An old man used to lived next door to me. Bert was is his name. Could have been around 70 years old, but I never asked. Didn’t ever found out his last name either. Everyday I would collect his newspaper for him because he couldn’t walk down the driveway himself. Funnily, he never stopped his paper subscription when he went away and such, or to visit grandkids on the mainland, and he’d read them all when he came back.

Gone for two weeks or a month, it wouldn’t matter— he would read each and every paper in order from the day he left to the day he came back. He seemed to enjoy it greatly— I would hand him the stack of papers upon his return, and his crickled face would fold into an expression of glee, and he would read each headline first before driving in. I never found out where he went on his trips; I would just wait for him to come back.

June, five years ago was the last time I saw him. Killed in Spain, or got lost— I never found out. Little forms came in the mail saying that his subscription would be automatically renewed.

Many years ago he’d told me of a wife who’d run away with a young ship handler in Italy thirty years earlier. Never heard from her since, he told me, except from a monthly cheque of six thousand dollars, and daily newspaper.

“Of course I was sad she left,” he told me, “But at the same time, having a mansion and a lot of money never hurt anyone too much.”

Piles of papers collected in my back shed over the years, and I always took care to make sure that they didn’t get moldy. Questions were never asked by me when he left for months at a time— I never needed to know where he went, what he did, and he never went into detail about his recent past— I was only ever there for the newspaper collection and sometimes to have tea. Rustic tea, though; he tried to put on a Japanese tea ceremony with authentic antique Japanese cups and pots following a whole ritual he learned and fully remembered from a trip to Japan 48 years before; but his hands shook too much and couldn’t pour the tea without spilling it all over his carpet, and from then on I poured the basic orange pekoe tea into the grey chipped ceramic mugs for the two of us whenever he invited me over.

Sunday’s he would go to church, but not to pray— he would go visit the pastor and smoke weed with him behind the church at lunchtime while the churchgoers were eating potato salad and drinking pineapple juice in the courtyard;

“A little weed is never too good for the soul, and the pastor could do with a little loosening up,” he told me when I asked him about it.

Then, after church, he would come home and listen to his radio, and smoked by himself on the back porch, looking over his grand estate, like he did nearly every evening— he never offered to smoke with me after church, and I never asked to; I only ever smoked alone really, and I liked it that way.

Usually when he left for a trip he wouldn’t tell me; I would just find out because I wouldn’t hear his radio— he always kept his window open and it drifted into my home. Vigilantly, I kept my ears open for the sound of radio flowing from his brick mansion and over this neglected estate into my townhouse.

When the first winter came after his disappearance, I was sure he’d come back, at least to fetch his summer clothes to go to Greece, because that’s where he spent winter for the past seven years. Xanthoceras, his massive Chinese plant, who sat in the front window of his house, began to wilt in the first spring of him leaving, so I smashed the window and took it into my house, almost like taking a little piece of him; I never took anything else from his home. Years went by, and the papers turned into pulp, but the plant stayed alive and the subscription kept coming, whether the ex knew of his disappearance or not. Zealously, I took care of the plant and stacked his newspapers in the event that the man would resurface to me.

I watched his home fall into decay, into the ground, the Earth swallowing it up; only the pale bones that held the house together remained, withering under the sun and rain.