Mr. Hairputtle was not well-liked in the neighborhood. The children were taught to sneer at the name, while the adults constantly dreamed up new reasons to dislike him, from "Why does he seem to walk out to get his mail at the same time that I do?" all the way to such things as "His window shutters don't actually shut, they are just cosmetic."
There was nothing particularly unusual about shutters that won't shut in this part of town, and while they are silly and rather pointless, the tenant of the house can hardly be blamed for decorative styles of architecture which celebrate illusion and common dysfunction. Mr. Hairputtle meant no harm with his house's fake window shutters of course, but he could hear the whispers over the picket fences and he kept to himself for the most part.
Directly across the street from Mr. Hairputtle lived the Keens. The Keens had sports cars, motorbikes, a swimming pool with a diving board and a slide. Mr. Keen wore shorts to work, drank diet soda with his steak, and he and Mrs. Keen were raising three fine boys. The Keens were popular in the neighborhood, had no fences, and never whispered about anything. The Keens were normal. Why then, upon one bright July day-- with eyes darting and shades drawn, did Mrs. Keen suddenly begin plotting the demise of Mr. Hairputtle?
The cricking of the crickets through the pastoral lawns and hedges of the neighborhood were the buzz and hum of nature, refusing to leave their instincts behind when the neighborhood moved in, and aloft with the ancient buzz now came a new tone. This new sound began as whispers, then became as a billion sharp corners in the very air-- a bleating it did become, and the quiet glens now churned with the near-visible swirls of grey-green fear as the neighborhood gossip and rumor twisted down the lanes and over the fences, gripping the eerie daylight and haunting the streetlight's hum by evening.
And so it was that this gossip and chatter curled it's way up into the Keen's gardens, lacing their ears with mischief and deceit like a noxious gas might waft into an unsuspecting nostril. Twas Mrs. Keen who succumbed to it first as she was tending a row of delicate but well-armed roses along the front drive, and once dosed, she found her rational mind becoming shredded, razed by the billion corners of the lies and tales-- stories long since distorted into unrecognizable monstrosities.
With her newfound fear of the unknown coupled with her newfound unease with the idea of Mr. Hairputtle living across the street, Mrs. Keen couldn't shake the words, the ominous clutch of little words which now repeated in her head, until a frightening thought was born through the brownish haze of confusion which had engulfed her, the words suddenly taking new meaning for her as she floundered in the torrent. With a last hard look across the street, she had dashed back into the house, drawing the front window curtains for the first time ever. Trembling, she found a pen, and began writing on a series of Post-It notes, the words that she'd heard in the wind's whistle through the neighborhood fences. Incredibly she did scribble, and the sticky notes which she then lined up on the dining room table formed the words, "Shutters that don't shut"
How a tale does begin to twist, when the teller must keep looking over their own shoulders as they relay such gossip and hearsay.
Weaving through the fencerows, curling next to the old clothesline, the gossip had reached an acute level of paranoid fever, and the great conspiracy of the fake plastic window shutters reached through the roses and shook Mrs. Keen dramatically. Her sticky-note scribblings were smitten with hyperbole and psychobabble, reeking of fear and glittering like tinfoil, so that when Mr. Keen came home that evening he furrowed his brow deeply as he muttered along with her spontaneous writings.
"Is Mr. Hairpuddle a bad person?" It was the youngest Keen boy's innocent question, but his father's exasperated expression was new to the family, and the boy didn't ask again, nor did he dare ask about what was for dinner, but instead shuffled up to his bedroom and shut the door.
Mrs. Keen rocked back and forth on the kitchen floor, and despite her child's question, she refused to utter the name 'Hairputtle', but would only point a shaking finger in the direction which had terrified her-- across the street. She would no longer speak, her once-vibrant voice was now missing. For a few days Mr. Keen helplessly watched her behavior, and on the third day, she was taken in for 'observation'.
It was with eerie irony that the doctor who studied the case of Mrs. Keen worded her condition, writing that "...her mind was a house, and while a well-built house has shutters to protect the glass windows from damaging hail or the flung debris of a hurricane, she became convinced that her mind was unprotected from the weather, as she found that during the height of a storm she was unable to shield herself from the world, as if her mind had been fashioned with shutters which wouldn't shut..."
artwork above, 'Spirit of the Neighborhood'- 16" X 20" oil on masonite panel 2006