Rain was pouring down in morbid torrents. Memphis Gray sat behind her favorite bay window and she stared down her long, beak-shaped nose, watching her eccentric neighbor dance around his attic in skin tight green silk pants. He was singing, it seemed, about the multiplication table. Colored by flashing lights, reminiscent of the early eighties, and dancing with him, his oversized sheepdog and glasses clad rabbit. If this wasn’t enough to satisfy his need for abnormality, he was joined by none other than a frolicking sheep wearing a bell. It was a strange sight indeed.

“Why,” she wondered “is he singing into a fake microphone?” Then she wondered why that thought had even crossed her mind, this being the least abnormal element to the scene before her. This scene, and ones similar, had become all too familiar to Memphis Gray, ever since her neighbor had introduced himself and his animals to her, and expected her to converse with them. Only the night before, she had seen him singing and dancing again, this time clad in Biblical garb, playing a harp, after emerging with a shout and jump from a shaking closet with a soccer ball perched precariously on top of it. The thought had occurred to her that night, “Why doesn’t the soccer ball fall off when the closet shakes?” Again, it scared her that the only queries she had about the scene before her were so trivial in comparison to the shocking events which had now become a nightly occurrence.

In observing her neighbor, she had become aware of certain patterns in his behavior. He was always speaking to ‘the kids’. This occurred to her as strange, as she had observed no children ever in the man’s house. He also seemed to frequently consult a large chest, often staring at it for long periods of time with childlike expressions of joy on his face. Never seeing anything unusual about this chest, it again struck her as odd. But tonight, after staring and talking to this chest for quite some time, she noticed the lamb that was now performing the multiplication song, emerge. Her first reaction was to reach over and call the animal rights protection organization to complain about this strange holding place for an animal. But was then distracted by the next activity he seemed to have up his sleeve. He brought a flute, and traipsed around the room, followed by the sheep, the dog, and the rabbit. They seemed quite amused by this simple activity. Memphis Gray was perplexed.

Brought back from her musings, Memphis Gray took one last look at the dancing cavaliers, before she turned to her bed, and climbed in. The flashing neon lights that seeped through her blindfold, perturbed her beyond all reason. What kind of man was this? Thoughts of terror began to caress her fevered imagination. Surely, this neighbor of hers was not a victim of eccentricy alone. There had to be something sinister to his behavior. Any man capable of keeping a pair of glasses on a rabbit, was surely capable of much more imaginative and perhaps even heinous feats. This thought terrified Memphis Gray.

She would not sleep tonight.

Not a wink.