It's a Damn Shame!

"Let the little brat defend for himself."

The woman shook her head, momentarily feeling sorry for the little boy as she keeps on cleaning her home. She is used to such derogatory talk between the young couple and their child.

She is like a fly on the wall who would much rather buzz around the fallen donut crumbs underneath the statute of Fredrick Douglas riding the horse in Stanton Park. She imagines flapping her little fly wings, outracing the snapping beaks of the opportunistic pigeons as she buzzes around the trash and looks for a mate before she dies in her two-week lifespan.

She surely doesn't want to buzz around the trash-talk between the young couple.

"When are you going to put gas in my car?" the young woman asks.

"I just got this $1100 and you're worried about $20 of gas?" the young man snaps.

The talk degenerates after that, concerning numbers on cell phones and other babies's mommas and infidelity and returned wedding rings. The listening/not listening women shakes her head and sits down at her kitchen table. She turns on her laptop and says to the room, "Let the paranoia begin." Her fingers type on a few keys.

"shhhh! Do you hear that?" the young woman whispers, "She's on her laptop again. She's writing a book about us."

The man doesn't answer. Or perhaps he does, but the listening/not listening woman doesn't hear it for once. She continues typing on the keyboard, answering email and writing status updates on her Facebook page. She might decide to get a little writing work in later and play a few computer games. But at the moment, she sits and types and waits for the real entertainment.

"You know she's writing about my life!" the woman hysterically shouts. A screen door bangs when shutting - like someone walked out. Then it bangs again like someone walked back inside. It continues to bang, not so much as trying to be a noisy disturbance. It seems more like an interesting distraction, as if someone wants the woman to go dashing to the window and see what's going on.

The woman ignores the noise, knowing it will be drowned out by the restaurant fan when they start cooking for the lunch crowd. She doesn't want to know anything about the couple. She doesn't want to know about the cheating husband who she saw walking with one of his "other women" as he furtively dashed by his apartment hoping his wife wasn't looking out the window to spot him with his girlfriend.

The woman shakes her head at the memory, surprised she had made the mistake in thinking the girlfriend was the wife, until she saw the REAL wife a few days later after the incident, holding their newborn child like a fanny pack at her waist, the child's arms out on both sides, splayed like a window decal with rubber suction cups as he clung on for dear life. The mother's one hand held him in place along her half-naked body, her tee shirt riding up to her chest area while the other hand held a cell phone to her ear, holding the phone better than the child. She strutted about, wanting the attention of the neighborhood.

The woman snaps from the memory when she hears the voice of the man outside, using his outdoor voice loudly. He walks around the woman's open windows as he complains about the woman writing stuff about HIM, about the woman having a Facebook account, and about waiting to see whether the woman will go out today.

A laugh bursts out her mouth. She remembers how, when talking on the phone one day, about going out somewhere. After she hung up, the guy literally screamed, "SHE'S GOING TO THE SOUTH SIDE! YEAH, MAN! JUMP HER THERE!"

Of course, she wasn't going to the south side of town, she was actually going to the north side of town. But even if she was going in the other direction, she wasn't going to get scared off from doing what she wanted to do with her life.

With a shake of her head, she finishes typing, surprised on how much she got written in such a short amount  of time. Nothing of what she wrote was about the two people and their child -- not about the wife beatings, the stealing, or their massive amounts of paranoia. The woman wrote what she wanted, cheerfully listening/not listening to their voices like soothing background noise. Like raindrops hitting a pane of glass during a brief summer storm. Like spring robins chirping as they built their nest in the eaves of the bakery.

There was nothing interesting to write about paranoid people who deliberately acted like crazy people just to get attention so they can play the hurtful victims. A cliche wrapped in a conundrum while pretending to be a paradox.

Even worse, she wasn't going to write about people who want to be written, just so they could feel as if their lives mattered to someone. That their lives meant something to at least one person. The writing woman shouldn't have to be that person. The husband's life should matter to the wife. The wife's life should matter to the husband. And the little boy's life should matter to both his parents.

They didn't have to seek attention from the world.. in such a bad way.