FlashNano 2025
Day 12
Prompt: You find an unexplained charge on your statement
The first time you read your credit card bill, the unexplained charge didn’t register. Maybe because it’s a little overwhelming, this pile of magazines, envelopes, catalogs, postcards, and ads, cascading edge to edge on top of your kitchen table.
You are energetic enough to work full time and hit the gym five days a week but apparently haven’t yet figured out how to gather the life force you need to take those simple, mindless really, steps to retrieve your mail from your association mailbox five houses away more than two or three times a month.
You read through the bill again, but the extra charge still doesn’t register. Nothing registers, not the electric bill, water notice, pizza coupons, leaflets from four different gyms telling you why they’re the best and if you’re truly serious about losing that weight, gaining that muscle, staying young forever, you won’t ignore them.
None of it sinks in because you’re remembering the real reason why you avoid the mailbox, dread that small walk.
It’s easy to drive by the mailbox and those houses, particularly that house. You do it every day, three four times a day. You’re protected by metal and glass. You can turn up your music, pretend to sing along. Simply stare straight ahead because you ARE driving after all and should be focused on the road.
But when you walk it’s just you, your legs, arms, skin, with only the flimsy protection of your wool sweater, cotton jeans, as your panting breath whispers hurry hurry hurry, your key fumbles with the mailbox lock and finally after what seems like hours but is maybe five minutes you stumble home, holding your mail tight to your chest because. . .
What if an envelope drops, creating the unthinkable opportunity as you retrieve it, for that neighbor to harm you, the neighbor who is a grandfather with children and grandchildren who visit every weekend and play football with him in the street in front of your house. Who cuts his House Beautiful lawn four times a week and hoses down his Architectural Digest front porch on Sundays. Who complained to the association about you once because when you watered your lawn, rivulets formed in the gutter, harming no one and nothing but he didn’t like the way it looked. Who when you first moved in you used to shovel out after snowstorms, until you noticed that when he was the first one out in the morning pushing his mega snowblower he’d take care of all your neighbors and stop short at your property line and turn his machine around, even that time it snowed two feet. Who hosts neighborhood parties that you’ve never been invited to in his garage, and who has a Confederate flag pinned to the wall next to his big screen television. The neighbor with the flashy red sports car that he only drives in summer, and the truck on oversized wheels, with the bumper sticker that says, “Your body my choice," and the other: “Celebrate Diversity” which has pictures of six – you know it’s six because you’ve memorized that horrifying, stupid sticker -- six different kinds of rifles.
How can you be expected to notice that suspicious credit charge right away? How can you be expected to focus on anything other than how soon can you sell this place and other thoughts related to your own survival, when every time you visit the local supermarket, jog on a nearby trail, and even walk to your mailbox a paltry five houses away from the safety of your own home you’re facing the fact that your very right to life hangs in the balance, dependent upon the whims of others and how they choose to act?
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