Jealous

Note:Aaah...jealousy. We all have it. We all feel it.

And now we'd like you to write about it. We'll leave it open: you can write about something or someone you envy, or a time when your jealousy got you in trouble, or maybe how it makes you feel to be envious. Whatever you want.

And it can be fiction or non-fiction. This is Fiction! Although I probably am the Neighborhood Crazy Lady. Word limit is 600.




As I stood out in my front yard, watering my roses, there they were. It was my next door neighbor's daughter, home from college, and a friend of hers. Two young, lithe bodies sunning themselves on the front lawn of my neighbor's house, where everybody and God could see them. Of course I stared. That's what they wanted, I realized. Why else would they have been out in the front yard, instead of in the backyard with the privacy fence? I stared.

Those long legs, smooth and evenly tanned.

Glutes that were almost granite.

Breasts, perched upright and proud way above tiny waistlines.

Flat, washboard abdomens.

Svelte hips.

Blistering white smiles and full, pouty lips.

Long hair radiating gold in the sunlight.

All that beautiful, luscious, ripe youth, stuffed into tiny bikinis that left nothing at all to the imagination.

Who wouldn't stare? They were wearing the kind of tiny scraps of cloth that I used to wear when I was their age. When my body looked like that. Only better, because I had the benefit of hindsight.

The two not-yet-women-but-no-longer-girls finally noticed me, the Crazy Neighbor Lady, standing next to my pink roses in my front yard, staring at them. They leaned toward one another, and one girl put her hand over her mouth to hide what she was saying. They giggled at the old neighbor lady staring at them while she watered her flowers. I turned away from them and moved toward my yellow roses.

I thought about my varicose veins, which make my legs look like a map of the interstates.

The thighs so covered in cellulite they looked hail damaged.

The breasts stretched oblong from breastfeeding and age.

The hips misaligned from carrying children on one hip.

The arms that jiggle so much they are recorded as seismic activity.

The dull, lifeless hair.

The double chin. The jowls. The feeling that my face is slowly sliding down into my cleavage from the gravity of my years.

A feeling came over me. An urge to run over to my neighbor's front yard and grab those two girls by the hair and pull every last strand out. To throw them out of those lawn chairs and into the hot street where the asphalt had the same temperature as the sun. The urge to claw that smooth, flawless skin to ribbons. My stomach clenched, and I could almost feel my fingers piercing soft flesh.

What was the word I was looking for? Then it hit me. Jealous. That was the word I was looking for. I was jealous of those two girls because they were young and beautiful. I am not either of those things, not anymore.

But I do have a petty side to my personality.

I turned and squirted both girls with the hose.