroom window.  ”Oh my God,” I said.  ”Should we be looking at this?”  David shrugged.  ”Probably not.”  We brought in chairs from the living room and David headed into the basement to dig up his old binoculars.  I went into the kitchen and cut an apple into slices for us to eat.  We moved quickly, thinking she’d be gone by the time we were set up, but she was still sitting on the edge of her bed, watching TV when we got back to the window.  David looked through the binoculars then passed it to me.  I twisted the knobs until the image came into focus.  She wasn’t what I expected.  Older— maybe in her 50’s.  There were these tattoos all on her chest and arms, and some kind of pattern on the curve of her buttocks.  All along her ribs were a patina of faint green lines.  ”I mean, she’s not bad looking,” I said, handing the binoculars back to David.  ”She keeps in pretty good shape.”  David shrugged and said nothing.  We kept watching and after a while she turned off the TV and the bedroom light, then left the room.  Over the course of the evening we’d stop at the window to see if she’d come back but she never did.  That night I lay in bed, unable to sleep.  I kept looking out the window into the yard, expecting to see something.  I looked over at David, and he was fast alseep, breathing heavily.  After about twenty minutes, I put on my robe and went downstairs to make something to eat.  I opened the fridge, and for some reason I was thinking about when I was eight years old and someone threw a baseball in through our window.  There was glass everywhere and I cut the inside of my hand, between the thumb and my first finger.  There’s still a scar from where I had to get it stitched.  It’s only about half an inch across but it felt like it was huge.  Then I thought about when I was thirteen and I was in school.  There was an older girl, Janet.  During our lunch period, she’d take her pen and draw flowers on my hand so they looked like they were growing out of the seam.  I remember coming home and trying to wash it off before my parents found me.  It took forever and it hurt like hell.