Neighbor

My annoying female ten dollar hooker (srsly a hooker) neighbor walked up my front steps with me, and I unlocked the door. The house alarm goes off. She asks "what is that, an alarm clock?" Understandable mistake. I go to the keypad to punch in the numbers. "Why do you motherfuckers have an alarm clock in your wall?"

And I slowly count 1, 2, 3...

Before I fixed it, it said "my annoying female ten dollar hooker." I left out neighbor. Ha. Glad I caught that now, and not later.

The remnants of the dream seem to lie in me not like a story or a song but like a painting, with pieces here and there and no specific direction to take in viewing them all. I will describe the most dominant parts.

We lived next to the foreign couple. We didn’t know the husband very well, but we were quite friendly with the wife whenever our respective errands would bring us out to the front yard at the same time. She was a nervous woman, and always acted deliberately and carefully, but no one could ever detect any hint of negative thought toward anyone. She was crying one night while she was doing dishes under the window that pointed toward a row of windows in a room of our house. We had the misfortune of seeing and hearing into the kitchen that seemed to breed her despair. Just then, a window that faced her house and kitchen was abruptly shattered, and a small collection of photographs fell onto the floor. All of the pictures were of her, close-ups of her face taken with a professional camera in deliberate poses. One was her stoic face looking into the camera, with black hair parted normally. This picture was mounted on a piece of paper with another, smaller picture, in the upper right corner of the paper, showing her profile from her right side. These pictures showed her as we saw her every day. In the next picture, her hair was gelled and sticking mostly straight up in haphazard clumps. She was again looking into the camera, and her face took up nearly the entirety of the picture. The next was another piece of paper with two pictures mounted on them in the same style as the previous one. In this, the two pictures had the woman in the exact same poses, with the same impassive expression, only this time with a thick layer of faded blue paint coating her face, already dried and starting to crack. The next picture did not seem to be taken deliberately. It showed her obviously in pain and reeling away from the general direction of the camera, holding her arms up as if to defend herself from an attacker. She had marks on her face from where it seemed as if she had gotten punched, and blood was running from the right corner of her mouth, and it had been smeared across that cheek. There was a general feeling of concern in the house as we continued to hear her crying and occasional sounds of anguish as she and her husband argued loudly over the dishes in a language that we couldn’t understand.

A young woman was telling a painful story of her and her abusive father. Having wanted a boy and finding himself irreparably broken by his disappointment in his daughter and only child, he would force her onto the floor of their house and straddle across her chest. He would then throw a large, dark, wirework mask over her face. It was a vertical distortion of a boy’s face and had several layers of tightly curled wires. It was large enough to touch the floor in nearly a complete circle around the young woman’s head, excepting space for her neck. The mask did not actually touch the girl at all, so she did not feel any physical pain when her father would punch the mask amidst cursing and screaming.