Orc’d By My Neighbor

Chapter 1

JUNIA

The fern bites me.

Actually bites me. Tiny green teeth sink into my thumb as I wrestle the terra cotta pot off the back of the rental truck, and I yelp so loud a bird evacuates the maple tree across the street.

"Listen here, you photosynthesizing little gremlin." I hold the pot at arm's length. The Boston fern, Reginald, unfurls a frond and snaps at my wrist. "We discussed this. New house. New rules. No biting the hand that waters you."

Reginald hisses. An actual, genuine hiss, like a cat that learned chlorophyll.

I set him down on the cracked front walkway next to the eleven other pots I've already unloaded, each one more belligerent than the last. The lavender is stress-blooming so aggressively the entire yard smells like a French countryside having a panic attack.

My prized moonvine has wrapped itself around the truck's side mirror and refuses to let go.

And the succulents, my sweet, supposedly low-maintenance succulents, have formed what I can only describe as a defensive phalanx in the corner of the truck bed.

"You're plants," I mutter, climbing back into the truck. Sweat plasters my curls to my forehead. Potting soil streaks my yellow overalls from hip to ankle. "You don't get opinions about real estate."

The succulents disagree. The largest one, Barbara, extends a thick jade leaf and smacks my hand when I reach for her.

"Barb. Seriously."

Another smack.

I grab her pot anyway, tucking it against me like a football, and hop down from the truck bed.

My sneakers hit the overgrown grass and immediately disappear.

The lawn swallows my ankles. Crabgrass and dandelions and some aggressive clover reach mid-shin, and I have to wade through it like a swamp to reach the growing colony of plants on the walkway.

The yard is a disaster. A beautiful, wild, glorious disaster.

The previous owners clearly gave up on maintenance sometime around 2019, and nature threw a party.

Creeping jenny cascades over the front porch steps.

A rose bush has consumed the mailbox whole.

The actual mailbox is in there somewhere, presumably accepting letters into its leafy tomb.

I love it.

I love every unruly inch of it.

The house itself is small. Two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen with avocado-green tile that screams 1974. The paint peels in spots. The gutters sag. The front porch lists slightly to the left, which gives the whole structure a tipsy, cheerful lean.

It's mine. Every crooked, overgrown square foot.

I drop Barbara next to Reginald, who immediately tries to bite her. She swats him with a leaf. I leave them to their turf war and wade back to the truck for the lawn furniture.

The wrought iron bistro set weighs approximately one thousand pounds. Each chair fights me independently. I drag the first one through the grass, the legs catching on every root and rock hidden beneath the green tangle, metal shrieking against a buried flagstone I didn't know existed.

By the time I get it to the porch, my arms shake and my lower back lodges a formal complaint.

Chair two goes worse. The leg hooks a loop of wild grape vine, and the whole thing lurches sideways, pulling me with it. I stumble, catch myself on a fencepost that wobbles under my weight, and somehow end up on my knees in a patch of clover with the chair on top of me.

"Great. Love this for me."

I shove the chair off and lie there for a second. The sky stretches pale blue overhead, streaked with the kind of wispy clouds that look like someone dragged a fork through whipped cream. A ladybug lands on my collarbone.

The truck still has the table. The big ceramic planters. Three more boxes of seedlings. The bag of enchanted fertilizer that keeps trying to grow things through the cardboard. A trellis. Another trellis. A third trellis, because I have a problem.

And the sunflowers.

God, the sunflowers.

I sit up. From across the yard, visible through the open truck door, the sunflowers track my movement.

So many stems, each one four feet tall and growing, their huge golden heads swiveling in unison like furry satellite dishes.

They've already punched through their box.

One enterprising stalk has threaded itself through the truck's ceiling handle.

"Don't look at me like that. We're going in the backyard."

They sway. Mournfully.

"The backyard is great! It has sun! It has bees, probably! You'll love it!"

More swaying.

I haul myself upright, brush the clover from my overalls, and go back for the table.

It takes me four tries, two rest breaks, and what might technically qualify as a swear word I invented on the spot to get it onto the porch.

The wrought iron scrapes my palm raw. The overgrown grass hides a sprinkler head that jabs my ankle bone with the precision of an acupuncturist who hates me.

But the bistro set sits on the porch now. Crooked, surrounded by hostile plants, listing slightly left with the rest of the house.

I stand in the middle of my wild yard, breathing hard, covered in dirt and scratches and sweat, and grin so wide my cheeks ache.

The moonvine yanks the truck's side mirror clean off.

"That's coming out of my deposit."

I'm elbows-deep in the truck bed, negotiating with the moonvine, when the ground shakes.

Not an earthquake. Footsteps. Heavy, deliberate, evenly spaced footsteps that vibrate through the truck's metal floor and up through my knees.

Each one lands with the precision of a metronome.

I extract myself from the moonvine's clutches, leaving it three of my hair ties as a peace offering, and turn around.

A mountain walks toward me.

No. A mountain wearing cargo shorts and a faded t-shirt walks toward me.

Moss-green skin stretches over shoulders wide enough to require their own zip code.

A jaw like a granite shelf. Arms that could bench-press my truck and probably have strong opinions about it.

He's got to be six-seven, maybe six-eight, and every inch of him radiates the energy of a man whose morning routine involves ironing his socks.

He stops at the exact point where my overgrown lawn meets his property line.

His lawn.

Oh.

His lawn looks like it was trimmed by tiny angels using laser-guided scissors.

Each blade of grass stands at what I instinctively know is a regulation height.

The edges along his walkway are so sharp they could draw blood.

His hedges form perfect geometric shapes.

His flower beds contain exactly three varieties of flowers, planted in symmetrical rows, color-coordinated from light to dark.

It's beautiful. It's also deeply, profoundly unsettling, like a lawn that would report you to the authorities for sneezing on it.

He holds something in one massive green hand. A laminated sheet of paper. In the other hand, he grips custom edging shears with the casual familiarity of a knight holding a sword he's named.

"You have sap on your shirt," I say, because apparently my brain has decided that's an appropriate opening line for a conversation with the largest person I've ever seen.

His jaw tightens. He glances down at the smear of green across his polo.The sap glistens there, and his nostrils flare with a breath so controlled it borders on meditative.

"Your vine." The words come out low. Gravel wrapped in velvet. "Reached across the fence. Into my yard. And attached itself to my Japanese maple."

"Oh! The moonvine is friendly. She just likes to explore."

"She tore a branch off my maple."

"That's... her way of saying hello?"

Those dark eyes narrow. The shears catch the afternoon light.

"Flynn Danger." He says his own name like he's reading a warrant. "I live next door. We need to discuss several things."

He extends the laminated sheet.

I take it. The paper is warm from his grip and thick, the kind of heavy-duty lamination you'd use for something meant to survive a nuclear winter.

The header reads: CEDARbrOOK LANE NEIGHBORHOOD LAWN AND GARDEN ORDINANCES.

Below it, a color-coded legend. Green for mandatory.

Yellow for recommended. Red for violations subject to fines.

There are twenty-three items.

Twenty-three.

Color-coded.

"You laminated this."

"I laminate all critical documents."

"There's a subsection on 'acceptable mulch colors.'"

"Brown, dark brown, and cedar red. Black mulch is permissible with board approval."

I look up from the sheet. Way up. The sun sits directly behind his head, turning him into a green-skinned eclipse. "Is rubber mulch addressed?"

Something twitches near his left tusk.

"Page two."

I flip it over. There is, in fact, a page two. Also laminated. Also color-coded. With a small map of the neighborhood that includes property line measurements down to the quarter inch.

"Flynn."

"Danger."

"Flynn Danger. Did you make this yourself?"

"The original ordinances were a single unformatted page. Insufficient." He says this the way a surgeon might describe a rusty scalpel. "I reorganized, cross-referenced with county code, and added the color system for quick reference. Every household on the block has a copy."

Behind me, Reginald the fern hisses at a passing butterfly. Barbara the succulent smacks it. The sunflowers crane their golden heads over the truck to stare at Flynn with expressions of open fascination.

His gaze travels past me. Over the hostile plants on the walkway. The overturned bistro chair I didn't fix. The rose-consumed mailbox. The grass that reaches my shins. The moonvine, now free of the side mirror and questing hungrily toward his fence.

His grip on the edging shears tightens until the handle creaks.

"Item seven. Grass height shall not exceed three inches."

I look at my lawn. My beautiful, ridiculous, knee-high lawn.

"What's the penalty?"

"First offense, written warning. Second offense, fifty-dollar fine. Third offense, the neighborhood board intervenes directly."