He called it Devolution.

Last week I allowed myself to participate in a little neighborly intrigue. My landlady, myself, and the next door lady converged on the lawn and bonded in the only way women know how--by clustering in a knot and deliberately and maliciously tearing apart the nearest lifeform.

The subject of our acrimony? Strange Gardening Man across the street. Over the past year his lawn has been the focal point of a neighborhood gripe. It started as something resembling a mud hut that reeked and crumbled and ran in goopy rivulets down the road when it rained. It has become incrementally better--a strange combination of green mounds and artfully fallen trees and haphazard flowers. I've watched it's progress and have decided that it's an entrance to a tunnel system for a race of subcity dwellers a la Lovecraft. I did not, however, mention this to my fellows.

But there we stood, silent and hissing. Our conversation touched on everything from the aesthetic to the practical, was peppered with bits of personal gossip ("Did you know he owns So and So?"), and was capped off with stray, unrelated complaints for good measure ("Don't even get me started on the company he keeps."). We were very thorough.

Perhaps from fatigue, perhaps from a vestigial sense of guilt, it ended as quickly as it started. We broke company, settled our feathers, cleaned our talons, and retreated behind our respective windows. And I vowed never to get caught outside again without a male buffer.