I got the good look at them that you’re waiting to hear about a few days after that. I looked out my window and saw a big person in sort of rust-colored pants and boots and sagging purple sweater working in Dr. Wilson’s garden. They had on floppy, colorless gardening gloves, and I guess they were weeding, in no hurry, kneeling on the ground, and they had on a rubber Halloween mask over their head. When they turned around to get the hand-rake thing, I saw the face and thought at first it was a green gorilla mask, or then a zombie, with the mouth hanging open, not in a snarl, but just open, like mindless. Then I saw the snake heads wiggling in the shaggy fake hair, and it was a Medusa mask. The mouth was open, but there was backing inside it so you couldn’t see the mouth inside. The eyes were filled in with staring Medusa eyes, sort of sloppily painted there with paint like two splashes of bird shit. There were slits under the eyes, so I guess you see out through those. And right away, I remembered the weird shapes around the silhouette of the head the other day. You see? It means they were wearing the mask then, when they were working on the car with Dr. Wilson. I didn’t see the head that day through the kitchen window, but I sort of think that I saw the back of the mask, the scruffy, fake hair sticking out in all directions, just for a flash there. So, it’s like they were in the same cheap, Halloween-store Medusa mask all the time.

Gee, what’s under the mask, are they too gross under the mask and so they wear the mask, but why wear a cheap, shitty drugstore mask and not just like some kind of medical mask they make for people with facial deformities?

Dr. Wilson came out into the yard a moment later and started talking to them. You in the Medusa mask knelt on the ground listening and you nodded when Dr. Wilson was done. Then you went back to weeding. Aunt Gabrielle was talking with Mrs. Figiel from across the street when I came in and asked her what the deal was with the Medusa masked person next door, and she said she hadn’t noticed anybody.

“Oh, you mean Dr. Wilson’s friend?” Mrs. Figiel said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know who it is.”

“Sort of big?” she said. “Works around the house, in the garden? And on that car he has, too, I think, right?”

“Do they always wear a mask? A Medusa mask?”

“You know, I think they do. I think they do usually have that mask on, yeah.”

“Oh!” my Aunt said. “I know who you mean! They’ve been living with Mr. Wilson since before I moved here.”

“And they always have that mask on?”