Sugar Hill Ch. 1 - You Can't Make This Stuff Up

You can't make this stuff up.

 

Karen was always talking. Most of the time, conversations with Karen consisted of old stories on repeat. Stories of glory days and Rugby wins. The injuries sustained to knees and head which, I figured, had something to do with the incessant, non-stop conversation. That or, I figured, it had something to do with the fact that the woman's relationships always seemed to leave something to be desired. Her son, a magnanimous douchbag constantly in a state of bewilderment regarding the opposite sex and their seeming inability to constantly complement him, disrespected her as a matter of course. Her girlfriend, Liz, was seeing a man "on the side." To whit, many of Karen's tenants wanted nothing to do with her for her inability to keep her mouth shut long enough to hear someone else speak as well as a complete absence of ability to answer a question efficiently, let alone succinctly. Asking where to find a screwdriver, for example, almost always wound up turning into a 45 minute long conversation about tupperware and a tendency for previous tenants to steal garbage bags. Such was the nature of the landlord of Sugar Hill.

 

Today was a tangent from the norm, but it was part and parcel to the norm in any case. Apparently leaving your own car door open overnight is some sort of sin. But it seems that, even though Sugar Hill rested in the midst of a sprawling wilderness occupied by nearly nothing and no one at all, locking the back door was a matter of great urgency. According to Karen, the neighborhood was rife with thieves hell-bent on stealing what few assets occupied the house on Sugar Hill. Skunks and raccoons were also great enemies of those who occupied the home, and threatened to steal the cat's food on a nightly basis if anyone so much as dared leave the door unlatched. Granted, the door did indeed open through force of wind from time to time. So perhaps there is some measure of truth to Karen's paranoia. Fuel for the ever growing fire that was Karen's eroded mental state.

 

A fixture of the conversational topics for the day, in addition to Karen being forced under the weight of duress to close the doors to my vehicle, was the topic of the back door. Once more, the door had been left unlatched and had crept open during the night while the occupants of Sugar Hill slept. No one was harmed. No one entered, whether it be animal or human or other. Yet still, the door was left unlatched and the door opened so, when Karen arrived home - early in the morning or late into the wee hours of the night, depending on what angle you view it - the door was ajar. This prompted an hour long conversation about the vicissitudes of Karen's life, of being robbed, of the tweaker neighbors who constantly prowled the area. Likely along with the roving packs of wayward skunks and ninja raccoons. No amount of body language or excuse to exit the conversation would amount to much more than Karen simply using the exit as a segue into another story; another reason why the doors needed to be closed and secured every night.

 

Meanwhile, the bathtub in Karen's room was left on. As it stood, Karen was returning to her boyfriend's home and, for whatever reason, was unable to shower there. So, as the conversation drolled on (and on), the bathtub filled. And then overfilled. The originally soapy water spilling over the edge of the free standing bathtub onto the dirty tile floor below. As Karen continued her stories, the water was allowed to flow freely from the bathroom door into Karen's room. It crept beneath bookshelves and television sets, soaked up by the stacks of books and newspapers Karen insisted were "on their way to be donated" for several months. The water level slowly rose around the legs of the entertainment stand and into the nooks and crannies of every object it could find and, eventually, into the electrical cables. It wasn't until the fuse blew that Karen noticed that something might be wrong.

 

Meanwhile, the tenants were simply grateful for the ability to gracefully exit the conversation.