A Halloween Visitor

Packs of kids roam the streets in colorful costumes, pelting ahead of their parents, swarming the adults on the stoops to grab handfuls of candy, shouting nonsense to each other, trading preferred treats with the cunning and avarice of silk road merchants. 

A scrum of them surround me - minions and superheroes and cuties with bearskin and wide, alien eyes - and I do my best to notice all of them, give them their due in both sugar and attention, so as the most recent wave begins to recede, one catches my eye, and I turn to her next.

It takes me a second to register that she’s not, in fact, in any kind of costume, nor is she a kid: her hair is piled in a ratted, single mass of a dread on top of her head, out from under which eyes with white showing entirely around the irises peer, while her black, shapeless dress, fallen off both shoulders, barely contains her heavy breasts that sag beneath. 

She smiles, but shakes her head when I offer her candy, and turns to Katie, saying, “I have a daughter who looks like you!”

Don’t Spook The Doctors

The new, young doctor and her even younger shadow bustle around the tiny examining room while my usual doctor goes to fight with the pharmacy about where exactly the lidocaine might have gotten to, and why it might be taking an hour to get it. They move the ultrasound machine, then move it back, do-si-do around each other, put on gloves, take them off, misplace them, leave and come back.

My dressing gown and I watch all this hubbub with mild concern. I mean, they’re doctors, so I definitely don’t ask, “How old are you?” or “Have either of you actually done this before?” because I know how that makes me sound, and it certainly wouldn’t help the case of nerves they seem to have, especially when they’re about to stick me with needles, so I keep my mouth shut.

Fall Dusk

There’s a light in the air, a gray light from the overcast sky, that pervades the park. I watch people outside the booth when it’s slow and I want a distraction from the pain in my legs. 

They move through the mild, gloomy evening, and there’s this sense of… not exactly nostalgia, maybe mild deja vu. Everyone is young and beautiful and completely unaware of the cold winter that’s coming.

In my head

“Excuse me,” the man asks me as I’m standing in the parking lot of U-Haul. “Where did you get that cart?”

“It’s not mine,” I say, looking down at the grey plastic dolly the company lets you borrow that’s piled up with merch for the upcoming market, “but I can unload this one for you.”
We go back and forth like this, with me thinking that he wants to know where I purchased this dolly and offering to unpack this one, and him trying to explain that he just wants to know where they ARE, until finally I figure it out and walk over to show him, saying, “Sorry, I’m kind of in my head today.”

East Coast Nice

“Where are you from?” the guy manning the “Road Closed” sign asks me.

The usual impulse behind this question involves me being pretty open and friendly in a conversation, which must mean I’m not from New York, Brooklyn, or the east coast - and I’m not, but I like to flex my bona fides: “Well I’ve been here almost thirty years, but I grew up in Arizona. What about you

“I’m from Connecticut,” he says sheepishly.

Come again?

 “You look like you’re having a pretty good day,” I observe. The older gentleman to whom I’m addressing these remarks looks at me me for a moment before continuing. 

“Well, I guess I’ve been perkier lately, but it’s been a rough year since my wife died,” he says, reaching down to some shelves near his feet.

“I’m sorry,” I say incredulously, “did you mention someone dying?”

Estimate

“We’ve only got help for a few hours,” Katie says as we enter the second day of move-in. “How long do you think it will take to finish this project?”

“I don’t know how long it will take,” I answer, exasperated. “I’ve never done it before!”