Mr. Vickery
Andy Edge
The October newsletter went out on the first, the way she always does. I write ’em myself. Been writin’ ’em since ’03, when Vester Penhall stepped down on account of his eyes goin’. My husband says I ought to hand ’em off, says surely somebody on the board’d be glad to take ’em on, but I like the work and I got me a particular way of sayin’ things the residents done come to expect. The newsletter is twelve pages, printed two-color at a shop over in Millerton, and she costs the association three hundred and forty dollars a run, which is a bargain and I’ll fight any man says different.
October’s issue covered the usual. Reminder about leaf pickup, bags only, no loose piles at the curb, and don’t you dare burn ’em, that’s a fire hazard and a county violation both, and I don’t care if your daddy burned his leaves and his daddy before him, it ain’t 1962 no more. The schedule for the Fall Social at the Buntin place on the twenty-fourth, which is the same Saturday every year and you’d think people’d remember but every year I get at least three calls askin’. A line of congratulations to the Wilton family on their second girl, born the eighteenth September, seven pounds four ounces, doin’ fine. And a correction to the September issue on the spellin’ of Mrs. Mireles’ late husband’s name, which were Giancarlo with a G-i and not, as I had it, with a J, and which I apologized for at length, on account of the mistake bein’ mine and Mrs. Mireles bein’ eighty-three years old and not deservin’ to see her husband’s name writ wrong in print four months after the funeral.
And in the back, the way she always sits, the Standards and Compliance column. Eleven citations for the month, which ain’t a record, the record were thirty-one in February of ’15, when we got the blizzard and weren’t nobody felt like shovelin’ the way they was supposed to, and I had to send out a Special Supplemental Enforcement Notice and the board still talks about it, but eleven is high for a fall month, and of them eleven, nine belonged to the fella over at 4412 Willow Bend.
I put his name and address right there in the column, same as I do for anybody. The community has got to be informed, and I’ll tell you, it works as a middle step besides, most folks see their name in print, they’ll fix the thing inside a week. Public accountability is a strong motivator in a place this size. We only got a hundred and sixteen households in The Foxglove Ridge at Whitfield Lakes. Everybody reads the newsletter. Everybody knows everybody.
Mr. Vickery did not fix the thing inside a week. What Mr. Vickery done was, he taped the page from the newsletter to his front door, with the part about him circled in red marker, and writ up above it in that same marker FRAMED FOR POSTERITY. I walked past it on my mornin’ constitutional and I noted it and I did not say a word. My husband, when I told him at breakfast, laughed and said, The man’s got a sense of humor at least, and I said I reckoned he did.
Mr. Vickery moved into 4412 the first week of August. He’d be somewhere in his middle thirties, I’d say. Done some kind of freelance work on a computer, I never got the whole of it. Drove a little green car. Lived by hisself. He were a good-lookin’ fella, I’ll say it, and I don’t think there’s nothin’ improper in sayin’ it, on account of several of the women in the neighborhood, and one or two of the men, have remarked on it to me direct. The welcome basket my husband made up for him set on his porch four days before he brung it inside, and the banana bread, when he finally took it in, was no doubt hard enough by then you could’ve drove a nail with it. He never come to the welcome dinner Roselle Buntin put on for him the second Saturday after he got here neither.
Let me tell you when I knew he were gonna be a real problem.
I come around the cul-de-sac one mornin’ the third week of August with Cookie on the lead. Cookie’s our dog, a little gray thing my husband brung home from the rescue in ’21, we got her a rainbow collar and she’s a sensitive animal, won’t eat in front of strangers, and I heard the god awfulest sound I ever heard come out from behind Vickery’s house. It weren’t a sound I could place at first, sounded like somebody were takin’ apart a kitchen with a hammer, sounded like a wreck on the interstate from a long way off, and Cookie set down in the middle of the street and would not go no further, and I had to pick her up and carry her the rest of the way home with her shakin’ against my chest. When I got to where I could see the back of the property I counted four of ’em. Four wind chimes hangin’ off the eaves. One were near three feet long, made out of copper pipe thick as my thumb, and the wind that mornin’ was comin’ down off the ridge and through that copper pipe in a way that I will tell you weren’t natural. The bylaws on chimes is two per property, eighteen inches maximum, and the bylaws is writ that way for a reason, and the reason were hangin’ off the back of 4412 Willow Bend makin’ a sound like somebody dyin’. I done sent the letter that afternoon.
I already sent two before the wind chime one. First were the trash bin, he’d left her at the curb past noon, six hours after pickup, and when I walked by she were still settin’ there with the lid flipped open and a paper sack of shrimp shells crawlin’ with flies, and the smell come up off her so strong you could taste it in the back of your throat from the sidewalk. Second were the mailbox. He painted her without ever once submittin’ the color to the board, a kind of orange somewhere between a road cone and a pumpkin, and she caught the eye from three houses down. I sent the letter. He painted over the orange with a coat of black, which weren’t on the approved list neither, and sent me back a photograph of the black mailbox with a sticky note on it that said Better?
I will tell you, I almost laughed. My husband seen the photograph on the kitchen counter that evenin’ and he said, He’s funny, ain’t he, and I said, He is funny. And we left it at that and I sent the next letter in the mornin’.
Couple days later there was six chimes, and I counted ’em twice from the sidewalk to make sure. Six where there’d been four the day before, and two of the new ones was smaller, glass and bamboo and what looked like a string of bottle caps, but the copper pipe were still there in the middle of ’em, swingin’ slow, and the new chimes was just along for the ride, and I done went home and noted it in the folder and sent a second letter on the same violation, which is unusual but which the bylaws permit at the discretion of the president. By the end of the week there was nine, and by the end of the next there was thirteen, and he done run out of eaves and started hangin’ ’em from a clothesline he’d strung between the porch and a tree in the back, and from the tree itself, and from a shepherd’s hook he’d drove into the ground for the purpose, and they was glass and metal and bamboo and one I will swear to you was made out of old silverware wired together, knives and forks and a soup spoon clatterin’ against each other in a way I have not been able to forget. Cookie would not walk that side of the block no more, I had to take her out the front and around the long way, which adds at least ten minutes, and which I done every mornin’ the rest of September without complaint, on account of a man does not punish his dog for the failin’s of his neighbors.
I stopped countin’ the chimes the mornin’ I come around and seen seventeen of ’em and a fresh one in his hand. He were standin’ on a step ladder in the back hangin’ it from the gutter. He seen me on the sidewalk. He did not wave. He did not stop what he were doin’. He hung the chime and he come down off the ladder and he went inside and shut the door. That were the mornin’ I went home and told my husband it weren’t a matter of the bylaws no more.
The porch light went out the first week of September. I noticed it the first cool mornin’ of the month, when the sun weren’t yet up over the ridge and every other porch on the street had a light on but his, and the dark of it made the house look like a hole in the row. I made a note. Waited the customary five days, on account of a man might not see his own porch light out, particular if he comes and goes by the side door, which Vickery did. Five days went by. The light stayed dark. I sent the letter.
I walked past that house every mornin’ after. That’s just my route, out the front gate, down Willow Bend, around the cul-de-sac, back past the Buntins’. I done been walkin’ her twenty-one years and I weren’t about to change her on account of one man. Every mornin’ I’d come past his porch and that light’d be dark and I’d note it and I’d walk on. Some mornin’s there were a coffee cup left on the porch rail. Once there were a pair of boots settin’ there untied, like he’d come home and stepped out of ’em on the way in. The light stayed dark.
Now the trash bin, the mailbox, the chimes, that damn porch light, them was matters between him and the association, and me and him could’ve gone back and forth on ’em till one of us give out. A man sends you letters, you send him letters. That is a correspondence and I kept up worse ones. What I could not move on from were the rest of it. By the end of September the grass, which had not been cut since Labor Day, were up past the boot tops in places, and the dandelions come in thick along the property line and gone to seed. And on a windy mornin’ I stood on the sidewalk in front of his house and watched the dandelion seed lift up off his lawn in a white cloud and drift across the property line into Roselle Buntin’s yard, where Roselle has spent damn near a decade buildin’ a flower bed that has been writ up in two regional gardenin’ magazines. Roselle come to her front door while I were standin’ there, and she seen the seed, and she seen me, and she did not say a word, she turned around and went back in the house and shut the door behind her, and that door shuttin’ sounded louder than any wind chime Vickery ever hung.
That were the first thing.
The second were down at the little library box and the donated canned food box where they sit in the brick surround my husband helped lay back in ’99, at the end of Willow Bend where the cul-de-sac meets the main road. Buford Carlton from over on Linden were gettin’ some books one afternoon and Vickery pulled up in that little green car and got out, and Buford, who is sixty-eight years old and ain’t never said an unkind word to nobody, said good afternoon to him, and Vickery looked at him and said, Are you the one writin’ the letters, in a tone Buford told me later he ain’t never been spoke to in by a grown man. Buford said no, he were not, that would be the association president, and Vickery said, Tell him to stop, and got back in the car and drove the forty feet to his house. Buford come to me that evenin’ on his way home from supper at his daughter’s. Stood on my porch with his hat in his hand. He did not ask me to stop sendin’ the letters. He told me what Vickery had said and he told me how he had said it and he told me that in sixty-eight years he had not been spoke to like that by a man whose people he had not even met. He said whose people he had not even met like that were the part that mattered. I told him I appreciated him comin’ by. He nodded and he put his hat back on and he walked home.
The third were Patty Mosby. She come to the house. Set in my livin’ room with a cup of coffee my husband made her and she said, Has he done anythin’ about them chimes? I said he had not. She said, I ain’t slept proper in weeks. I said I knowed it. She said, Cleve is talkin’ about goin’ over there and I do not want him to go over there. I told her not to let him go over there, I told her I would handle it. She set the cup down on the coaster and she looked at me across the coffee table and she said, When.
That were the word she used. Not how. Not what are you goin’ to do. When.
I told her soon. She nodded and she got up and she let herself out.
The Fall Social were the twenty-fourth, at the Buntin place, the way she has been every year since ’94. Roselle does the social the same way every time, white tablecloths on the long tables out on the back patio, a punch she makes from a recipe her mother brung up from Charleston, the good plates not the paper ones, on account of paper plates is for a barbecue and the Fall Social ain’t a barbecue. Eighty-some residents come. Vickery did not come. He weren’t invited, not in any formal way, but an invitation had gone in his mailbox same as everybody else’s the first week of October and he had not responded, which by then weren’t a surprise to nobody.
I stood by the punch bowl most of the evenin’. That’s where the association president stands at a function like that. The punch bowl is where folks come to you. They get a cup, they say hello, they tell you what’s on their mind. It is the most efficient arrangement and I have used her for years.
Buford come up first. Said good evenin’ and did not say nothin’ else, just stood there with his cup and looked at me, and after a minute he said, Vester Penhall handled the Calloways in ’09 and I ain’t forgot it, and he nodded once and walked off. Then Patty with Cleve behind her. Cleve did not speak. Patty said, I told Cleve we was waitin’ on you, and Cleve looked at the ground and then looked at me and nodded and they moved on toward the cheese. Then Roselle herself, in the dress she wears for the social every year, blue with the white collar. She did not get punch. She put her hand on my arm and she said, The flower bed is finished. There ain’t no comin’ back from what that seed done to it. And she squeezed my arm and then went back to her guests. Then the Wiltons, the new parents, who I would not have expected. Mr. Wilton had not been a resident but maybe two years. He said, My wife and I been talkin’. We do not want our girls to grow up next to that house. I said I understood. He said, Whatever the association decides, we are with the association. And he nodded and he took his wife’s hand and they went and got punch.
By the end of the evenin’ eleven separate residents had come to me at the punch bowl. Eleven, the same number as the citations in the October newsletter, which I noted at the time and have not been able to stop notin’ since. None of ’em had asked me anythin’. None of ’em had told me what to do. They had each, in their own way, come up to the punch bowl and put a hand on the matter and walked off, and what they had put on the matter was the same thing every one of ’em put on it, which were that the matter were no longer mine alone.
I walked home that night with my husband and neither of us said a word for the first half. Then he said, They was all there tonight, weren’t they. I said, They was. He said, Then I reckon it ain’t long now. I said, No. It ain’t.
The notice went out Wednesday. Community Standards Meetin’, Saturday the seventh November, ten a.m., 4412 Willow Bend. All residents requested to attend. I writ her myself and I dropped a copy in every mailbox in The Foxglove Ridge on Wednesday afternoon, the way I done for the two before, and the way Vester Penhall done for the ones before that. The notice don’t say what the meetin’ is for. It don’t have to. Anybody been here long enough knows. Anybody ain’t been here long enough learns. I dropped the last one in Vickery’s box at the end of the row and I stood there a minute lookin’ at the black mailbox with the orange showin’ through where the paint had peeled. The little sticky note he had sent me back in August were long gone but I could see in my mind where it had been. Better? I’ll be honest with you, I felt somethin’ lookin’ at that mailbox. I won’t say what. I closed the box and I walked home. He did not respond to the notice, and I did not expect him to.
Saturday come on cold, first real cold of the fall, the kind that gets into the joints of the porch boards and makes ’em complain when you step on ’em, and I were up before the sun the way I always am and I set at the kitchen table with my husband and we did not speak about what the day were. He had laid out his good flannel the night before, the gray one with the wood buttons I give him for his birthday in ’17, and I had laid out mine, the green, and we drunk coffee and watched the light come up over the ridge through the kitchen window the way we have watched it come up most every Saturday of the twenty-six years we been married, and I will tell you it weren’t a sad mornin’ and it weren’t a fearful one, it were a Saturday, and we had a thing to do.
At nine forty-five they started comin’, walked up Willow Bend in twos and threes from both directions the way folks come to a thing in a small place where everybody knows the route. The Buntins and the Mosbys and the Carltons, Buford with a length of pipe in his hand he had brung from his garage and Cleve Mosby with a claw hammer hangin’ from his belt loop and Roselle’s husband Walter carryin’ a shovel he had not bothered to clean from the fall plantin’. And the Wiltons with their older girl held on Mr. Wilton’s hip and the baby in a wrap on Mrs. Wilton’s chest, which I had not expected and which I will say give me a moment’s pause when I seen them, but Mr. Wilton had told me at the social that they was with the association and I reckon he had decided that meant all of ’em, and Mr. Wilton had a hatchet through his belt that I noted and did not comment on, and Mrs. Wilton had a fireplace poker held loose in her free hand, the iron tip pointed down at the sidewalk. And Vester Penhall hisself, ninety-one now and walkin’ with two canes, brung up the hill by his grandson who lives over in Pinegrove and drives him to the things he needs to be drove to, and the grandson carryin’ a tire iron in his free hand. By ten there was eighty-four residents standin’ on the lawn and the sidewalk and spillin’ into the street.
Vickery’s front door were shut and the curtains was drawn and the car were in the driveway and the porch light were still out. He were in there. We all knowed he were in there and he knowed we was out here and there were a stillness over the whole front of the property that I have not been able to describe in the months since and will not try to describe now.
I walked up the path to the porch by myself, that part is the president’s part and has been since before me and will be after me, and a man takes the job knowin’ what the job is. The porch boards complained under my weight the way the porch boards at my own house had complained under my weight that mornin’, and I will tell you it weren’t lost on me, the sound bein’ the same.
I knocked several hard knocks on the door the way you knock when you are there in an official capacity and not as a friend.
There were a long pause and then the door opened. He were in a t-shirt and jeans and he had not shaved in some days, and he looked at me through the screen and he looked past me at the people on his lawn and he looked back at me, and I will tell you the thing I will remember about Mr. Vickery, the thing I have remembered every day since, which is that he did not look afraid. He looked at me through that screen the way a man looks at a bill he has been expectin’ in the mail.
He said, Is this the part where you tell me to leave?
I said, No sir. It ain’t.
He stood there a long moment, lookin’ at me and the lawn behind me, and I watched somethin’ move across his face that weren’t fear and weren’t surprise, it were a kind of recognition, like he had thought on some level that this might be what the letters was buildin’ toward and had not let hisself believe it until the moment he opened the door and seen all of us standin’ on his property, and then he believed it. I watched him believe it. His eyes went slow across the lawn from one end to the other, and I watched him take in the pipe and the hatchet and the poker and the rest of it, and when his eyes come back to mine they were different than they had been a moment before. Then he done a thing I have thought about ever since, which is he nodded. The way a man nods when a thing he has been workin’ out in his head turns out to be the thing. He opened the screen door and he stepped out onto the porch.
I will not describe what come next. I have set down to write this part of it a few times and I ain’t been able to write it and I will not write it now. Some things a man keeps for hisself. What I will tell you is that it were quick and it were quiet, and that no one resident done it and every resident done it, and that when it were finished the lawn looked how you expect a lawn looks after a thing of that kind and not before, and that the Buntins had brung tarps for the purpose and a fresh gallon of bleach, and a wheelbarrow Walter pushed up the walk hisself, and that the Wiltons had took their girls inside Roselle’s house before the part that the girls did not need to see, and that Vester Penhall watched the whole of it from his foldin’ chair without sayin’ a word, on account of he had been the president before me and had stood where I had stood and had knocked the knock I had knocked, and he were there to bear witness to a thing his own hands done years before.
The wind chimes was still hangin’ off the back of the house. I could hear ’em the whole time. The copper one over the rest.
When it were finished I walked back down the path to the sidewalk and I turned around and I looked at the house. I done that on purpose, on account of a man does not look away from the thing he has done. I looked at it a long minute. Then I went home.
My husband were already there, he had walked back ahead of me the way we had agreed the night before because one of us had to put the coffee on and he were the better hand at coffee, and he had it ready when I come in, and he set out two mugs on the kitchen table and put a plate of the lemon cookies he baked Friday in the middle of the table. He stood at the counter when I come in and he looked at me and he did not ask me nothin’ and I did not tell him nothin’, and he poured the coffee and we set down, and we drunk it slow, and we ate the cookies, and the light come the rest of the way up over the ridge and filled the kitchen the way it does on a Saturday in November, and after a while my husband reached across the table and he took my hand, and he held her, and he let her go.
I writ the December newsletter on Monday. It went out on the first, the way she always does. Twelve pages, two-color, printed at the shop over in Millerton. The leaf pickup schedule for the last collection of the year. The carolin’ on the eighteenth, organized by the Buntins as it has been every year since ’96. A note of congratulations to the Wiltons on the baby’s first tooth, which Mrs. Wilton told my husband about at the grocery and which he passed along to me for the column. A correction to the November issue regardin’ the date of the Community Standards meetin’, which I had writ as the eighth and which had been the seventh. And in the welcome column, on the back page, a note that 4412 Willow Bend had gone on the market the previous week and were expected to show well, on account of the price bein’ fair and the neighborhood bein’ what it is, and that we looked forward to meetin’ the new family when the sale went through.
I dropped a copy in every mailbox in The Foxglove Ridge on the first, the way I have done since ’03 and the way Vester Penhall done before me. Took me an hour and twenty minutes. I dropped the last copy in the box at 4412.
The orange were still showin’ through where the black had peeled. I stood there a minute, and I will tell you what I felt this time and what I would not say before, which is that I hoped the new family would paint her, I hoped they would paint her the color the bylaws called for and I hoped they would do it in the first week the way the welcome packet asked, and I hoped they would come to the Spring Social and bring a dish and introduce theirselves, and I hoped they would last.
Some do. Some don’t.
Andy Edge (Mr. Vickery) writes thrilling horror where the monster is always human. His fiction explores obsession, revenge, betrayal and the rot beneath ordinary lives, often through a queer lens. He has a particular pull toward stories of home: hard people and grudges that outlive their owners. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Ossuary 13, and Exploitation Media. His story “In Care Of” won the Judges’ Choice award in the Ember & Vine Writing Contest and will appear in the upcoming anthology. His poem “Full Sun” was longlisted for the LemonLight Prize. He serves on the board of the Write A Great Story Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to mentoring writers. Born and raised in Appalachian Ohio, just across the river from West Virginia, he now lives in Arizona with his husband, their dogs and an ever-growing stack of true crime documentaries. Find him at andyedgewrites.com.
© 2026 Andy Edge. All rights reserved.
Without in any way limiting the authors’ and publisher’s exclusive rights, any unauthorised use of any part of this story to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited.
This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, events, locations or general circumstances is entirely coincidental and/or used in a fictitious manner.
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