{"id":23469,"date":"2026-02-08T08:19:03","date_gmt":"2026-02-08T13:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/?p=23469"},"modified":"2026-02-08T08:23:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-08T13:23:22","slug":"my-neighbor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/flash-fiction\/my-neighbor\/","title":{"rendered":"My Neighbor Pays Me $100 to Dress Up Like His Dead Daughter"},"content":{"rendered":"

I should have told him to get lost because everyone said he had to be a creep. What kind of man buys a single-family home in a neighborhood full of kids anyways?<\/em> the mothers said when they circled up at the playground. But then I bumped into the popular girls at 7Eleven while they split a blue raspberry Slurpee and they looked right through me. Didn’t even giggle or point or whisper or do what mean girls do best. I bought a bag of peach rings with some spare change from my mother’s purse and ran outside and that’s when I saw the neighbor, the one everyone said to stay away from, filling up his gas tank. You want a ride home?<\/em> he asked. I live right around the corner.<\/em> I would have said no but the popular girls were peering at us through the glass front entrance, watching with stunned, frozen faces as I got in the front seat and we peeled away in his rusting RAV4. I put a peach ring on one finger then another while he drove. Bit them off until I tasted skin. He watched me do it, too. One hand on the wheel. Maybe everyone was right. Maybe he was a creep. I’ve got a favor to ask you<\/em>, he said. And that’s when he told me I reminded him of his dead daughter because we both have red hair, freckles, and look like we’re keeping everybody else’s secrets. I’ve still got her prom dress<\/em>, he said. But I can’t find the photos anywhere<\/em>. I rub sticky, peach ring residue on my jeans. It would mean a lot to me if you could help me recreate them<\/em>. He offered to pay me $100 for my trouble. I agreed because he looked so damn sad, fumbling around in his wallet to show me her school photo. Her pretty face floating against one of those marble-blue backgrounds. She really did look like me. You’ve both got dimples<\/em>, he said. She must have been taller than me though because I tripped over the hem of the dress when I put it on and wore it out to the backyard where the neighbor set up a digital camera on a tripod. He’d changed his shirt too, presumably into the one he wore on his dead daughter’s prom night because of the way the buttons stretched over his beer gut. He paid me the $100 in $10 bills. Maybe I should have asked more questions about the dead daughter, about what it was like to keep on living without her instead of counting the bills, rolling them up like a cigarette to tuck behind my ear. He put the camera on a timer and rushed to stand next to me. Looped his arm around my neck and pulled me so close we were cheek to cheek. He gripped my shoulder. Like I really was his dead daughter and he\u2019d be able to hold the both of us in place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

And that’s when he told me I reminded him of his dead daughter because we both have red hair, freckles, and look like we’re keeping everybody else’s secrets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":24387,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3530],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-flash-fiction","writer-christina-tudor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23469"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24386,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23469\/revisions\/24386"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24387"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}