The citronella candle blinked and my neighbor’s arms ticked against his sides. 

He was on his front porch in only boxer briefs.  It was midnight and I remembered

his wife’s arms—the time she scooped her wheezing pug to her chest. “It’s genetic!”

she snapped.  Electric colors shifted through their curtains. “She has a collapsed

trachea, Jon.”  I watched him from my own dark porch because his nakedness was

a big joke—funny like the word cauliflower.  He sat down, tucked his legs close to his

body, chin to knees, heaving shoulders folding and all at once I felt sticky, untied—

for him, for his wife, the collapse, collapsed trachea.  Or maybe for me.  But I  stopped 
myself, went inside, because middle-class sadness is a dishrag that can be washed over and over again.