Loud music blaring from the neighbor next door fucked-up my mood in the wee hours of that Monday morning. Infuriated, I vaulted out of bed, my vexation multiplied every second by the urge to relieve my bowels. Twice the keys slipped off my fingers in a desperate attempt to unlock the door. As I did, my whole being was accosted by a throbbing deep pulsing bass of un-music. Discomfited, my full bowel leaked slightly, threatening to erupt altogether. All the while my head was reeling with nostalgic confusion of an unusual yesterday, and then I saw him there, and froze. Everything froze. The music. The pressure on my bowels. The pain in my head. Everything was suspended in a photographic frame except for him. His presence was the only thing palpable and his seething eyes stunned me perilously like a deer in the headlights.
The interloper looked me straight in the eye. Right into the black dot in the center of the iris of my eye as it expanded in tandem with my terror and racing heart, he peered deep and beyond the reaches of my own awareness. Sleep gone; I steeled myself and held his gaze. He smiled. A smile that revealed yellowish teeth with fragments of green. It was not the time to ponder his nightly diet. It was time to get rid of him. Fast.
He did not say hello. He did not shake my hand when I extended mine. He did not even seem to notice that the noise of the music next door suddenly came back up in a startling intensity.
“Is she here?” He asked.
“No! She went away last night. Late last night.”
He had a tetra pak milk carton of KCC gold crown in his hand. And a straw. He looked down as though to disguise impatience and then tightened his grip menacingly, collapsing the carton into itself. A river of white gushed out of the roof of the carton, a stark contrast to a clenched black fist. Then without a word, he walked away. As though he was gone to regroup, and attack with the surety of a kill.
I went back into my room, trembling. I thought to myself, what a big mess I had gotten myself into. It was already three am and Nora, who was supposed to be present for the play on the other side of town by eight, was nowhere to be seen. And so I resigned myself to the fact that she was not going to be throwing in a disturbance into the flow of my day again. Yet, at the back of my mind, I still longed to see her.
Sitting back in my bed, I took my water bottle and gulped on it like a nomad. Then I walked out the room, passing my insensitively noisy neighbor’s door on the way to the washroom at the end of the corridor that the entire block shared. I staggered in, and in a swift single motion, lifted my nightie while pulling my panties below my knees as I squatted down to dump the dissidents interned in my belly into the pit latrine.
No sooner had I returned to my room than my door slowly swung open. She was there, dress changed, no odor of fragrance as you'd expect a woman of her beauty, but her calm in place.
“Your friend just left.” I said, “He was looking for you!”
“Yeah. I know. I just met him downstairs.”
“He was supposed to pick you up last night?”
She laughed, “He's not my friend. Fuck I don't even know the dude.”
