Neighbor
In this spare, haunting meditation, Daniel Wallace writes about how the specter of loss follows us from childhood into marriage, reminding us that every bond—no matter how fierce—must one day confront its own ending.
Big Fish Daniel Wallace | Southern fiction about childhood loss | Contemporary Southern Ghost story
I remember the old man perched in his second-story window, milky behind the wavy glass, glaring at all us kids like we were the mice and he was the hungry hawk. We played in his yard sometimes. I never met him.
I thought—in my nightmares—that one day he’d pitch himself through the window and grab one of us, hold us in his arms until we crumbled, sucking our life out through his withered, chicken-skinned body and dragging himself back inside, appearing at the window again, waiting for another one of us to drift into his gaze, living forever. He didn’t
live, though: one day he died. It happened the way it happens when you’re young: on a different plane, like clouds. I just remember wearing the coat and tie I never wore, and the shoes so tight my toes bled, in a church we never went to, surrounded by the smell of the strange and the old. We went back to his house after, and I went inside for the first time. His ancient wife shivered in a big green chair on an Oriental rug, not even crying. I think she was all dried up. I ate a little sandwich, then I went outside to see if he was still there at the window—and he was. I knew he would be. He waved, all friendly now, and I waved back, I don’t know why. My throat felt strangled, my eyes so dry I thought they’d crack. Then he
I didn’t tell anybody. How could I? I didn’t know what it meant, or what it could mean, because even though I was young I knew I didn’t believe in anything.
Big Fish Daniel Wallace | Southern fiction about childhood loss | Contemporary Southern Ghost story
disappeared, fading back into the dark, and I never saw him there again. I didn’t tell anybody. How could I? I didn’t know what it meant, or what it could mean, because even though I was young I knew I didn’t believe in anything. I told my wife about it, though, twenty years later. We were in bed in the dark. Just married, our lives ahead of us—so far ahead we couldn’t even see them from where we were. I wanted to tell her everything, though, everything about me, and so I did, and part of the everything was this. It had stayed with me all these years. The story scared her, of course, but not the way it had scared me. I asked her what she thought it meant. It means you’ll be a ghost one day, she said, and so will I, and she cried as if this were the first time it had ever occurred to her, because she never wanted to think that even this—all of this, our brand-new world together, the love so big we almost couldn’t bear it—wasn’t going to last. It means I won’t be with you forever, she said. And she was right.
Read “The Long Road Home Is Covered in Limpid Roses,” another story from Daniel Wallace’s latest collection.
Daniel Wallace is the author of six novels, including Big Fish, which was adapted and released as a movie and a Broadway musical. His novels have been translated into over three dozen languages. His essays and interviews have been published in Garden & Gun, Poets & Writers and Our State magazine, where he was, for a short time, the barbecue critic. His short stories have appeared in over fifty magazines and periodicals. He was awarded the Harper Lee Award, given to a nationally recognized Alabama writer who has made a significant lifelong contribution to Alabama letters. He was inducted into the Alabama Literary Hall of Fame in 2022. He is the J. Ross MacDonald Distinguished Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
