“Mom.” The word was said quietly but with an eagerness, jarring Nikki back from the brink of her dreams. “Mom,” it came again more insistently, and she awoke to see her son hovering in the doorway of her bedroom. He stood up a little taller when he saw that she was awake, and renewed his assault in earnest. “Mom.”

Nikki sighed. For just the briefest of spare moments between her workout and the endless demands of the home, she had let her eyes slip shut and drifted effortlessly into the land of dreams, where she’d found herself back in the front yard of her childhood home, helping her father with some lawn-related task. 

“Mom.”

“Sorry,” she whispered.  

Her son’s face softened only slightly. “Were you dreaming?” 

“How could you tell?”

His brow twitched. “I had a dream last night. It was my birthday, and I was making my candle wish.”

“What did you wish for?” 

His face never flinched. “Better birthdays.”  

Nikki snorted a laugh, though her son’s own expression remained stoic and unreadable.  She blinked back the last of her dreams, not having intended to sleep, but unclear too on why she’d been awakened. “Did you need something?” 

“That man’s back again.”

Nikki squinted.  “What man?”

Her son’s face showed only the tiniest hint of anxious annoyance.  “The one in the backyard,” he insisted.  “And he won’t listen to me.”

Nikki sat up in bed, a portion of her sheets stuck to the drool that had coalesced on her forearm. “What did you say to him?” 

“I told him to get the shit damn off our deck.”

“What did he say to that?”

“He just ignored me.” 

She nodded and stood from the bed, feeling the lingering burn of the morning’s workout. “Until you know how to swear, it’s probably better if you don’t.”

She walked a beeline to the door that led to her backyard, her son at her heels. She clicked the thermostat along the way and aimed a pair of discarded shoes deftly up the stairway.  When she got to the backdoor, she peered through the glass to see a pair of white feet on her patio, toes pointed up to the heavens. 

“Sleep in your own yard, cock-pisser.” Her son’s voice was quiet but insistent.

“Well goddamn,” she said, unlocking both parts of the door in one motion. “Again?”

She closed the door behind her and followed the two white feet to the rest of the intruder, who wore a pair of jogging shorts and a fuzzy, oversized wool sweater that seemed comically out of place in the heat of the summer morning.  He was thin, and completely hairless, making it difficult to guess his age. The man’s eyes were closed, and his head lulled to the side, but he wore a calm, satisfied smile – one that was stained white with the remnants of an open bag of poisonous slug repellant that Nikki had left out on the deck.

“Mr. Chynoweth,” Nikki’s voice was not unkind, “Can you hear me?”

He gave no indication that he could, his placid smile fixed in place and crusted at the corners with the poison. Yet as Nikki reached down to try and lift his gaunt frame, the man helped himself to his knees, making no protestation as she guided him into one of her lawnchair loungers. 

“Thank you,” he exhaled, laying back to stare up at a cloudless blue sky. “It looks an ocean,” he mused.

“Sure,” she sighed, adjusting his feet to hang less awkwardly off the end of the chair. She considered abandoning him there, alone as he stared into his “ocean.” Then she caught her own reflection in the dark of the glass. 

She looked … good. 

“I always look good,” she insisted silently to herself, but just now she truly believed it. The backdoor sat in the long shadows of the morning, framing her reflection with dark lines that accentuated the tautness of her curves, while bathing the features of her face in a shadowy, pristine wash. Through it, Nikki’s eyes shown impossibly bright, taking in the unnumbered tattoos that patterned her skin like an exotic wild animal.  One of her hands moved absent-mindedly to the stubble just above her ears, and the soft hair that lay beyond.

“Your house number….”

Nikki turned away from her reflection. “What about it?”

Mr. Chynoweth was still smiling up at the sky. “It’s 1234.” When Nikki’s brow only lowered in response he added, “That’s just bad writing.”

Nikki nearly laughed. She pulled the other lounger an inch or two closer and sat down next to her elderly neighbor, choosing a spot to sit upright along one of the edges. 

“Why do you do this?” She asked Mr. Chynoweth earnestly.

“Honestly I can’t remember, what with the Alzheimers and all.” His smile remained locked in place, and his lips parted a little to show a set of bad teeth. “But if I had to guess, I’d say I was probably trying to kill myself. At least the first time, anyway.” His smile retreated to the corner of his mouth.  “It sounds like something I would do.”

Nikki scrunched up her brow. “In my backyard?”

The man only shrugged.

“Well, thanks for that. If it didn’t work, then why do you keep doing it?” 

“Oh … well… “ he laughed. “Turns out your slug repellent is a pretty powerful hallucinogen.” His smile widened again. “Who knew?” His long fingers raised another pinch of slug repellant up to his lips before Nikki flicked it from his grasp. “This stuff is a little like mushrooms, but with less of the soul-crushing grief.” His hand returned slowly to the bag before Nikki slid the entirety of it out of his reach. “Are you a fan of mushrooms?”

She wasn’t. 

“Me neither,” he rambled on. “Who wants to pay for a drug that makes you sad? I have a theory about mushrooms, though. I think when we pick them, and let them sit and dry in their own little mushroom juices, that they go into something of a cocoon. They lay in hibernation like that desert moss that can sleep for years beneath the surface of the soil, just waiting to remember the taste of water. And then … “ He waived his hands in front of him, lowering his brow to stare at the white fingers that jutted from his long sweater. “They spring back to life once they get inside us. They get those last final hours to experience whatever it is they find – joy, sadness, fear …,” he shrugged. “They don’t care, they’ve never felt human before. It’s all new to them. And whatever they find, they run with it, those little fungal parasites.”

Nikki opened her mouth to say something, but then stopped and scrunched up her brow. 

“Anyway,” he continued with a smile, “the slug repellant is like the fun parts of those trips. Lights and colors … extra fingers. Things like that. I like it better than mushrooms.”

Nikki leaned in a little closer. “But how is it that you remember all that? And how can you remember each time that you prefer it to mushrooms?”

“I can’t,” he smiled. “Because of the Alzheimers.”

This time she laughed sincerely, though Mr. Chynoweth only stared up in silence. She knew she could call the cops if she needed to – have the man removed to his own house where he could eat his own slug repellant and sit in his own backyard.  Hell, she was pretty sure she could carry him there herself, a workout less challenging than the ones she imposed on herself daily. But she didn’t see any need to punish Mr. Chynoweth for the intrusion, and more than that, it just wasn’t … her. She wasn’t afraid. She didn’t feel threatened. And she didn’t back down from much.

“My husband flew out today,” Nikki lifted her feet and relaxed back into the lounger, “to go see his parents.”

“What’s the occasion?”

“Car accident.” 

This brought a look of interest from Mr. Chynoweth. “Was it their fault?” 

“Does it matter?” She raised her arms up and linked them behind her head. “They survived though. Everyone survived, except for the driver of the other car.”

“Rollover?”

She shook her head. “Sunglasses.” When the thin, hairless man only gawked back at her she added, “The driver’s glasses got lodged in her head, cut into her and … “ she pantomimed with the flat of her palm, stabbing herself in the brain. 

THIP THIP

The sound of a small, insistent tap brought Nikki’s attention back to the glass doorway. There, behind her reflection, loomed the image of her son, who peered out at her with a nervous shrug. She couldn’t help but smile and stifle a laugh, seeing the best portions of herself within him. Then she turned back to the intruder. 

“You’re not gonna remember any of this, are you?”

“Any of what?”

“Right.” She exhaled a long deep breath. “Fuck it. Jake’s getting deployed again in a month.” She gritted her teeth. “Last time he was gone for more than a year and it hurt my heart. Earlier this week I tweaked a muscle in my neck that irritates every other lift that I do, like a tiny little grain of sand stuck at the end of one of my socks.  I’ve got a thesis due that I haven’t started, for a class that I need but care nothing about. My house is an instrument that I have to constantly keep in tune, and my son will ask me to drive him somewhere the minute I start working on it.”

She raised two fingers to her mouth, pretending to take a long drag from an imaginary, poorly rolled blunt. But when she exhaled, Mr. Chynoweth only chuckled a little, so she kept right on going. 

“The other night I was out with a guy that I met at a party.”

“Does your husband know?”

“My husband introduced us.” She tapped at her fictional blunt. “Everything was going great. He’s good looking and has his shit together.  We were just at the best part, when things could either lead to a hotel, or home to an early bedtime, and he looked right at me and said the worst thing imaginable.”

“I’m not as contagious since the antibiotics?”

“Ha.” Nikki said the word appreciatively, instead of laughing it. “No, he looked me right in the eye, this selfish sonovabitch, and told me that I’m intimidating.” She scowled. “I mean, what the fuck, right? Tell me I’m gorgeous. Tell me about my flaws. Don’t take the magic of an anonymous evening and ruin it with something like that.”

Mr. Chynoweth blinked, and then turned his dark eyes upon her.  They were tired eyes, that looked like they’d seen everything twice. “Why are you telling me all this?” he asked innocently.  

“Well, I figure you’ve already wasted my morning.” Nikki took another drag from her invisible blunt, the smoke filling her lungs like the oxygen of the summer air. “The least you can do for me in return is listen.”

“What if I tell all your other neighbors?”

She shrugged. “No one’s going to give too much credence to the word of a known pesticide pilferer such as yourself.”

“Good point.” The old man brought his hands up to his face once more, fanning them out and rolling both of them over slowly before his eyes. Then he reached towards Nikki with fingers that only he could see, and snatched the make-believe blunt from her grasp before taking a long drag from the illusory herb. “And besides, then you’d never invite me back.”

“I didn’t invite you this time.”

“Another excellent point.” He closed his eyes and exhaled, revelling in the warmth of the morning drugs. “You have a lot on your plate. Some people might say that you need balance.”

“Balance?” This time she did laugh. Appreciatively. “At any given time I have four things that need my attention, and three of them need it urgently. They only get done because I do them. I keep it all together in a pattern too complicated to draw and too intricate to explain.” She hoped that Mr. Chynoweth was lucid enough to really hear the truth of her next words. “I’m the queen of balance. The goddess of getting shit done.” 

It was a quiet forty seconds before Mr. Chynoweth spoke again. 

“I believe you,” he said at last. “In fact it’s all a little … “ he grinned a bad, yellow-toothed smile, “… intimidating.”

“Bleh,” Nikki blanched. “Not you too.”

“Try not to take it personally,” the old man mused.  ‘Beauty is intimidating. It brings us back to life when we find it, if only for a few hours. The problem is, most men don’t know what to do with it when they have it, because they’ve just … never had it.”

She scoffed. “They’ve had it.”

“Not like you.”

Mr. Chynoweth was staring upwards again, at a sky that was vast and blue. It really did look like an ocean, Nikki had to admit – one that was waiting to swallow her up the moment this world  released its hold on her. She wondered why it was that she never dreamed of the sea. 

THIP THIP

The sound of the tapping brought Nikki’s attention back to the glass, before her hairless visitor did something truly unexpected, pushing himself to sit upright before rising to his feet. “Tell your son I’m sorry for the intrusion.”

“My son? What about me?”

“I’m not sorry I talked to you. Haven’t had this much fun in years.”

“How do you know?” Nikki shook her head. “And how can you remember?”

“I can’t,” he said, turning to shuffle towards the gate. “Curse this shit damn Alzheimers.”

Nikki followed and latched the gate behind Mr. Chynoweth. 

“TIl next time,” he called from the front yard.

She stood there in the sunlight, listening as the sound of the old man’s feet shambled back to his own home, or possibly to the deck of one her neighbors and an open can of paint thinner. 

“Mom.”

Nikki turned and saw her son’s head peering out from the frame of the back door. 

“We should stop getting slug repellant.”