noisy neighbors

Noisy Neighbors

A Story by the Ascendance EngineersWritten for a Crash Course in Creativity

December 2012

I bought a foreclosure house about one year ago. After I moved in, I met a wonderful couple who lived next door. Soon we became good friends.

About 6 months later, I started to hear loud noises at midnight – the sound of fighting, a woman screaming, the noise of throwing and breaking objects, etc. The noises kept me up all whole night, worrying that

someone was going to get killed. I thought about calling police to report domestic violence, but since they were so nice to me, I decided I should check with them to see what was going on first.

The next day I met the wife in a local supermarket and I asked her what happened. She just laughed and said the noise I heard was from the television. She said her

husband liked to watch TV at midnight and his favorites were suspense and murder movies, so there was nothing to worry about.

Then there was a peaceful time for a few weeks, until I got a Netflix gift card from a friend for my birthday. I thought that since I already had Netflix, I would give it to

my neighbor, because I knew the husband liked movies. As I expected, the husband was really excited when he got the Netflix card.

Unfortunately, a tragedy happened two months later - the wife died in a car accident on a stormy day. The police report showed the car maker was responsible for

the mechanical failures, so the husband got a large amount of money from the car maker as compensation.

Last night, I met the husband at a bar. I thought he must be devastated after losing his wife. After a couple of drinks, he told me he could finally get peaceful nights sleep. He said that he stayed up late watching movies because he could not stand the noise of

his wife's loud snoring.

After I went home, the image of this couple just kept coming back to me. Finally it struck me: the husband had watched so many murder movies on Netflix, that he finally figured out how to plan a perfect murder-

accident to get rid of his wife and become rich. Too bad I just don't have the evidence to prove it!