The Man and the Woman

A dream inspired by actual events

I am six years old and taking a walk around the block of my childhood home with my parents. A man and a woman turn a corner and stop upon seeing us. The man is tall and the woman is squat yet pretty. They are dressed in renaissance attire. The woman wears a pointed hat with a veil. (They live together in an odd neighborhood house right across the alleyway from our living room, from which only their roof and a fence is visible. Above the fence is a garden box and pergola, adorned with visual curiosities, only some of which my six-year-old self could recognize - flowers and wind chime - and some crazy and mysterious entities - such what looks like a white upside-down funnel that seems to hover in one spot).

My mom starts talking to the man, who speaks in an abnormally deep voice with a California drawl. What he says alludes me, but the grownups get it. I recognize his affect however as jolly and good-natured. The couple seems likable yet strange - maybe they are likable because they are strange – perhaps their charms are facilitated by their strangeness in a way that would only be possible for someone on the margins of society. They are old but have a timeless quality about them, the way that some people have when they are in their 20's. They are anomalies.

In a social neighborhood where people are outside often and are frequently waving and chatting, this is the first time I am meeting this couple. They have up until this point been nonexistent. But upon having this encounter, I want to know more about them. Their blinds have always been drawn, and there have been small but noticeable hints suggested of illness and pathology on the rare occasion that they do come up in conversation. (To make their lot even stranger, I once saw what looked for a moment like a formless black entity floating above their roof line only to recede back over the roof's crest like a wave on the beach. This recurred several times all within a few minutes and then happened no more.)

The conversation with my mom done, they continue on their way. Their path is divergent from ours, and so they are gone just as suddenly and mysteriously as they had appeared. “Why were they dressed like that?”, I ask. My mom says, “maybe they're going to a consume party.”