A few patrons ahead of us in line at the donut store, the poet wore a floor-length emerald green robe with gold trim; he alternately quoted verses and flirted loudly with his sister. My mother imprecated quietly in my ear, mainly about the Catholic church, since the poet's popular latest volume was dedicated to his priest - and all profits supposedly went to the local parish.
I worried they would run out of coffee before I got to the front counter; back in the schoolbus, five of my labmates waited for lattes and mochas. With budget cuts in federal research money, charter buses had become a popular alternative to airlines as a means of transport to scientific meetings.
A few minutes later, I was riding in a converted van with my father. I opened a trapdoor in the middle of the floor and peered down into the dark subcompartment.
"Did you know there was a cat in a cage down here?" I asked him. I scanned the dim space anxiously, trying to determine if the animal was emaciated or dehydrated.
"What?" he responded.
"And a kitten. No three kittens. More cats. There must be half a dozen caged cats!" My voice echoed loudly in the space below, sounding more agitated than I actually felt; looking around the cats were clean, groomed.
My father sighed. "It's probably another rescue by your mother." He shrugged.
I woke groggy and parched, the most vivid memory that first moment looking through the floor at the cats, a sense of terror and sadness at what I might find. A few days ago I'd had a dream I put two kittens in a tupperware container and half-killed them with neglect.
I'm going to assume that dreaming of healthy well-cared for cats is a better sign. As for the preist, the poet, the schoolbus and my mom... I probably just need to hand that off to a starving comedian.
Friday, April 25, 2014
Thursday, March 27, 2014
Space carnival accident
My father walked over to the big green plastic carnival ride. It was broken but he glued it together, assuring me it would be "good as new in no time."
He acted like it didn't bother him at all that a family friend had said something snarky last night about my father's hobby re-building carnival rides: "It's not like he's sending rockets to the moon, or anything." My father's cheerful banter as he worked meant, of course, that it bothered him a great deal.
The ride had a thick plastic green tree trunk of a base, into which fit a giant ball joint from which sprouted four extended arms. From each arm dangled a small pod. We had ridden it endlessly in summers of my childhood.
As it rotated, the pods would flare out in wide ruffling arcs, like one of the high speed swinging bucket centrifuges in my lab might do if the operator ever lost his mind entirely and started a run without first balancing the load.
The ride normally sat four, the size of my nuclear family. To test it, my father was loading just one pod with three people - himself, my mother, and the family friend, leaving the other pods empty.
"Well," he smiled at me, zipping a silk jump suit up to his neck, "wish me luck." He said it the way you might if your dangerous mission were going to the corner store for a liter of milk. I nodded at him, smiled back. He hopped into the pod and snapped shut the door.
My best friend and I watched the pod's progress on the video moniter he had rigged, next to an altimeter with a digital readout. First I was confused, as we watched the numbers rapidly count backwards from 900. Just before they reached 0, I understood that he had set the pod to shoot straight up. It was unclear if he had meant it to go this high, but at 0 it would exit the earth's atmosphere and they would be in space. Had my father been wearing a helmet?
No sooner had the question entered my mind, it was answered: my father's head, a grainy black and white shadow in the moniter, changed from a single blob to a wispy spray, then dissipated into. Nothing. For another second, when the pod's other two passengers remained intact, I wondered if he had provided them with helmets. Then their heads too became staticky confetti.
It is hard to describe that long moment, in which there was time for so many questions and regrets, like that old cliche about your life flashing before your eyes before death, only it was my final moments with my father that replayed in agonizing detail in the microseconds after I watched my parents die.
I remembered this sensation that had risen as his eyes met mine, right before he clambered into the pod. I'd wanted to ask. What he was doing. Did he need anything. Did he need anything special. And then he was gone.
There wasn't even time to fully process the event before I woke up, groggy, feeling hungover from last night's fried chicken. The shock was wearing off and I began to mourn my family even as I realized it had been a dream.
It's such an odd feeling, this residue of grief matched with reality. That didn't happen. It wasn't real. And still I feel such a sickening, terrible sense of guilt and sadness. That I didn't ask the question. Didn't understand. Didn't insist. Didn't even hug him goodbye. I just let them go. And then my family was gone, without fanfare, just a horrible, low resolution, soundless explosion.
He acted like it didn't bother him at all that a family friend had said something snarky last night about my father's hobby re-building carnival rides: "It's not like he's sending rockets to the moon, or anything." My father's cheerful banter as he worked meant, of course, that it bothered him a great deal.
The ride had a thick plastic green tree trunk of a base, into which fit a giant ball joint from which sprouted four extended arms. From each arm dangled a small pod. We had ridden it endlessly in summers of my childhood.
As it rotated, the pods would flare out in wide ruffling arcs, like one of the high speed swinging bucket centrifuges in my lab might do if the operator ever lost his mind entirely and started a run without first balancing the load.
The ride normally sat four, the size of my nuclear family. To test it, my father was loading just one pod with three people - himself, my mother, and the family friend, leaving the other pods empty.
"Well," he smiled at me, zipping a silk jump suit up to his neck, "wish me luck." He said it the way you might if your dangerous mission were going to the corner store for a liter of milk. I nodded at him, smiled back. He hopped into the pod and snapped shut the door.
My best friend and I watched the pod's progress on the video moniter he had rigged, next to an altimeter with a digital readout. First I was confused, as we watched the numbers rapidly count backwards from 900. Just before they reached 0, I understood that he had set the pod to shoot straight up. It was unclear if he had meant it to go this high, but at 0 it would exit the earth's atmosphere and they would be in space. Had my father been wearing a helmet?
No sooner had the question entered my mind, it was answered: my father's head, a grainy black and white shadow in the moniter, changed from a single blob to a wispy spray, then dissipated into. Nothing. For another second, when the pod's other two passengers remained intact, I wondered if he had provided them with helmets. Then their heads too became staticky confetti.
It is hard to describe that long moment, in which there was time for so many questions and regrets, like that old cliche about your life flashing before your eyes before death, only it was my final moments with my father that replayed in agonizing detail in the microseconds after I watched my parents die.
I remembered this sensation that had risen as his eyes met mine, right before he clambered into the pod. I'd wanted to ask. What he was doing. Did he need anything. Did he need anything special. And then he was gone.
There wasn't even time to fully process the event before I woke up, groggy, feeling hungover from last night's fried chicken. The shock was wearing off and I began to mourn my family even as I realized it had been a dream.
It's such an odd feeling, this residue of grief matched with reality. That didn't happen. It wasn't real. And still I feel such a sickening, terrible sense of guilt and sadness. That I didn't ask the question. Didn't understand. Didn't insist. Didn't even hug him goodbye. I just let them go. And then my family was gone, without fanfare, just a horrible, low resolution, soundless explosion.
Sunday, March 16, 2014
Smuggling operation
I was hiding in the back of a closet in the cellar with my cat when the police battered down the door. It was dark, - maybe 1030pm - by the time they broke in, but there had been a helicopter circling overhead with a floodlight for the last several hours.
I could hear them swarming through the house, then several sets of heavy boots clomped downstairs, and systematically "cleared" the basement rooms till they came upon me, curled in a ball around Tinkerbell, eyes closed.
Two officers pulled me up the stairs, not ungently, each one supporting me under one armpit, because my legs wouldn't work and my arms were full of warm grey fur.
I knew why they were there, because they told me, and I put a few more pieces together as they talked to me, but pretended complete ignorance as had always been my father's instructions.
"If the police ever come and I am not here, you don't know nothin'," he'd say in his thick Louisiana dialect; and it wasn't hard it turns out, since I was hard-pressed to say much at the best of times, never mind at my kitchen table, in the middle of the night, surrounded by uniforms.
I recognized one of the female officers assigned to talk to me. She was a case worker who had been trying for several weeks to get me to agree to something. It was related to the legal trouble my father was already in over a smuggling operation. She wanted me in an adult group home or maybe it was a kind of live-in therapy - in any case, something that would require me to leave my home with my father, which I was quite certain I did not want to do.
She had talked to me about my future and potential and used other big words for hours and I would just nod and take whatever brochures and material she handed me and throw it in the recycling as soon as she was out the door.
The trouble my father was already in had to do with moonshine, which I knew was a slang term for alcohol, but this new thing was about guns and I had no difficulty pretending I had no idea that guns were being assembled or sold in my house because I had no idea about anything related to guns.
It seemed unbelievable and I said so, proud I could say something helpful with complete honesty. I liked it so much, I said it a few more times, for emphasis.
This is what I knew that I didn't tell the police. Shortly before I got home from school, I got a text from my dad saying he was going to meet one of the officers on his case unofficially - "on da side," to see if he could get him to cut dad a break on the smuggling charges.
When I did get home dad and uncle Charlie weren't there. There wasn't a note but there were dark boot prints going from the side door to the garage, and the kitchen was filthy with fine black soot that stood out starkly on the white linoleum floor and faux granite countertop in the kitchen.
So I swept and mopped all the floors and wiped the kitchen counters till it was all gone, then threw the sponge away in the incinerator out back which was exciting because it mini-exploded when I opened the door of the firebox and threw it in.
I went back into the house and called for Tinkerbell to feed her but she didn't come. By then it was getting darker, and I started to feel panicky and I heard a helicopter circling. After searching the whole house, I noticed the cellar door, always locked, was strangely ajar.
I heard sirens, far away, then closer. They cut abruptly as car after car pulled up to the house. I went around turning off all the lights, pulling closed the blinds so I could see out but they could not see in, a trick my father taught me. I heard a single "mew" from downstairs so I went down the cellar stairs, slowly, each step bringing me closer to a cooler dankness than I was used to.
Just as I reached her, huddled against the washing machine, the cops were coming up the front stairs of the veranda. I peeked out the cellar window, at the flashing red and blue splashing over my front yard. They were bringing a long, thick black something up the walk, two men needed to carry it so it must have been heavy. I turned, picked up Tinkerbell, and squeezed into the back of the pantry, buried my face in the cat's warm flank. And that is where they found me.
I could hear them swarming through the house, then several sets of heavy boots clomped downstairs, and systematically "cleared" the basement rooms till they came upon me, curled in a ball around Tinkerbell, eyes closed.
Two officers pulled me up the stairs, not ungently, each one supporting me under one armpit, because my legs wouldn't work and my arms were full of warm grey fur.
I knew why they were there, because they told me, and I put a few more pieces together as they talked to me, but pretended complete ignorance as had always been my father's instructions.
"If the police ever come and I am not here, you don't know nothin'," he'd say in his thick Louisiana dialect; and it wasn't hard it turns out, since I was hard-pressed to say much at the best of times, never mind at my kitchen table, in the middle of the night, surrounded by uniforms.
I recognized one of the female officers assigned to talk to me. She was a case worker who had been trying for several weeks to get me to agree to something. It was related to the legal trouble my father was already in over a smuggling operation. She wanted me in an adult group home or maybe it was a kind of live-in therapy - in any case, something that would require me to leave my home with my father, which I was quite certain I did not want to do.
She had talked to me about my future and potential and used other big words for hours and I would just nod and take whatever brochures and material she handed me and throw it in the recycling as soon as she was out the door.
The trouble my father was already in had to do with moonshine, which I knew was a slang term for alcohol, but this new thing was about guns and I had no difficulty pretending I had no idea that guns were being assembled or sold in my house because I had no idea about anything related to guns.
It seemed unbelievable and I said so, proud I could say something helpful with complete honesty. I liked it so much, I said it a few more times, for emphasis.
This is what I knew that I didn't tell the police. Shortly before I got home from school, I got a text from my dad saying he was going to meet one of the officers on his case unofficially - "on da side," to see if he could get him to cut dad a break on the smuggling charges.
When I did get home dad and uncle Charlie weren't there. There wasn't a note but there were dark boot prints going from the side door to the garage, and the kitchen was filthy with fine black soot that stood out starkly on the white linoleum floor and faux granite countertop in the kitchen.
So I swept and mopped all the floors and wiped the kitchen counters till it was all gone, then threw the sponge away in the incinerator out back which was exciting because it mini-exploded when I opened the door of the firebox and threw it in.
I went back into the house and called for Tinkerbell to feed her but she didn't come. By then it was getting darker, and I started to feel panicky and I heard a helicopter circling. After searching the whole house, I noticed the cellar door, always locked, was strangely ajar.
I heard sirens, far away, then closer. They cut abruptly as car after car pulled up to the house. I went around turning off all the lights, pulling closed the blinds so I could see out but they could not see in, a trick my father taught me. I heard a single "mew" from downstairs so I went down the cellar stairs, slowly, each step bringing me closer to a cooler dankness than I was used to.
Just as I reached her, huddled against the washing machine, the cops were coming up the front stairs of the veranda. I peeked out the cellar window, at the flashing red and blue splashing over my front yard. They were bringing a long, thick black something up the walk, two men needed to carry it so it must have been heavy. I turned, picked up Tinkerbell, and squeezed into the back of the pantry, buried my face in the cat's warm flank. And that is where they found me.
Monday, December 30, 2013
All's fair in love, war and movies
I dreamt that I was a male soldier in a war. I was advancing up a stairwell under fire. A head poked out over the top banister. I fired. The body tumbled down the stairs, landing at my feet, face up. I saw it was a dear friend. I had shot him through the left eye.
I picked up the body and cradled it, flooded with shame and remorse. When I put my head to his chest to see if he still lived, I heard a ticking. Not a heartbeat, more like a clock. I ripped open his shirt and saw the enemy had cut out his heart, replacing it with a bomb.
Just in time I tossed the body down the stairs behind me. It exploded before it even hit the ground. The concussive wave knocked me over. Debris rained down.
I pushed down my awareness of the nature of the explosive confetti that covered me, the walls, the floor. I kept moving. Up the stairs. Toward the objective.
At the top of the stairs was a cobblestone street. I was girl, about 13, in a nightgown. The director called, "Action!" so I pushed open the door of the Italian restaurant and took a seat next to my step-mother in a cheerful yellow booth at the back, next to the bathroom.
The shot was two and a half hours of me pretending to read the menu and order pasta and red sauce in slow motion while the special effects crew wrangled the flying equipment that was supposed to bring other actors floating gently in from stage left.
Instead they crashed and dropped, hovered and slid. Finally the director called it a day, completely exasperated. Arnold Swarzenegger patted my shoulder as he walked past. "Good job," he said. "A total pro." He'd been on the other end of the steel cables and harness for the last couple of hours, attempting to Peter Pan into the scene without success.
I rose, now grown, invited him to have a drink with me. We settled into a couch in the far corner and a friend brought two shots - one blue and one red. As Arnold downed the red, my friend whispered, "a total send-up of the Matrix." The liqueur turned his eyes bloodshot.
I had loud, vigorous sex on the couch with Arnold Swarzenegger, while extras and crew wandered past tidying up the set.
I picked up the body and cradled it, flooded with shame and remorse. When I put my head to his chest to see if he still lived, I heard a ticking. Not a heartbeat, more like a clock. I ripped open his shirt and saw the enemy had cut out his heart, replacing it with a bomb.
Just in time I tossed the body down the stairs behind me. It exploded before it even hit the ground. The concussive wave knocked me over. Debris rained down.
I pushed down my awareness of the nature of the explosive confetti that covered me, the walls, the floor. I kept moving. Up the stairs. Toward the objective.
At the top of the stairs was a cobblestone street. I was girl, about 13, in a nightgown. The director called, "Action!" so I pushed open the door of the Italian restaurant and took a seat next to my step-mother in a cheerful yellow booth at the back, next to the bathroom.
The shot was two and a half hours of me pretending to read the menu and order pasta and red sauce in slow motion while the special effects crew wrangled the flying equipment that was supposed to bring other actors floating gently in from stage left.
Instead they crashed and dropped, hovered and slid. Finally the director called it a day, completely exasperated. Arnold Swarzenegger patted my shoulder as he walked past. "Good job," he said. "A total pro." He'd been on the other end of the steel cables and harness for the last couple of hours, attempting to Peter Pan into the scene without success.
I rose, now grown, invited him to have a drink with me. We settled into a couch in the far corner and a friend brought two shots - one blue and one red. As Arnold downed the red, my friend whispered, "a total send-up of the Matrix." The liqueur turned his eyes bloodshot.
I had loud, vigorous sex on the couch with Arnold Swarzenegger, while extras and crew wandered past tidying up the set.
Sunday, December 29, 2013
Wedding cake prostitution
OK so first of all, NO MORE VODKA BEFORE BED.
It is 440 am and I can honestly say I've never had the pleasure before now of waking up in a cold sweat and realizing oh thank GOD I wasn't in charge of those two wedding cakes on the way to my prostitution court date.
So here is the dealio.
I rode a bus downtown with a friend who was going to teach me how to turn tricks. But when I arrived she said I was wearing the wrong boots. I needed thigh highs with a $50 price tag.
So I called in a favor with a friend who was also the father of one of my labmates. He pulled up to the side of the road in his blinged out SUV and when I explained why I needed the money, he hesitated, not wanting to get into legal trouble - since he was a lawyer and could be disbarred.
Eventually I promised I'd use my earnings to pay for his daughter's wedding cake. She was to be married on Tuesday - New Year's eve - and here it was Saturday and he had no ideas.
I had needed the money from hooking in the first place to pay for another special event cake - a friend was graduating - so I told him I'd just get an extra cake from the same place.
Relieved, he handed me the fifty, we embraced, he drove away, and a very pretty female police officer arrested me for intent to engage in prostitution.
I told her, tearfully, that I never got out much, just worked long hours, certainly had not spent much time downtown, that I didn't understand what was happening and so probably needed a lawyer. She nodded, smiled. It was a very genial arrest.
After I'd been booked, given a hearing date, and released, I began textbook grieving my arrest.
Bargaining - or as I like to call it, scheming: What could I say to explain my actions that would be plausible and obscure my true intention to sell sex for money?
Denial and anger: What had actually happened? I got money from a friend. Is what I had done actually illegal? Can you be arrested for INTENDING to do anything you have not actually done? I probably would have chickened out anyway. How could the police possibly predict the future?
I also cried a lot - sadness - and of course, never got to acceptance.
Meanwhile there was the small matter of the cakes. Now in this bizarre juxtaposition of two unprecedented anxieties dream you might think the problem was that between my time-consuming arrest and the chilling effect it had presumably had on my new revenue stream there was no cash or time to buy the cakes.
Not so, dear logical reader, for this is my brain on a greyhound (the drink AND the bus I traveled home from Christmas on - ha! a twofer!).
Both cakes sat chilling in my fridge when I arrived home. The problem was that they had not aged well. The events - wedding and graduation - were to take place in two days' time and already, after only 24 hours storage, the one with strawberry mousse and wafer towers was starting to ridify and the one with fresh flowers was beginning to wilt.
Looking at them now, these cakes that had seemed such perfect solutions to the tasks I had signed on for, such fitting tributes to the solemn events, now looked cheap and old.
How could I possibly find replacements that were better over a holiday with such short notice?
I woke - Never so relieved to be hungover and dehydrated.
It is 440 am and I can honestly say I've never had the pleasure before now of waking up in a cold sweat and realizing oh thank GOD I wasn't in charge of those two wedding cakes on the way to my prostitution court date.
So here is the dealio.
I rode a bus downtown with a friend who was going to teach me how to turn tricks. But when I arrived she said I was wearing the wrong boots. I needed thigh highs with a $50 price tag.
So I called in a favor with a friend who was also the father of one of my labmates. He pulled up to the side of the road in his blinged out SUV and when I explained why I needed the money, he hesitated, not wanting to get into legal trouble - since he was a lawyer and could be disbarred.
Eventually I promised I'd use my earnings to pay for his daughter's wedding cake. She was to be married on Tuesday - New Year's eve - and here it was Saturday and he had no ideas.
I had needed the money from hooking in the first place to pay for another special event cake - a friend was graduating - so I told him I'd just get an extra cake from the same place.
Relieved, he handed me the fifty, we embraced, he drove away, and a very pretty female police officer arrested me for intent to engage in prostitution.
I told her, tearfully, that I never got out much, just worked long hours, certainly had not spent much time downtown, that I didn't understand what was happening and so probably needed a lawyer. She nodded, smiled. It was a very genial arrest.
After I'd been booked, given a hearing date, and released, I began textbook grieving my arrest.
Bargaining - or as I like to call it, scheming: What could I say to explain my actions that would be plausible and obscure my true intention to sell sex for money?
Denial and anger: What had actually happened? I got money from a friend. Is what I had done actually illegal? Can you be arrested for INTENDING to do anything you have not actually done? I probably would have chickened out anyway. How could the police possibly predict the future?
I also cried a lot - sadness - and of course, never got to acceptance.
Meanwhile there was the small matter of the cakes. Now in this bizarre juxtaposition of two unprecedented anxieties dream you might think the problem was that between my time-consuming arrest and the chilling effect it had presumably had on my new revenue stream there was no cash or time to buy the cakes.
Not so, dear logical reader, for this is my brain on a greyhound (the drink AND the bus I traveled home from Christmas on - ha! a twofer!).
Both cakes sat chilling in my fridge when I arrived home. The problem was that they had not aged well. The events - wedding and graduation - were to take place in two days' time and already, after only 24 hours storage, the one with strawberry mousse and wafer towers was starting to ridify and the one with fresh flowers was beginning to wilt.
Looking at them now, these cakes that had seemed such perfect solutions to the tasks I had signed on for, such fitting tributes to the solemn events, now looked cheap and old.
How could I possibly find replacements that were better over a holiday with such short notice?
I woke - Never so relieved to be hungover and dehydrated.
Wednesday, December 4, 2013
Dream memory loss
I just spent hours doing... I was in... We were trying to ...
I have no idea. All I remember is that it felt really, really important.
I have no idea. All I remember is that it felt really, really important.
Tuesday, December 3, 2013
Big brother is watching - and so is everyone else, apparently
Last night I dreamt that my mother - who was actually Lea Thompson, the actress who plays Kathryn Kennish on "Switched at Birth" - had begun to suspect that our city was the site of a reality TV show.
To test her theory my mother rented a glider and began taking off from the shore of the lake behind our house, each time landing further and further out, in an effort to find the border, that false horizon.
Once you had that thought, the signs were everywhere. I went exploring under bridges, to see how the waterways connected. I found a young Asian lesbian couple living under the Hawthorne street bridge, nested up atop the power lines that run underneath from bank to bank. They were very hungry and cold. I gave them a shortbread cookie and $42 which was all the money in my wallet.
They told me a balding red-haired man had tricked them into a threesome and when they wanted out he ruined their credit. They couldn't hold down jobs or get an apartment. Their description reminded me of a friend I'd made just the day before - an older, wealthy man who I'd met at some supermarket and who I had invited over for dinner to discuss a business proposition. Both girls said they'd rather live on the street than by his rules.
When I looked over the edge of the bridge strut, I could see the river was partitioned by high fences midway between every bridge. It would be impossible to ride a boat or swim through the water.
Three hundred yards to the right, I spotted a classmate from grad school and his two young boys standing on the bank of the river underneath another bridge. They were skipping stones, hitting the fences. The stacatto "thunk" "thunk" as the stones reached their mark made me feel light-headed and claustrophobic.
I re-traced my steps, getting lost several time along the way. When I got home I could barely recognize it. Before it had been a 70s era split level home, and now it was a bungalow with a big yard and rose bushes.
A bouquet of daisies lay discarded in the front yard, and the cellophane wrapper was crawling with spiders and ants. I picked it up gingerly by one end and carried the package of insects and flowers to the trash.
The businessman's car was parked in the driveway. I could hear scuffling from inside the partly open front door. Someone had probably let my indoor cat out. I nudged the door open with my foot and began inching inside. From no identifiable source, soft bars of suspenseful music swelled.
To test her theory my mother rented a glider and began taking off from the shore of the lake behind our house, each time landing further and further out, in an effort to find the border, that false horizon.
Once you had that thought, the signs were everywhere. I went exploring under bridges, to see how the waterways connected. I found a young Asian lesbian couple living under the Hawthorne street bridge, nested up atop the power lines that run underneath from bank to bank. They were very hungry and cold. I gave them a shortbread cookie and $42 which was all the money in my wallet.
They told me a balding red-haired man had tricked them into a threesome and when they wanted out he ruined their credit. They couldn't hold down jobs or get an apartment. Their description reminded me of a friend I'd made just the day before - an older, wealthy man who I'd met at some supermarket and who I had invited over for dinner to discuss a business proposition. Both girls said they'd rather live on the street than by his rules.
When I looked over the edge of the bridge strut, I could see the river was partitioned by high fences midway between every bridge. It would be impossible to ride a boat or swim through the water.
Three hundred yards to the right, I spotted a classmate from grad school and his two young boys standing on the bank of the river underneath another bridge. They were skipping stones, hitting the fences. The stacatto "thunk" "thunk" as the stones reached their mark made me feel light-headed and claustrophobic.
I re-traced my steps, getting lost several time along the way. When I got home I could barely recognize it. Before it had been a 70s era split level home, and now it was a bungalow with a big yard and rose bushes.
A bouquet of daisies lay discarded in the front yard, and the cellophane wrapper was crawling with spiders and ants. I picked it up gingerly by one end and carried the package of insects and flowers to the trash.
The businessman's car was parked in the driveway. I could hear scuffling from inside the partly open front door. Someone had probably let my indoor cat out. I nudged the door open with my foot and began inching inside. From no identifiable source, soft bars of suspenseful music swelled.
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