To love our neighbor as ourselves is such a truth for regulating human society, that by that alone one might determine all the cases in social morality. ~ John Locke

It was the happiest day of my life. We celebrated hard when the papers were all signed and it became official. Nothing was the same for us once we closed on the house. For the first time we had a place of our own, and what a difference it made. No more moving from place to place, not being allowed to hammer a nail into the wall or paint a room a different color. It was all ours, to do with as we pleased, a permanent home where we could settle in and put down roots. Life was miserable before that, when we were homeless. When I say homeless, I don’t mean we were out on the street with no roof over our heads, but not having a home of one’s own, is almost as bad. Some of the stories I can tell you about the things we had to put up with would boggle your mind. We were biting our fingernails until the last second, not sure how things would work out because of legal issues hanging over the sale, but in the end our dream came true.

I’m not saying the place was a palace or anything like that. In fact, it was a dump. It needed lots of work just to make it livable, and it took us many years to fix the place up and make it what it is today. It’s still no palace, but it’s damn comfortable, in some ways even luxurious. For us, having been without our own place for so long, our home was our number one priority. We came close to losing it a few times when times were tough, but even through those bad periods we managed to make our payments and keep the jackals away. It was a struggle, but it only made us stronger and more determined than ever to hold on to what we worked so hard to acquire. Never again, I swore, would we return to our previous homeless existence, and I’ve devoted my life to that pledge.

Every homeowner has problems to deal with—from small nuisances like a clogged toilet or broken light fixture to major crises like needing to replace a roof or heating system. There’s always something that needs fixing. There are also the big projects undertaken voluntarily to make life easier and more pleasant, like remodeling a kitchen or building a deck. Undertakings of that kind never fazed me. Every improvement I made to the house gave me satisfaction. There was only one kind of problem I hated dealing with because it had no easy remedy—the neighbors.

The trouble with our next-door neighbors began as soon as we moved in, or more accurately, while we were in the process of moving in. As I backed my pickup truck hitched up to a small utility trailer into the driveway I knocked over the neighbor’s mailbox. That rig was a pain to maneuver and I didn’t even realize what happened until I stepped out of the cab and saw a guy with a red face standing there gesticulating and yelling at me. He looked like some kind of a nut. It took me minute to understand what he was going on about, and when I finally understood what he was saying I promised to take care of the matter later, once we were moved in. After unloading, I still had a few more trips to make. He raged on though, so I took out my wallet and handed him $50, figuring that should make him happy.

He didn’t calm down one bit, though, insisting it would cost $300 to sink a new pole into the ground. That sounded so outrageous I just laughed and started unloading my stuff. He left in a huff and I thought that was the end of it. I heard him get into his car and slam the door and supposed he was driving off, but he parked his car on the street blocking my driveway. When I saw him walking back to his house, I called to him and said he had to move his car because I needed to get out soon. He yelled back that he’d move it after I gave him three hundred bucks. You can imagine how pissed I was, not only because that was a lot of money, but because he was spoiling my move-in day. I was so happy about moving into our new home but his orneriness changed my mood. I had no choice but to write a check out to him for $250, but when I gave it to him he refused it, saying I needed to make it $300. Right then I knew what kind of a shyster he was. I got even with him, though. About a week later, I released some wasps into his brand new mailbox.

That’s how things started out with our neighbors, and they didn’t get any better. Over the years we had plenty of skirmishes over all kinds of issues. They called the cops on us numerous times and we called the cops on them, too. We found out that they already had it in for us before that first fight over the mailbox. It turns out they were related to the people we were battling with in court, who had some kind of claim on the house. But we won the lawsuit and the house was legally ours whether they liked it or not. Still, it’s a drag having bad neighbors, and what made it worse was that they’d lived there a long time and had a lot of friends in the neighborhood who were less than friendly towards us.

Things reached a boiling point because of their dog. Their old dog died and not long afterwards, they got a new one, a rambunctious puppy that never stopped barking. I complained to them about it numerous times, but they didn’t do anything about it. Finally, I had enough and decided to take matters into my own hands. To tell you the truth, I felt sorry for the dog. If they had taken better care of it and not kept it outside all the time, it wouldn’t have kept on barking. It must have been pretty unhappy and I decided I’d be doing it a favor by putting it out of its misery. Some poison and a piece of meat was all it took. The hard part was making sure there was no evidence, because I knew they’d try to blame me for it.

Not long after that I heard that our neighbor was seen at a shooting range. Of course, that worried me. Those people were a little crazy and there was no telling what they might do. We had a wonderful house, but how could we enjoy it without a sense of security? Any day they could attack us. It was an existential threat and I had to find a solution. It was no use trying to talk to them. They couldn’t be reasoned with or trusted. The more I thought about it, the clearer it became that there was only one way for us to be safe. It was us or them. After much thought, I devised a way to do it. When they go to sleep tonight, they’ll have a long, peaceful sleep from which they won’t awake. Then, finally, we too will have some peace.