They wanted to be good neighbors, so the day they moved into their quaint cottage house on Glenrose St., the second they were settled in, they baked 24 casseroles, all unique and painstakingly customized, so each household felt special and just in case there were ever a secret neighborhood meeting about them where they all exchanged notes to uncover that they’d received identical, lame green bean casseroles.
They wanted to be good neighbors, so they went to countless city council meetings and presented charts and mocked-up schematics and peer-reviewed research and ranted and raved and banged their fists on the makeshift podium until the city agreed to repave the street and rezone Glenrose for a brand-new sidewalk, one of the new rubber ones that are porous and less slick in winter.
They wanted to be good neighbors, so they took it upon themselves to start a neighborhood watch and when nobody else signed the form they sent around to join, they posted up each night by themselves in the woods with the nature trails by the Martens house with their binoculars and coffee, police scanner and camouflage, silenced rifles and neighborhood watch name tags made on Canva, to make it official.
They wanted to be good neighbors, so they drew sketches and wrote down vehicle makes and models and license plate codes of people who littered in their neighborhood and when the police refused to act, they tracked each and every one of them back to their homes under the starry cloak of darkness, picked the locks, snuck inside, and helped the scum understand what they’d done was reprehensible and such a thing wouldn’t be tolerated on Glenrose St. again.
They wanted to be good neighbors, so when the apocalypse finally came and nukes fell from the sky on big cities, leaving their small town relatively safe and unbothered aside from all the ash raining down, they volunteered to sacrifice themselves to spare the rest of Glenrose St. when the gang of marauders inevitably rolled through town pillaging, which the marauders accepted as long as nobody else on the street wanted to take their place, which nobody did, so the marauders took them but didn’t wait to get out of earshot before torturing them, so Glenrose St. was awash with their piercing screams as the marauders left quick as they’d come, and the residents of Glenrose St. took a brief moment of silence before riding out the apocalypse in peace, on their freshly paved street and new porous, rubber sidewalk that nobody, not even the elderly residents, ever slipped on.
