Quiet sadness ambling with Grocery bags in hand. A mother’s kindnesses doing what Little good they can. When his anger flared Young eyes could not resist The rooms of meticulous smut, And the circus of an exhibitionist. The stomachs knew before The cats could understand, In the days before They found the feline's man. None were as honest in affection, If they stirred, it was surely brief. For need is their only loyalty, Hunger, the only grief. The wind only Understood That the shouting Had stopped. The drippings of the Mortal remains forevermore Are still entombed Beneath that New vinyl floor. And nobody Told The new Tenants.
Everyone has weird neighbors. Some weirder than others.
I grew up in a strange place. The city, yes—odd enough—but oddity within oddity was my neighborhood. A cluster of about twelve houses dropped in the middle of an industrial district. My across-the-street neighbors weren’t people at all, but the city’s largest power transmission station. Massive towers, humming lines—an entire rusted empire of pylons feeding every dwelling in town.
Our human neighbors were like us: weirdos. Who picks a house in a place like this? Just people trying to exist. People who don’t fear breaking social norms because they were never part of them in the first place.
And our next-door neighbor, Mister Denton, fit right in.
To me, he was always very old. A bloated pear of a man—fat in the middle, narrow up top—shoes too big, athletic socks forever slouching, pants one slip away from abandoning all pretenses. His shirts were always greasy and mis-buttoned. His hair a wild swirl of salt and pepper. Coke-bottle glasses thick enough to bend the world.
Whenever he stood, he braced one hand—thumb down—on his hip, as though pushing against pain or gravity itself. I saw him often, trudging down our dirt road toward the grocery store with empty bags. I lost count of how many times my mom gave him a ride. In later years, she just took him groceries.
The few times I heard him speak—usually in Mom’s car—his voice surprised me. Soft, high-pitched for a man. Not squeaky, just delicate. The kind of voice that made the lingering smell of body odor even more memorable.
He was, without question, mentally ill.
His house was a WWII-era stucco box: tan walls cracked like dry earth, rotting window frames, and the back sheathed in brittle asbestos siding.
A four-foot chain-link fence separated his house from ours, overgrown with trumpet vine—a flimsy attempt at privacy. To curious children, it was less a barrier and more an invitation. His windows had no curtains, just greasy glass and rusty screens. The place practically begged to be peeked into.
And peek we did—especially when he started yelling at his cats. I never knew how many he had, but if smell is evidence, the answer was “far too many.”
When Mister Denton raged, he screamed at the top of his lungs: a shrill, high-pitched fury that sliced through the neighborhood. Usually something about feeding time. The ritual became a game—one kid sneaking to the window to report what they’d seen.
Most often we found him strutting around in nothing but slouching athletic socks, grimy flip-flops, and a sagging pair of dingy briefs. Only his coke-bottle glasses completed the ensemble.
Usually he wore the briefs.
Sometimes he didn’t.
Of the three windows we could safely peek into—the living room, the kitchen, and a small room that had become his “library”—the kitchen offered the most entertainment. Every counter was covered in open cans of cat food.
The library always fascinated me. A lifelong fantasy of mine has been a room filled floor-to-ceiling with books, and though small, Mister Denton had achieved that dream. It felt oddly extravagant for such a broken man.
In my imagination, his shelves held sci-fi epics and fantasy adventures—new worlds, distant galaxies, places far removed from our dusty street. That illusion shattered years later when, as a teenager helping roof his house, I was sent inside to sweep up debris.
I browsed his shelves.
The titles were… not what I expected.
Curiosity being what it is to cats (and boys
), I plucked one book off the shelf and flipped it open—only to land on a passage describing… well, something intimate happening on an airplane. Something far more adult and far more acrobatic than anything my teenage mind was prepared to process. I slammed the book shut, mortified, suddenly aware that the world held corners I had not yet imagined.
Hundreds of such books surrounded me—Trailer Park Temptresses, Nurses in Heat, The Peach Orchard Diaries, Naughty Nights on Flight 69. Endless stacks of the same. My fantasy of the eccentric scholar evaporated. Mister Denton was simply a lonely man with a lonely man’s library.
It all made sense.
To my knowledge, his interest in lurid books never translated to attention toward children—a huge relief in hindsight. We ran wild in that little kingdom, day and night, unsupervised and unbothered.
I always felt sorry for him. He lived utterly alone. If he had family, they never visited. My mother was the only person who consistently looked in on him.
It was her kindness that led her to discover his body. I’m vague on the timing—I’m not sure if I was still living at home or already married—but I vividly remember the glimpse through the rusted screen door: his swollen blue-black body and the overwhelming smell of decay.
Thankfully, I have no recollection of how the cats handled his death.
That was more than thirty years ago. And yet I still think of him whenever I see the house beside my parents’. His first name is gone from memory, other details too. But a small piece remains.
As all of us remain, briefly, in the memories of those who shared our worlds.
I wish I had brighter memories of the man who lived beside us for two decades, but reclusive souls rarely shine their light outward.
Mister Denton, should we meet again in some restored place, I hope you’ll tell me how you remember your strange little neighbors on that dirt road in the north of Texas.