RhondaK

Closet

The dream started out uneventfully enough. However, her flailing and screaming seemed to have attracted the attention of the overly vigilant next door neighbor.

"So, you are fine?" the officer asked. She was a wizened red head of indeterminate bitterness. At the corners of her knowing eyes were symbols of laughter and periodically extreme mirth perhaps aided with Jameson's.

"Why yes. It was the nightmare." She said feeling naked. In fact, she felt like she did when a highway patrolman had shined a light into her boyfriend's car and illuminated his head insouciantly affixed to her teen breast. It was sort of a Jesus and Mary vision with the people in all the wrong sizes. Definitely in the wrong car. A parked one in the woods.

"I apologize, but I would like to come in, just to make sure. You understand, a neighbor heard screaming and loud noises."

"Why.."

She was brushed aside as she stood there hands in her hair, disheveled in a devil may care sort of porno stance but with all the wrong characters. Her long black gown made her fill forties and grown up. However, the officers sweep flashlight sweep of her bedroom changed all of that and reversed her mental time machine. Pink and macabre, her super-Jamaican fun vibrator was glaringly iridescent against the super large bottle of Wet she had left by her bedside. The mangled old copy of the now likely illegal "Little Girls Want to Have Fun, Too" was in stark relief against the crumpled Girl Scout Uniform on the floor.

"No one else in here?" the officer trailed into another room.

Felice was thinking that her libido left plenty enough evidence that most of the people in the apartment were insecurely inside her own nightgown.

"Are you OK? There was nothing outside." The officer's partner's shoulders filled her door way and then some.

"Everything is fine." It was hard to maintain eye contact. She hadn't expected company and it showed badly. She saw the other deputy get smacked in the head with her cat-o-nine tails that were hanging up in the closet.

However, it was more than apparent the closet wasn't at all a place Felice lived. Particularly telling was the stack of Hustler's in the bathroom she could only imagine the male deputy was now studying thinking things in old cliches of "how beautiful women are together."

She couldn't figure out what she regretted more, the spread of tampons visible on the counter or the basket of festive multi-colored condoms. Felice was shaken out of her reverie as the red headed officer knocked over her rather sloppily stacked porno collection. "Guys and Dolls and Dolls and Another Guy" skittered across the floor next to her foot.

"A classic.." Felice offered weakly.

"Are you really a Felice?" the officer asked fingering a feather boa.

"I'm O.K. I'm O.K" Felice sputtered. "Look, officers I appreciate you coming by, but really, I just had a nightmare and I woke up screaming. "

"What sort of nightmare would make you wake up screaming so loud two of your neighbors dialed 911?"

"Well." She paused. It hardly seemed horrific compared to two strangers walking through her din of liquidity. "I was in the grocery store shopping for vegetables. Squeezing a lemon. Checking out an avocado. Looking at lettuce. And all then sudden everything I touched sprouted human eyes. Big human eyes. Then the produce they touched sprouted eyes till the whole department was staring at me. They were staring at me and crying for me to pick them up."

"Oh." The red headed officer smiled. "You're what age? Thirty? Thirty-two? Unmarried? When I was your age I dreamed about eggs. Every dream I had, there was an egg. Motionless, yet ever there. That is when I adopted my boy."

"My wife, she had the terrorist dream. You know, the one where she was more likely to get killed by one than get married since she was over the age of 35."

Both of them looked bemused.

Felice was lost in fecund thoughts of thwarted fertility.

"Look it, hon, you'll meet someone. Don't worry. Volunteer somewhere. Go be a Big Sister. I mean, it doesn't take a psyche major to get what your head was saying. You know, produce department. Be productive. You see?"

"Yeah, I met my wife at a Habitat for Humanities house building weekend up state."

Felice felt those eyeballs on her again and began to scream.