I found a bit of a granola bar on the ground. I know no one ate it. I was trying to plug a power strip into the phone line, because I don't pay attention, when there was a knock on the door. It was my next-door neighbor. She had moved out six months earlier. At least I thought she had. "What are you doing tonight?," she asked. This was odd because we had never spoken before. She was of middle Asian descent, with small pink bows on her shirt, a wonderful scent that made me want to impregnate her, and she was holding three pizzas.

I was worried. I was also lactose intolerant. Maybe she had come back to stab me in the gut. I was also knife in the gut intolerant. It's a birth defect. The doctors told my parents there wasn't anything they could do. "Just make sure no one ever puts a knife in his belly. His soft, soft belly. He'll probably bleed to death."

"Would you like some pizza? I ordered too much."

"Uhh, sure, okay."

"Come on over." She smiled. She knew something I didn't. So did the ancient Egyptians.

We walked into her apartment. There was stuff everywhere, as people like to have things in the place where they live. But most people don't keep it in boxes. No one else was there. I guessed she ordered about two and a half pizzas too many. She closed the door behind us with a kick, and kept smiling. I turned around. She threw the pizzas on a table, and grabbed me around the neck. A couple of hours later in bed, she offered me some cold pizza.

"Uh. Do you have a microwave."

"You can't eat cold pizza?"

"Not ... not really."

Her name was Erilina. My name was Syphon Cummingham. The g was silent. Erilina .. something. Seoung, I think. She was born in San Diego. And she didn't like any of the names I tried to call her. Eri. Lina. Erilina. Mrs. Cummingham. She really hated that one. So I called her San Diego.

We let pizza get cold together for about three months. Then she disappeared, and I had to cool off my own pizza again. I don't know what she saw in me. Maybe she felt as alone as I did. Maybe she actually found me attractive. Or maybe I lived next door and I had a penis.

I took a big bite of a slice with extra cheese. Thank the lord above who created my horrible lactose intolerance that they make pills to help it. I just wish they made pills to help with losing your Korean fuckbuddy. Also renal cancer.

Six months earlier I heard some screaming in another language I couldn't understand. I looked outside and saw a Korean woman yelling at what I assumed to be her boyfriend in Korean. Eventually the cops showed up. A couple of days later I saw him rubbing her hands, with his forehead touching her belly. Neither of them said anything. I moved away from the peephole and tried to forget about it.

Occasionally I would meet her son, about 9 years old, in the hallway. He always held the door for me. But I could tell he didn't really want to. One time he tried to open my apartment door for me. It was locked. A different white guy from the belly listener who was presumably his dad but maybe not admonished him for it. The kid was just trying to be nice, I guess. Sometimes he rode his bike back and forth down the parking lot. His mom would see him, yell at him, and he'd go inside. Any other time I saw his mom, she was carrying a laundry basket. She never made eye contact. At least with me. Or anything other than the ground.

One time I was carrying a video game into my apartment. He came out of the laundry room. "Hi," he said, looking at what I was carrying, and not me.

"Hey."

"Hey, I've got one of those."

"Ah. ...Yeah."

"Later."

I never really saw him again.

A few months later, there was a knock at the door. The woman inviting me over for pizza seemed a bit unfamiliar. But I couldn't figure out what it was.

A few minutes after about the fifteenth time I climbed off of her, I decided to ask. "Hey, do you speak Korean?"

"HA! Definitely not." She still had a big smile on her face. She always did. It was disturbing. "My parents do, and my older sister does. But the rest of us never learned how. Why? Do you want me to talk dirty to you in Korean?" She smiled even bigger.

"No. ...Just curious."