Am I paranoid? I don’t think so.
I look out my window and see them, nightmares made flesh. With azure hair and prescription pills, walkers, mobile chairs, oxygen tanks, coupons, dentures and adult undergarments; they are death incarnate.
They wait for me to leave my home, but I am no idiot. I know if I venture out, they will surround me -this army of wrinkled zombies- and touch me with their cold hands. Claustrophobia takes hold; I imagine a geriatric mass operating as a single entity, closing around me, gripping my cheeks with their fingers, calling me cute, laughing at nothing funny. They bombard me with nostalgia, lament the state of the world today, and remember at me fondly the days of coathanger abortions and colored folk, that lovely era when war was good and a man could still wallop his woman when she talked gibberish.
It is 8:03 AM. I will be late for school. My mother’s cries from the floor below are ignored. I can’t go out there. I won’t go out there. Why won’t these translucent specters die and leave me alone? I look out the window and see them on the front lawn, immobile, gazing upward, insensible and inchoate fools anxious to ruin my life because I am a young person. My breathing becomes heavy and panicked. I don’t know where to flee.
Through hazy corridors I run. Through labyrinthine passages and down spiral stairscases, doors locked behind me, still that same dread panic pounding violently under my ribs. And I hear their words echoing around me like some demented chorus. Everywhere I hear the electric buzz of motorized chairs. No escape from their words:
“Young people today have no morals, I tell you. They run wild on the streets; no family values; no work ethic. Why, in my day, people just didn’t behave like that. Bread cost a penny back then and had meat in it! Everyone believed in God and loved their President, bless Ike’s soul, and the Blackies lived in straw huts next to watermelon patches, happy as pigs in shit! No one was miserable back then, I tell you. We did our part and we enjoyed every minute of our 20 hour work days. You kids today don’t know how good you have it. Can you please bathe me now, as my bones have become stuck like a fossilized skeleton? HAHAHAHA”
