The two women stood on the sidewalk, swapping a cigarette back and forth in the cold. They’d both told their husbands that they had quit, and always blamed the other one for why they still smelled like that.

“New folks movin’ in down the block.” Said one of them, pointing at a moving van a few houses down, before handing the cigarette over.

“Umhmmm.” The other was too busy inhaling to give a better response.

“Plates on the car says Vermont. You know what that means, right?” She paused for effect, then hissed out the accursed word: “Yankees.”

“What in the hell is that?” Coughed the other, giving the cigarette back. A man was pushing something that looked like across between a wood chipper and a lawn mower up the driveway.

“I…I think its a snow blower.” She said between drags. “Who the hell keeps a snow blower in the South?”

“A yankee serial killer, that’s who. Probably uses it to chop up his victims. Whilst naked and all painted up with clown make-up. Why else would you need that in down here?”

“Mmhmm. Ain’t that the truth.”

“Damn yankees,” she spit as she stomped out the cigarette.

Memphis Note
The Civil War’s been done for years, a hundred and fifty of them, to be exact. But, that doesn’t do anything to lessen the inherent, irrational distrust people in the Deep South have for Northerners. In the South, “Yankee” will forever be a derogatory term.

She caught him in the dining room, peering out the window with his binoculars, all of the lights in the room off.

“GREGORY WILSON WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” She shouted at him, causing him to jump.

He swore at her and told her to shush.

“I will not be shushed! Are you looking at that Richards girl again?” She’d once found him ogling the teenage daughter of their neighbor. Then threatened to leave him. That’s how she’d gotten her first fur coat.

“Dammit, Martha, no! ” He motioned for her to come over to him. “This is something much more important.”

He pointed to the house across the street, there was a moving truck in front of it. She peered through the binoculars. “The movers?”

“Look in the dining room.”

“So? They’re Indian or something.”

“They could be terrorists!” He hissed.

“Gregory, honestly.”

“We have don’t know anything about these people or where they loyalty is! They could be building a dirty bomb!”

She rolled her eyes at him.

“Come to bed, Gregory.”

“In a minute!” He was already back to spying on them.

She signed and walked out, wondering how she could turn this into another fur in her closet.

Memphis Note
I won’t name names, but there are places in the suburbs of Memphis where you feel like you’ve traveled to another planet. Where all common sense has fled, seemingly replaced by consumerism and Fox News.

The overwhelming beigeness of the subdivision going up down the street made Elsa Mae spit. She could see the huge trucks moving through the tree line, like some kind of horrible metal monsters that sent her rabbits scattering.

Elsa’s property was the largest in the area. Her grandfather had purchased it as a homestead a century ago. She still lived in the house that her grandfather and father had built. Her parents married on the front porch. Elsa was born here, and wed Henry under the oak tree you could see just out the parlor window.

Her Henry had succumbed to the cancer three years past. They’d never been blessed with children. Instead they raised rabbits. Acres of them, with plenty of runs, slopes and tree roots to hide and play amongst. Jacks, lops, hares, and a pair of Flemmish giants that she wished would get off their duff and make some kits.

Elsa spit again, and went to wrangle her children into their hutches for the night.

It was just her and the rabbits now, holding off the metastasizing growth of the suburbs. A last bastion of what was, standing firm against what is. It was a good fight.

Memphis Note
There are still places like this, out on the edges of Memphis. Where people lived before the city grew out to meet them. It always breaks my heart a little bit when I see one of them sold to a developer to be sliced up into a dozen less interesting homes.