Cityscape

I lived in this apartment building.  The mother of the family next door was a rather nervous, quiet, woman.  I met her one night in her dreams.  She said she wanted to show me something.  It was just getting light out and the rest of her family was still asleep, having dreams of their own.  She put a finger to her lips and then brushed aside the clothes hung up in her closet to reveal a secret panel in the wall.

The panel opened onto a passageway that led down several winding flights of stairs.  We passed a room where some old grey-haired accountants seemed to be working.  One of them stared after us sourly with his bottom lip stuck out.  I turned back, out of curiosity, but the woman took my hand and led me on, eager to show me something.  There was a giddiness in her eyes, and something in the way that she was tiptoeing down the stairs in her white nightgown made her seem younger despite her lined face and wrinkled hands.

At the bottom of the stairs we came to a balcony.  The fresh air and the view hit me all at one.  It was a futuristic cityscape, although it seemed as though it were made out of plastic toys.  There were brightly colored gizmos and gyros that seemed to operate everything.  There were all sorts of sleek vehicles and humming electronic and mechanical noises.  It was like a vast living machine or an organism, endlessly interlocking motion and energy.

In the air around us there hung solid blocks of letters forming words that felt like they were attacking us, bearing down threateningly from the sky. Apparently, I wasn't the only who felt this way.  I looked over and noticed the neighbor woman curled up on floor of the balcony.  She was shaking and half-hysterical.   She told me that it absolute torture for her to keep coming here, but somehow she couldn't stop.  She brought me along because she needed someone else to see it.  

My Bad Hair Day

An old boss of mine was cutting my hair.  He had a barber's chair set up in the middle of a store for some reason.  Shoppers stared at me as they went by.  One kid stopped to gawk with his finger in his mouth.  I slipped my hand out from under the cape and gave him a little smile and a wave.  When he was done, my boss removed the cape with a flourish, brushed some powder on my neck, and rang me up on an old cash register that he had sitting off to the side, the kind with the numbered cards that pop up in the window and the lever you crank to ring the bill and open the cash drawer.  He charged me twenty bucks, which seemed a little steep.

I stopped in the restroom to inspect my haircut in the mirror, as I often used to do.  It was awful.  A total mess.  It was all patchy and uneven and not even trimmed close and neat the way I like it, just sparse clumps of hair and some sloppy manipulation with a comb.  I would have been better off trimming it myself with the clippers like I normally do.  I was going to have to do that anyway.  What a disappointment.