I can talk about her now. Now that we’re gone.

She thinks she’s beautiful, you know. Short shorts. Tank-top, no bra. Long hair the color of dark coffee spilling down her back. She believes in the healing power of tanning, evident by her sun-puckered, sun-scoured skin. Her flesh looks like a dusty saddlebag. Her breasts sag behind the too-tight top. Her face looks like a half-deflated basketball: pimples and divots and wrinkles.

(A sexy Baba Yaga. Fifty, maybe fifty-five. A GMINLTF.)

We’d spoken to her a few times. She ever said if we need to borrow her hose, we could. We thought that was nice and said if she ever needed anything, just ask. No, really. Just ask.

A week later, we found ruts in our rain-drenched lawn: kicked-up mud and torn grass. A mystery? Whuh? Why? Who would dare? Later, we found the culprit: here she comes, carrying wheelbarrow loads of dirt through our yard, dragging a lawn mower behind her, coming around the side of the house. We had the end unit in the row, which gave us a side yard, a yard we were trying — to much failure — to cultivate.

Witch Tits thought it was communal property.

We didn’t like it, and we politely told her, please don’t do that, and if you need something from us, just ask.

No, really. Just ask.

This did not make Witch Tits happy.

But it, like many things, passed.

We did not know to fear her retributions, not yet.

We hadn’t yet heard about the brick in the road, for one. She didn’t tell us that story. No, her daughter did. We lived on a fairly fast-traveled road — double yellow, swift curve, the main thoroughfare through town, noted in particular by a familiar name: “Main Street.” Witch Tits thought that people were going too fast around that curve. So she put a brick in the road. Y’know. To slow people down. By destroying their tires. And causing them to crash.

One time someone fired a paintball at our door. First a sharp thwack against the storm door. Then, a greasy pink blotch. We wondered: “Were they shooting at something? Us? Our door? Why?”

Then we saw a sign on Witch Tits’ lawn. A crazy sign. Some kind of warning: BEWARE NUM 1 GOD KEEP OUT DOG WILL BITE HE HAS A GUN AND WILL SHOOT YOU. The sign, inked in black marker on the inside of the cover of a Christian coloring book, came replete with little drawings: a hastily scrawled barking dog and a blocky gun shooting little pee-pee bullets. We thought, someone put this here. Someone is trying to teach Witch Tits something. She’s made enemies, and this is the fruit born by such adversarial agitation. And what did that sign mean, anyhow? That the Number One God (as opposed to Number Two, or Number Three-Hundred-Forty-Seven?) was going to getchoo? And he had a dog, this god? And he had a gun? Some kind of… god gun? That shoots little Tic-Tac bullets, pyoo-pyoo? Or maybe it was the dog who has the gun? What madman would give God’s dog a gun? Oh my. “He will shoot you.” Oh my, indeed.

We were worried. Paintball attack? Crazy sign? Not good, not good at all. In the morning, we hurried over to Witch Tits’ house, told her what was on her lawn.

She made the sign, as it turns out.

As a warning to anybody who would “throw glass on her lawn.” Whatever that means.

Whoever shot that paintball was probably trying to shoot that crazy sign. They missed, hit our door instead. Traveling from a moving car, after all, makes for a tricky shot.

(If only there had been a brick in the road. You know. To slow them down.)

Witch Tits was bonafide batshit.

Our walls, not paper thin by any margin but brick and stone, did nothing to mitigate her shrieking voice. She could’ve screeched and knocked down the Walls of Jericho.

One day, we heard her screaming at her granddaughter.

Not unusual in and of itself, but was it that she said to her?

“All you do is shit down my motherfucking throat.”

A kind, grandmotherly admonishment if ever there was one.

She told once me she considered herself “something of a writer.” She said she was only able to write when the mood struck her. When the Muse was with her. When she had, and I quote, “found serenity.”

If you want to really know what Witch Tits looked like, she looked like one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey who had lay dead in the desert sun for a week.

Her pipes sometimes banged in the walls. When asked about it, she told us it was a ghost. The ghost of a neighbor’s dead son come to haunt her. (Only she could be so solipsistic as to believe the ghost of somebody else’s child was haunting her for reasons beyond all our ken.)

More clamor arose from Witch Tits’ screen door, too. The hydraulic door closer broke, and so the door slammed. All. The. Time. Slam! Wham! Every time, it sounded like something in our house was falling. We had to tell her about it a half-dozen times before she did anything at all. She told us the “part was on special order,” as if the part was something that had to come via mule from Mongolia, as if it had to be hand-crafted by someone in the bloodline of Thomas Edison. After weeks, we finally managed to convince her to tie the door open. Months later the door sits without repair.

She had various boyfriends, though by the end only one with tenure. He was some kind of junk man. Rusty. Sandy. Dirty. Skeevy. (In fact, we called him “Skeevy Guy.” As opposed to our other neighbors: “Creepy Guy,” “Old Girlfriend,” and “Meth Sister.”) He never smiled. Never said hello no matter how many times you said it to him: instead, he just stared at you, or merely ignored you. Something of a sociopath. He was like a white, Jeffrey Dahmer version of Sanford & Son, always bringing truckloads of dead mowers, washing machines, refrigerators, or just piles and piles of scrap metal (gutters, wire, cable, siding, tubing). To be fair, he was capable: he really could fix it. And then he sold it on the front lawn. Every day, a new rust-caked mower, a new dented appliance. One-stop shop for your recession-era homeowner needs.

Witch Tits loved to sell things on her lawn. The yard sales were epic. And by “epic,” I mean, it looked like her house threw up. And voided its bowels. All over itself.

If you really want to know what Witch Tits looked like, imagine a leathery pterodactyl. With breasts like rolled-up gym socks. Breasts that sprayed bile and acid. Breasts that may have sprayed weed killer.

One time she killed part of our lawn with weed killer (perhaps spit from her bat-wing teats). She saw me spraying weed killer in our driveway, thought that I had sprayed her lawn in an imagined attack (for the record, I did no such thing, for such passive-aggressive neighbor games bring only miserable escalation), and so she sprayed ours in return. You could tell somebody had done it, and done it at a distance (say, when leaning over our fence): circles of dead grass that carried to the plants potted on our steps. Dead in patterns, impossible patterns, patterns not found in nature. She more or less admitted it later on. Which takes staggering balls. Or total unawareness of consequence.

I thought about retribution. Milking her lawn. Defecating in her planters. Maybe writing messages to her in weed killer, or, even better, speaking to her deepest paranoias by lathering the bottom of my shoes in Round-Up and walking across her lawn to her front porch, leaving a series of dead-grass footprints as if the Devil Himself had sauntered up to her door and tried to get inside.

But this is my retribution.

For I consider myself something of a writer, too.

The mood has struck me. The Muse is with me. I have found serenity.

And now the Ballad of Witch Tits — as true a story as any lie told — is sung.