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.”
“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.