James walked up the pavers to his front porch, sorting the mail. There were three things that were pure junk, a couple of flyers and something about his “home warranty has expired.” The last piece was a bill that he was pretty sure Polly had already paid, but he’d check with her when he got in the door.
Getting up to his front steps, he frowned.
A man with a sword and a rolled up piece of parchment was sitting there on a large shipping box. The man was smoking a long pipe.
It was the pipe that made James frown, because he used to like to smoke a pipe out on the front porch but his wife would have none of it.
The sword and parchment mostly made him curious.
“Hello,” James said stiffly.
The man with the long curved sword pocketed his smoking implement. He casually unrolled his parchment. Scanning it briefly, he did his best to read it without taking his eyes off of James.
“I regretfully inform you that this is a declaration of war.”
James blinked. “A declaration..?”
The man paused, looking cross. “Of war, yes. May I continue?”
James didn’t get to say yes, or no, or how much he would like him not to. The man went on.
“I have been sent by the Newbower family at 17 East Lake Circle.” At this he pointed to the small yellow bungalow two doors over and across from James and Polly Whitman’s home. James thought he had met the Newbowers once, in passing, when they had moved in seven months ago. They’d seemed pleasant enough. Quiet. No children. Older, so maybe their kids had left the home already.
He seemed to think that Polly had said something about taking them some cookies. Frosted almond if he remembered right. She kept slapping his hand when he’d tried to get at the dough in the mixer.
“Due to your discourteous nature over several incidents involving your dog,” the man continued, still looking over the top of the declaration unblinkingly at James, “Mr. and Mrs. Newbower have found they have no further recourse that to wage war against you and all who reside in your domicile.”
“My dog? You mean Fozzie Bottoms?” He looked up to their front window, and he saw the little cardigan corgi up on the bench seat there, on his side, nose pressed against the pane. “What did my dog do?”
At this, the man reached into a pocket on his Hakama and pulled out a small bag. He handed it to James, who took it, and then immediately dropped it in disgust when he realized from the stench what it was.
“Gah!” he said.
“That is the most recent attack on their lands.”
“You kept that in your pocket?”
The man rolled up the parchment at this. His formality eased a bit.
“If I may,” he said. James nodded, stepping to the grass to get away from the smell he’d dropped on the walkway. “This is a very serious matter. I have been sent to warn you of the Newbowers’ intent. They have hired myself, and a small team of Ronin. In three days time, the war will commence.”
“You keep saying ‘war.’ Like… do you mean feudal war? Like swords and stabbings and beheadings and… You mean like WAR-war?”
“Hai.”
James frowned again, much harder. “War? Over… my dog… doing that…” he pointed down, “on a lawn?”
“Hai.”
James just shook his head. “We really should have brought over something more than almond cookies, shouldn’t we?”
The ronin, as James now recognized him, handed the parchment to James, bowed, and then strode off back to the yellow bungalow. It was not far, and James could see him, hear his wooden sandals clomp the whole way.
He read over the declaration himself. It was all there. Something about a trash can being left on the curb two days past the pickup day as well. Garbage was one of Toby’s chores, it’s what allowed him to buy his Playstation. James read it over twice, and then looked back at his porch. The box the man had been sitting on was still there.
“Hey!” James called over to the ronin, who was standing just before the front stoop of the Newbower home. “You forgot your box!”
The man shook his head. “Not mine,” he called back.
James shrugged. “Any idea what’s in it then?”
The man nodded. “I think it’s pillows. I was there when they dropped it off.”
James’s frown reached full scowl status. “Jesus,” he said under his breath. “How many fucking pillows does one house need?”
James walked inside, carrying the large box with the rolled parchment sitting on top. Fozzie came over and sniffed his shoes, excited for whatever smells he’d stepped in that day. He dropped the box in the foyer and brought the declaration over to where his wife was sitting in the kitchen. She was hunched over her iPad at the island, sitting on one of the stools she’d ordered three months ago and had already decided she couldn’t stand and was outside of the return policy to send back. So James had assumed they were stuck with them, to which she had insisted, no, they most certainly were not.
“Pol,” he said, slapping the rolled up paper in his palm nervously. “There was a man here when I got home.”
“I know, I know,” Polly answered, not even looking up. “I got the gist of it earlier.”
James nodded, but in a way that actually meant No instead of Yes in his mind. “The… the whole gist?”
Polly’s fingers were swiping upwards and downwards on the tablet’s screen. “Pretty much. He just couldn’t give me the actual ‘speech’ because I wasn’t the man of the house. Can you believe that? Do you know how insulting that is?”
“That part is insulting? That’s what you’re focusing on?”
She started typing away. “No, no…” She wasn’t happy with what she was looking at. “That’s not right. We have Prime, why isn’t this part of two-day shipping?”
James set the rolled paper down on the counter, remembering he needed to wash his hands from the baggie he’d been handed. “Are you shopping now? Seriously?”
She finally looked up at him, at his back, and clicked her tongue at him. Knowing the sound, he winced. He kept scrubbing his hands, already well past clean, just so he didn’t have to see the look he knew was aimed at him.
“Well, we have to fucking do something, right?” she said sharply.
He nodded, still not facing her. “I mean. Yeah. Sure. So you think we can order them something as a, what. As a peace offering?” He liked that idea, even if their credit cards were already melting at the edges from all the online shopping Polly did.
“No, you… will you turn around please?” Begrudgingly, James shut off the water, dried his hands on the small towel hanging from the pull on the silverware drawer, and looked at his wife. “No, we are not rewarding them for this with some gift.”
James sighed. “Okay,” he conceded. “Then what are you buying?”
She held up the iPad to face him. “Look.” He squinted at it. It looked like a Halloween costume. A man dressed up as a cowboy, with pistols on his hips and holding a lasso. Up at the top he could make out the words “Posse.”
“What is that?”
Polly pinched-to-zoom and showed him again. “It’s supposed to be a counter.” She looked very matter-of-fact, but saw he wasn’t getting it. “To the ninjas. The Newbower’s ninjas.”
Still not getting it, he just said, “Ronin. I think… they’re different.”
“Whatever,” Polly said curtly. “The point is, I thought guns would do better than swords. So I’ve been looking and I can get us about ten cowboys, two of them with actual sheriff training, but they won’t be here in time. Shipping is more than a week and we need them in three days.”
James blinked hard, shaking his head. “You really can get anything online these days,” he said to himself because he figured she must already know that and would just see it as one more way to criticize him that he didn’t.
“I keep looking for something similar. S.W.A.T. or mercenaries. Something, but nothing will get here in time.”
James held up his hands. “You’re serious? You mean… You really want to go to war with our neighbors?”
She set the iPad down now. “James.”
Here it comes.
“James,” she repeated. “They started this. They brought this to us.”
“Well, apparently it was Fozzie who brought it to them.”
She ignored him. “They have been here in this neighborhood. In OUR neighborhood, on OUR street, for seven months. And we, we have lived here for twelve and a half years. Toby, our son, was born in this house.”
“Toby was born in Saint Anne’s.”
“You know what I mean.” She went on. “This has been our family’s home as long as we’ve been a family. We have a life here. We have been part of the community here. I have helped with garden parties, and we’ve hosted Fourth of July fireworks shows and barbecues. And these… people…”
“Careful,” he started but without the force to back it up.
“These newcomers, the Newbowers.” she said, “think they can come in and insinuate that we’re the bad neighbors? Us? Well, I’m not having it, James. We’re not having it.”
James closed his eyes tightly at this, scrunching up his face as he did so, as if he could somehow close off the entire world if he just Noped hard enough.
When he finally opened them again, Polly was staring at him expectantly. She had slid the iPad over to his side of the island. She was pointing at the screen. James looked down, saw the picture of the man. A neat, purple suit. A carnation in the lapel. A fedora. Holding a tommy gun.
“These can be here by tomorrow afternoon.” She nodded at him. “I need your card, mine is maxed.”
Gritting his teeth, James reached for the wallet from his back pocket. Defeated, he tapped the button.
Buy It Now.
It had been a safe neighborhood. Quiet. The kind of place you could leave your doors unlocked, people liked to say.
But that didn’t keep them all from installing video doorbells, and spy cameras that looked at, sometimes directly into, each other’s homes. They all joined the NextYard social app, sharing photos of anyone that looked strange walking through after dusk. If a package went missing, if a gate got opened, if an automatic light on the front of a garage door went on for seemingly no reason, everyone logged in and hurled accusations, made predictions. It’s all going to hell. This used to be a nice place. It used to be safe.
James had still felt safe. Until today.
“I just want to.. I just want to apologize,” James called’ The man who had originally served him notice was there, in the front yard, with two more similarly dressed men. When James started to open the gate, one of them drew their sword, and James stumbled backwards in a defensive stance. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he kept saying. He’d meant to be apologizing to the Newbowers, but they were nowhere to be seen. Smart.
James felt less smart.
Polly had told him to go out there. She said, “James, if there is going to be a war, then someone is going to have to lead.” And it was the one time James had ever known his wife to not take the lead. Granted, he never really felt the need to. She was good at things. She was, in no small way, smarter than he was. And he liked not having to take charge. He wanted to drive the car on road trips. He wanted to be the one hovering over the grill. He wanted to get the remote for just one solid hour a night, normally when Toby was asleep and when Polly would go read or play Castle Crush on her iPad. He could watch a home show or a food show, and he could play the commercials instead of skipping them and no one would complain. That’s all he wanted out of life. That was certainly all he got.
“Polly, if i go out there, I can’t. I can’t… kill… anyone.”
Polly rubbed his shoulders as he sat hunched in his leather chair. She had even given in and let him pull his pipe out of where he hid it from her (poorly, it seemed, since she had told him to go get it from behind the books on the second shelf in his office) and smoke it in the house. She was being extra nice, giving him extra care and attention. And he hated it.
“You don’t have to kill anyone,” she said assuringly, “if you don’t want to.” That being tacked on didn’t help at all. “You just need to make sure our guys don’t lose to their guys.”
James didn’t particularly like ‘our guys.’ They seemed jovial enough, but they leered at Polly when they thought he wasn’t looking. They said critical things about the food, about his stuff. They complained that he didn’t have a guest house for them to sleep in, so they’d been sleeping mostly in the garden. There was the use for all those goddamn pillows they’d been stocking up on at least.
“Why can’t they just do what we paid them for,” he moaned.
“They will, they will. But they need someone smart. Someone to point them in the right direction. Someone to lead.” She kissed him on the top of the head. “Like Braveheart. And you know how you love Braveheart.”
James nodded in the way that meant No instead of Yes. “Why did the Scottsman clan have to be backordered.”
Polly came around, grabbed his hands, and gently but forcefully pulled him out of his chair. She took his pipe and set it on the plate from the sandwich she’d fed him. There was still half a pickle spear but he couldn’t find his appetite. “Just go out there. It’ll come to you. Once you’re in the fray…”
“The fray?” he squeaked.
“Once you’re in the mix, you’ll figure it out.” She pulled him in to hug him, but he also felt her coaxing him towards the door in the same motion. “My big, strong protector.”
He knew it was a lie when she said it. But he knew it even more when he was begging for forgiveness at his neighbors’ gate.
Looking back over his shoulder, he saw the world’s most affordable mafiosos laughing at how pathetic they thought he was. That, he knew, was the truth.
“I just can’t…” he started to say, louder than he meant to. But then he saw it. A steel blue four-door hybrid, coming down the lane. It was the Newbowers’ car. They hadn’t been home after all. Maybe this meant he could speak to them. He could make them understand. He would give them the damn dog for all he cared, just so they would call this whole stupid thing off.
Without thinking, James started jogging towards the car. He felt his legs pump. He felt his heart race. He heard his voice call out, “Hey! Hey! I need to–“
He felt sharp steel glide across his stomach.
James lay on the ground, bleeding profusely. He was cold. He was very cold.
Smoke still filled the air, like one of the Fourth of July barbecues. Shells had accumulated around him. Entrails. Bodies of the discount mafia and the mostly-affordable samurai littered the street.
Above him, Mr. Newbower was speaking to Polly.
“I just don’t get it,” he was saying. “It’s like… How did this happen?”
“I know, I know,” Polly was answering. “Things just got out of hand I guess.”
Newbower was pointing to the house. “I told her, I told Evelyn. I said, ‘the Harpers.’ It was the Harpers dog. I saw them with their St Bernard. Let him right on our lawn, didn’t even pretend like they were gonna clean it up.”
“Oh my gosh, you are kidding.” Polly let out a small laugh, like it was the world’s easiest mix-up. “I mean, yes. The Harpers.” Sam and Dorris Harper lived three houses over from James and Polly’s house. “Wow, they can just be the worst.”
“I agree, the worst,” Newbower nodded.
James, his hand pressed hard over his belly, trying to keep the insides from becoming the outsides, listened to the two of them describe what had happened. Polly actually used the word “kerfuffle.” A strange word, even without the context.
The street lights were just starting to come on. Automatic sprinklers were starting. A mist in the air, the buzzing of fluorescents above. But to James the light was going out. The sounds were starting to fade.
“You know, your husband is bleeding on my driveway.”
“You’re right, yes. Polly leaned down to his ear. “James, my god,” she whispered, “you are fucking embarrassing me in front of our neighbors.”
