Nowhere Is Safe From… THEM

I live in a ground floor apartment in the middle of my little town with a small courtyard at the back. There’s a lovely set of glass sliding doors that open from the living room into said courtyard, and on the other side of the courtyard fence is a public footpath, with a public carpark behind it. It’s lunchtime here, so there’s a person walking past every five minutes or so.

I’m physically disabled and use a walking stick. My genetic disorder, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, also makes me look significantly younger than I am, so despite being thirty-one, I’m often mistaken for a teenager — especially by entitled jerks, for whom I seem to be a g**d*** magnet.

I am sitting on my sofa, watching TV and eating my lunch, when I spot one of those little black millipedes on the carpet. We get a lot of them at this time of year. So, I use an empty muesli bar box to scoop it up and chuck it over the fence, so that it hopefully won’t come back into the apartment. No big deal, right?

There is this lady walking along the footpath, a fair way down from our fence.

Lady: *Yelling* “I saw what you just did!”

I don’t think she is barking at me, since I haven’t done anything wrong or unusual, so I start to go back inside. She then appears at our back gate and starts shouting at me.

Lady: “I saw you throwing rubbish over the fence! That’s littering!”

Me: “I just threw a millipede over the fence that I found on my carpet.”

Lady: “You’re lying! I saw you throw a box!”

I open the fly screen and hold up the empty muesli bar box.

Me: “You mean this one?”

She freezes and stammers a bit.

Lady: “Well, obviously, you threw something else, then!”

Like I am being the idiot here? Ha!

Me: “Then where is it?”

And this b**** actually starts scouring the flowerbed between the footpath and the carpark for the imaginary rubbish she is adamant that I threw!

I guess she finds nothing she can reasonably accuse me of having thrown out there, because she comes back to the fence and barks:

Lady: “If I ever catch you littering again, missy, you’ll be dealing with the police!”

Me: “Sure! I’d love to tell them about you harassing a disabled woman in her own home. We’ll see how that goes for you.”

And she storms off. What the actual f***?! I get dealing with jerks like that in the wild, but in my own g**d*** home?! I wish I’d thought to snap a photo of her, just in case. Hindsight is twenty-twenty.