Becky and David
 

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   David was one of the first in his suburban neighborhood to switch from a gasoline burning leaf blower to an electric one. Al Skeppa had mocked David, calling him a “tree hugger,” but David felt good about his efforts to fight climate change. He and Becky recycled religiously and used metal, refillable water bottles, which Becky always carried, deliberately and proudly, high in front of her as she walked the ten feet from their front door to her car each morning.

   David bought a fifty-foot orange extension cord at Home Depot to go with his leaf blower. Don Sedoux, who lived next door and had no leaves on his emerald lawn, had recommended it, although when he did, David had struggled to hear him over the roar of Don’s sit-down lawn mower. The choice of that particular cord, though, was confirmed by Leslie Hoppa, who David encountered in the Home Depot parking lot when her car alarm had been going off for absolutely no reason for three hours. A passerby had googled “stuck car alarm” on his phone and discovered there was nothing that could be done about it unless the government barred dark skinned immigrants and cut taxes. David found Leslie leaning against her Mercedes and watching Instagram reels and oblivious to the shrill, intense sounds emanating from her shiny new car. “Oh, for real, get the orange fifty-footer,” she confirmed. A week later, Becky excitedly announced that Leslie had started a Go Fund Me page for herself because she needed a new car. 

   David trusted Don because he had tipped David off about Bitcoin, and even though David and Becky had lost thousands from their digital currency investment, Don had made a fortune as evidenced by his classy, pronounced lack of conspicuous consumption. Indeed, Don proudly shopped at Costco, shouting to David over the roar of a  pool vacuum, “A bargain is a bargain. It is what it is.”

   Becky and David loved their pool, especially Becky. For a while it had been a nuisance to clean - all that tree mess - but when Don cut down the forty foot mulberry tree that had lived on his property for eighty years longer than Don had and which always made a horrible blue-purple berry mess each summer, they got the idea to have the even bigger sugar maple tree on their side taken away. Once the trees were gone, they enjoyed their pool, but Becky was upset that she burned more easily now with no shade. But then, fortunately, Don tipped them off to a special on cases of sunblock that was running at Costco. Not wanting to be spotted shopping there, Don asked Leslie Hoppa, after he had finished making love to her in the back of her Mercedes, to pick some up for them. After that, the trees gone, her skin protected, Becky luxuriated in the pool, only bothered each time she dropped her phone in the water. Don dutifully replaced each ruined phone, and always wanting to keep Becky happy, he only timidly suggested that she not bring her phone in the pool, a suggestion unheeded as Becky’s aquatic Instagram photos received thousands of heart likes.

   Don loved his eco-friendly blower and never thought about how the electricity to run it was generated; it would have made him confused and uncomfortable. Once, though, when he was scrolling Facebook on his phone, next to but not in the pool where Becky was, he felt a vague sense of reassurance when he saw a picture of a giant array of solar panels in China. So, he shared it with Becky (on Facebook) and shared it to his own page. For some reason, Don Sedoux reacted to the post with an angry emoji.

   All was well in the neighborhood. All were content with the ease with which they dispatched with the unease generated by their screens by buying more stuff. The lawns and paved over and concrete yards were free of anything alive or once alive or never alive, free of any mush or swamp or smell, until Al Skeppa lost his mind.

   Al lived across the street, a paved over country lane where big Dodge Ram pickups, owned by people who used them mostly to carry their Costco loads of toilet paper and snacks, sat idling all day while their owners scrolled in oblivion from behind the wheel. Al had been regarded as just “slightly peculiar” for some time. He was a nice guy, super-friendly and fastidious in his lawn care. But he cut his grass - at least twice a week, unless it rained, then more times - wearing brightly colored, tight short shorts that looked like something seen on a basketball court in the early 1970s. But other than the strange garb, Al was exceedingly “normal.” Then one day, while talking with David and Don, each positioned in his pickup cab, Al asked, for the third time that week, “When is garbage picked up?” Then the next day, he asked again.           Some of the people in the neighborhood sometimes forgot when recycling was picked up, but no one would ever forget garbage pickup, which liberated the town’s consumers from their mountains of discarded stuff, purchased, sometimes surreptitiously, from the big box bargain stores and also online. David and Don grew concerned, and then everyone became alarmed when Al bought a tractor and started riding it up and down his driveway, trying to mow the pavement and sending small stones screaming through the air, one of which struck Marybeth Holderlaine in the head and left her blind and unable to walk. Al apologized to the Holderlaines, but the next day he was seen without his short shorts, carrying TVs - big ones, eleven in all - out of his house and onto the front lawn. Don asked him why, and Al informed him, surprisingly correctly, that trash pickup was that night. 

   There were many indiscretions that the residents of the town where Becky and David lived could overlook, but discarding perfectly good televisions, barely out of their big boxes, was intolerable. The police were called, and Al was taken away. Later they found the body of his badly beaten wife in the refrigerator. The townspeople were briefly shocked that something could go terribly wrong in their pristine paradise, but then later they felt okay.

   Summer came, and Becky and David opted for a staycation at home by their pool with their phones and electric powered tools, including a cordless pool vacuum they purchased from Amazon by mistake since David really enjoyed twisting and stretching and flipping his long extension cord all around the yard. He’d grown adept at whipping the thing behind him as he blasted even the tiniest of leaf fragments off his property until the wind invariably blew it back. One early morning, as David stretched the extension cord as far as it could go in order to blow a dead impatien flower that was malingering on the other side of the pool into Don’s yard, he heard a furious splashing in the pool. Unbeknownst to David, the fifty foot orange extension cord had wrapped around his beloved ten-thousand-dollar cockapoo, Flecka’s, neck and sent her hurtling into the pool where she floundered and then drowned. David was inconsolable for weeks over losing his beloved little friend, but Becky got over it. She had lost interest in Flecka just a few weeks after they had flown back from Phoenix where they had purchased her from a breeder they had found on Instagram.

   David moped and neglected his yard. The leaves began to accumulate, some even floated in the pool, pictures of which Becky posted with the caption, “Responsible husband wanted!” David’s prized electric Roundup sprayer, a gift from Leslie Hoppa, gathered dust in the garage as bees and fireflies began to appear in the yard. Becky was at her limit. She texted her husband who was well within earshot, “Great, now we have bugs. You are USELESS!”

   Don noticed the sudden drain on the electric current that powered the neighborhood when his new blender, violently mixing the smoothie recipe he had watched being executed on Tik Tok, suddenly slowed. He went to the kitchen window and saw a puff of smoke rising from Becky and David’s pool. 

   Becky’s electrocuted body was found floating next to an electric leaf blower attached to a long orange extension cord plugged into an outdoor outlet. David was found dead behind the driver’s seat of his Dodge Ram, whose engine still hummed inside the garage where countless unused electric power tools hung on the walls.

 

   Becky and David had gone to grade school together but drifted apart when they went to different high schools. Later, when they reconnected as undergrads at Franklin and Marshall majoring in Business Administration, they confessed their mutual grade school crushes: Becky said, “I liked you,” which meant a lot more than that and made nineteen-year-old David turn crimson.

   He blurted, “All I could think about was you.”

   “Wow.”

   That was it, that was enough. They married their mysterious childhood crushes to their young adult lust and committed to each other. They liked making plans, although they were also woefully unimaginative, and so they looked around - not far - and picked out the available plans offered by the world as they had become used to seeing it, a world with boundaries, the illusion of freedom, the illusion of choice, a comfortable place to live. Becky googled, “list of things to do in life” and found the following:

1. Play

2. College

3. Career

4. Marriage

5. House

6. Dog

7. Kids

8. Work

9. Retire

   Becky added “10. Die,” which made them both laugh, albeit nervously, but then she deleted it. 

   After college, they attended one friend’s wedding after another and farmed ideas for their own, for which Becky’s parents spent lavishly. Big, cream-colored limousines shuttled the guests from the church to the reception and then to the hotel booked from top to bottom for Becky and David’s big day. In the backs of the limos, as they sat in traffic between stops, the chatter was the same: “This reminds me of Gelnda’s wedding.”

   “I know, right?”

   “I like how everyone in the wedding party looked exactly the same.”

   “And I like how all the men at the wedding are wearing the same-colored suits and have the same haircuts.”

   “And those brown shoes.”

   “Right?”

   “The women look nice like they did at Farla’s wedding.”

   “Exactly. They do.”

   From one bland, off-white limo to another, the same confirming conversations, everyone engaged in building each other’s comfortable, rationalized space, within which everyone convinced themselves they were not only special and unique, but also safe. They were horribly wrong.

   Stepping out of one of the oversized automobiles, Tony Lind, whom, according to Becky, David had spent too much time with as a freshman smoking weed, remarked, “Look at that blue sky. It’s a miracle how blue our atmosphere and oceans are.”

   His companion, Lisa Maddox, exclaimed, “Awesome,” but she was referring to her friend Donna Feldor, who emerged from her limo having positioned a white flower from her bridesmaid’s all white bouquet in her faux blonde hair.

   And so it went… 

   For Becky and David, the house next to Don Sedoux and across the street from Al Skeppa soon followed. They decided to put off having a child until after they had travelled, but they never did either. They changed their plans after Becky read an article that had been shared with her on Instagram that explained that it was better to travel after retirement when you would have more money and are able to travel in greater comfort. The article didn’t address having children, appealing to a young, rich millennial demographic not interested in diapers. David read the same article when Leslie Hoppa, with whom David started an affair, shared it with him. It enabled him to justify his time with her, “Yeah, I got married too young and still have things to get out of my system. I’ll travel later when I am more settled.”

Leslie was hardly confused, “I understand.”

   Those things from David’s system never made it to Becky who remained childless from year to year, but her confidence that she would someday be a mother never wavered even as she noticed she was thirty-five one morning in the pool when six hundred people wished her “Happy Birthday” on Facebook. This outpouring of sentiments inspired Becky to pull out their eighth-grade yearbook that night. She and David felt tinges of nostalgia over the various team sports photos, but they had trouble remembering most of the student photos. The written names had detached from the photographs. And they couldn’t remember who they were then either. They couldn’t remember playing or dreaming or staring in wonder at baby fish and robbins’ eggs or falling in love or the streams in the woods that eddied around rock islands before joining rivers and oceans.