Such a Bad Neighbor

Last night, while opening my bedroom window to let the sweet stormy breeze in, I noticed that the trunk of my neighbor's car was open, the little interior light glittering away in the otherwise dark 12:00 hour. What to do? I sat and contemplated this for a while. All the lights were out in their house. I'd assumed they'd gone to bed. But how do you forget to close your trunk? My suspicions were then aroused: perhaps this was one of those instances where someone sees their perfectly normal neighbors dragging a suspiciously body-shaped garbage bag out of their house to throw in their trunk; or perhaps someone had managed to break into the trunk and was attempting to crawl through the front seat and steal the car. I squinted at the car closely. It looked like a small and weathered stuffed animal of some sort was sitting back there, just awaiting the return of my neighbor so it could curl up in the dark of a closed trunk and fall asleep. My thoughts then turned to what I should do about the open trunk: do I go over there and close it myself? But there is the possibility that it is open for a reason (to air it out, for example) or that my neighbors were somewhere outside of my line of view in their backyard and would close it before they headed in. I also was leery of lurking around in someone's backyard, picturing my typically mild-mannered neighbor stepping out onto his porch with a shotgun half-cocked straight at my head. I then contemplated calling the police department so that THEY could at least go over there and shut the trunk for them without my neighbors mistaking them for thieves. But I figured they'd just laugh at me. So instead I laid there on my stomach, staring out the window as the pre-storm breeze tiptoed into the room. The sky was swirled with quickly-moving storm clouds. I could see a television spastically glowing in the upstairs bedroom a few houses down. The trees were whipping in the wind and making the streetlights cast epileptic bursts of shadow and light on my walls. I thought about reading the book I'm working my way through. Then I discarded the idea. I thought about the guy who lives on W. 10th who sits outside in a plastic lawnchair with a newspaper and, every time I pass his house, never fails to ask me what time it is. I thought about what a long and crazy heatwave it's been this past week and a half. I thought and I thought some more.

And then I fell asleep.

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