Good Fangs Make Good Neighbors
Smartest thing she ever did was take the buyout and get out of tech, trade in her tiny San Francisco flat for a beach house on Lake Michigan. Dumbest thing she ever did was buy that house only looking at it once, when the neighbor was gone, off installing a commission piece in another state. She had two weeks of serene gorgeous views, until he came home, fired up the welding torch, and started building another metal dinosaur on his stretch of scrubby beach, mere yards from hers.
A metal. Goddamned. Dinosaur. He’s made them for years, it turns out, skeletal sauropods all over the country.
The welding is the least of it, because he wears the thick hide jacket and full mask and it’s relatively quiet. She can indulge in a clean neighborly hate and still pursue a life of leisure, read maybe, or pull out the watercolors she hasn’t used since college. It’s when he breaks out the ball peen hammer, the sledge, the heavy files, when he’s crafting teeth and scales and claws with his shirt off and just that stupid hippy necklace swinging against his ridiculous seventies furry chest with each strike…
And that’s when she sees that his body of work has shifted, the piece in progress not another skeletal herbivore in a long line of them, but a monstrous copper dragon bristling with teeth and claws, shimmering with hammered scales turning green with patina.
She throws away the crusted shut tubes of watercolor, and stuffs a microcontroller in her pocket before padding over into his yard one sunset. “You know, if you’re interested in collaboration…I could program it to breathe fire.”