Mother Goose, Part 1

The woman who lives in apartment 1C owns two dogs. They’re yorkshire terriers with wiry black hair like the remaining strands of mostly grease on your Great Uncle Floyd’s head. Their shrill yaps sound like the recordings that voice every obnoxious cartoon dog. Yet their barks don’t irk me half as much as 1C when she calls them in every night from their annual pee-fest in the yard.

“C’mon. C’mon.” Words that could be endearing and inviting when spoken soft and satin? But 1C’s voice is set to the timbre of a tenor bassoon and snaps with the rapidity of a gum pop. Those “c’mons” evolve past one word into a single, brassy quip, which sounds exactly like the quack of a goose. “C’mon. C’mon.” becomes “Quack. Quack.”

Maybe 1C is the younger sister of the lady who swallowed a horse, except 1C wasn’t idiotic enough to swallow a horse because she didn’t want to die of course. (It all happened so long ago, she’s beginning to think of the incident not as reality, but as one of those nursery rhymes that warns kids against eating weird things--a cautionary tale, like the one adults tell their kids to warn them against gateway drugs. Does that make flies the weed of animals kids shouldn’t eat? Are birds: narcotics, cats: shrooms, and horses: heroine? I can picture thinking I’m eating a dog while tripping on acid. Or accidentally eating one. Not that I’ve done acid, Mom, Dad, Grandparents… I’m just really smart and know about everything).

Anyway -- back to the woman of 1C --, in my theoretical version of her childhood, she followed her sister all the way up to dog, but instead of eating a goat, she screwed up and ate a goose. “Typical,” her sister had said, but 1C got the last quack.

My window overlooks the yard from the fourth floor of our complex and as I lay in bed these past few weeks, trying to fall asleep to the mix of “whale noises” my sister sent me -- NOT WORKING, EZZIE, but thanks for thinking about your insomniac big bro -- I could hear her quacking to her dogs. Quack-yap, quack-yap for at least 30 minutes before she finally resorted to dog treats to coax them inside.

This has been happening the entire time I’ve lived on Sacramento, but Wednesday night was especially terrible. I had an interview for an internship the next morning--the one at npr that I actually care about. They had been outside for almost an hour, quack-yapping back and forth before I lost it, threw off my covers and started yelling out the window.

“Can you please shut up down there? I’m trying to sleep.”

“Beauty sleep?” A high voice called. I looked down but could see no other heads sticking out of windows. At least I knew that I wasn’t the only one being kept up by Pacabell’s duck-symphony from hell.

“I’m insecure enough without thinking about beauty in my sleep!” I shouted back.

“You’re annoying, that’s what you are!” Quacked 1C, her upturned face a swollen beet after it's been left to soak, when the red is paling and the flesh is sagging off.

“No, your dogs are annoying and I can’t sleep.”

“They’re slow movers.”

“Why don’t you give them treats right away?”

“I want them to learn!” I leaned further out the window.

“At their age?”

“They’re only ten!”

“That’s like a hundred in dog years!” A tenant below me spat out a laugh and I smiled. Do I occasionally exaggerate to make a point? Yes. Is that a problem? Not at all.

“Should I leave them out here overnight?” She screamed up, trying to dent the sidewalk with the force of a single red booty. Well, yes, then they might learn, I thought, but answered,

“Would that hurt them? It’s not like the wolves will come out and eat them.”

“How do you know?” Her voice, though strong with fury, trembled on the last word. Had I gone too far? Mmm I didn’t think so. Because--

“We live in a city. There are no wolves in Chicago!”

Believe me or not--I’m not sure I do--the next thing we both heard was not the yap-yap of her terriers or the laugh of another tenant, but a howl, high and rising. It was the sound of a werewolf in a teen fantasy series, but close and potentially real.

1C screamed and I leaned down, peering into the darkness around the back of the yard where the garage meets the shadowed alley. I thought I saw movement, a rustling around the recycling bin. But then my hands slipped off the windowsill and my head plummeted forwards out of my bedroom towards the ground--

To be continued...

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