Listening to the violent, fighting neighbors.

(from In The Garden of the North American Martyrs)

A strange, messed situation gives way to watching TV. This funny-scary story conjures up more questions than it answers. Like why does the husband-wife duo in the foreground sleep in separate beds, like a TV couple of old? The “geography” innuendo is sweet.

Many thanks to the thoughtful Beth Gabriela Warshaw for making a huge donation to I Read A Short Story Today. She dropped off a big box containing the following treasures:
Tobias Wolff, In The Garden of the North American Martyrs
Granta #81, Best of Young British Novelists
Granta #87, Jubilee
Granta #88, Mothers
Granta #89, The Factory
Ethan Canin, Emperor of the Air
A.S. Byatt, Little Black Book of Stories
A.L. Kennedy, Indelible Acts
Alan Bennett, The Laying on of Hands
R.K. Narayan, Under The Banyan Tree
Muriel Spark, All the Stories
Richard Ford, A Multitude of Sins
Modern Short Stories: The Uses of Imagination
Modern American Prose: Fifteen Writers +15
Alice Munro, Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
The Bedford Introduction to Literature
William Trevor, The Collected Stories