Filed under: general
He is stretched out on his ratty, three hundred pound stupid wood and vinyl sleeper-sofa, which has not been sleepable for a long time. Something having to do with missing pieces. It is a sofa that my stubborn boyfriend hauled up and down four substantial flights of stairs in two years because it was worth a lot of money before my dog chewed the wooden arm up. And now the dog lays on it, and he looks so bored. I whistle, and his face twitches.
Now he suddenly jumps up as the synthesized voice on the laptop starts speaking. The long grey fur on his face is smooshed in a million directions at once, which is hilarious. He looks annoyed now for being interrupted from his boredom and then laughed at. He looks at the back door. He looks at me. He yawns while falling backwards, into his original position.
The new neighbors are out in the street screaming again, but he doesn’t respond to that. It almost seems like they go outside to scream, instead of staying in their apartment to scream. Maybe they are the tenants of various apartments so they meet between their buildings to scream.
My boyfriend hates it when I raise my voice. I do it a lot in public because of my trashy upbringing, but I don’t go out into the street in front of my house to do it. And that makes me feel more civilized than the new neighbors. The new neighbors’ kids go out into the street to get involved in the arguments too sometimes. Little kids. Like six year old girls. I think it is not a good example to set for your kids.
The dog sighs loudly, almost theatrically.
I begin to think of all the bad examples I would set for my kids, if I had some. Sleeping all day, watching too much television, smoking, drinking, swearing a hell of a lot. And yelling at my baby’s daddy at the grocery store for rushing me. I hate being rushed. Just like my mother.
The dog jumps up again with a smooshed face. He is responding to a noise. It is a noise I hear often, probably daily, mid-day. I don’t know what it is. It sounds like someone hitting a garage door with a big rubber mallet 100 feet away. It sounds approximately three times a second, but not with any rhythmic regularity. Sometimes it gets louder, and that is when it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck.
In the Summer, my neighbor to the north, who drives a truck around to collect junk during the day and drives a cab at night, releases his six kids into his backyard to stomp on soda cans. I hear them doing it almost every day, and it usually makes me happy. They have a green plastic swingset in the backyard which was new last summer and now has no seats. It is just a structure with chains hanging from it. Maybe the kids sometimes hang from the chains. That’s what I would do.
After about five minutes, the banging sound out back has stopped. The arguing out front has started again, and I feel relieved.
Leave a Comment so far
Leave a comment
