It's 11:30 at night. I hear death metal from the house on the corner of the street.

There was an older couple that lived in that house. The husband died. The wife kept on. She kept up her gardening. Statues of elves and dogs, plastic pinwheels, neat piles of mulch and pretty flowers reflect her refusal to wilt. Three days before Christmas, she'd bake cookies and send all her immediate neighbors a heaping paper plate wrapped in green or red Saran wrap. My favorite is chocolate poured and hardened over a stack of short pretzel sticks. She continues to do this.

About two years ago a new man began to show up. Occasionally, he'd water the lawn late at night. I'd see his jeans below the chasis of an old white Ford pick-up. His torso and face were blocked off by the lifted hood.

I assumed with his increased visits that he was their son. Their loser son, the one who never got married, the one who got in the habit of drinking, the one who tried to move out and move on, relying on an array of random jobs, like security guard and the caretaker of indoor plants in a nice office building. He is thin, he is bald at the top and the rest of his hair is grown out. He pulls it all back into a ponytail. He prefers old t-shirts whose sleeves have been ripped off.

It is nearing midnight and another peek through my blinds shows some lights are still on in that house. The windows are open, but it is a warm night. There is nothing strange about that; it is summer, we are inland and earlier today the large digital thermometer at the nearby bank said it was 96 degrees. The music, the screeching riffs, the panicked rhythms, the lung-compressing bass, burst through these opened windows. I believe the blood of somebody I probably have never seen is being sprayed in that living room.