It was quite a crowd that had gathered out front of the house. I took it as a sign that pandemic or no pandemic, give the kids some good wholesome Halloween fun and they would turn out in droves.
I was upstairs in the home office, looking down on the throng from the open window.
“Moms and dads, let’s try to keep the little ones under control, okay?” I yelled. “Six feet between groups, please. Don’t worry, you’ll all get a turn. Keep those masks on, now.”
It was an odd question from Wilson, but then again so many from him were on the strange side.
“Are you going to the room for kvetching?” he asked.
I stared at him from behind my lab goggles, puzzled. There were only a few of us back in the office, so in general the kvetching was a bit on the low side these days. I wasn’t quite sure there was a need for an entirely separate room in which to kvetch.
Asleep on the couch, a glorious Sunday afternoon nap to be followed by a socially-distant cookout at the Wald’s place a few blocks over. It doesn’t get a whole lot better, especially during the stress and strain of the pandemic.
I was drifting off into that nice in-between place just before the deep sleep kicks in when I heard a distant buzzing. Maybe a fly had slipped inside. It wasn’t exactly peak season for house flies, but whatever it was, it could wait. When I got up I would tackle the pest it if still insisted on visiting.
I was shoved against the wall, and before I could speak, or start crying, the lights came on. As best I could tell I was in a bar.
There was a pool table, a ping pong table, a full-sized refrigerator, along with a couch, and a couple of big easy chairs. Some guy was asleep in one of the chairs. And oh yeah, there was a flat-screen TV that took up a full wall. A replay of a Jets game was on, which may have explained the sleeping guy.
The knock at the door was soft, so soft I wasn’t even sure it was a knock. I concentrated and listened for it again, but it was difficult to hear anything over the industrial humming of the air filtration-cleansing-purifying-recycling apparatus in my office.
But there it was again, a soft tapping on the door.