A Short Story I Wrote When I Was in a Bad Mood Last Year

Once there was a girl named something like Beth Feldman, and her husband’s name was something like Brad or Joel. They had two kids and lived in a split-level house that they were remodeling. The kids went to public school and she was active in PTA. She had a bunch of friends and they played tennis and had bagel lunches at Gold & Myers. She still had both her parents though her mother had had a breast cancer scare. Beth was also active in Relay for Life and fielded a team for it every year. She wasn’t especially friendly with the families on her block, but it wasn’t anything conscious: she just didn’t have anything in common with them.


One day one of the neighbors said hello to her and she didn’t recognize them and called them by the wrong name so they ran her over with their car in ShopRite. Her husband was sad for awhile but after going to bereavement groups for a year or two he met someone else who looked just like her and their family lived happily ever after. The new wife made friends with most of Beth’s old friends, who told themselves that this way they were staying in touch with the kids, and every now and then they would have to remind themselves that someone had traded places with Beth. The crazy neighbor was tried and convicted and went to jail. The judge was of the opinion that the neighbor was manic-depressive and sent the neighbor to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. The rest of the family moved and everyone forgot all about them. The house was occupied by a Korean family who didn’t speak much to the neighbors, nor did the Feldmans speak to them. They got annoyed by the smell of cabbage cooking, sometimes, and eventually Bradley or Joel got a nice promotion and they moved away to a bigger house that was a Colonial. They still gave money for breast cancer.