The Two Cox

Miss Gilda began her response to my return by beating on my chest, as if she would like to kill my for still being alive.

“Where where you? You’ve been gone almost the entire day,” she said, nearly screaming into my eardrums. I pushed her away,

“I was in the grove,” I said, pointing to the area I had just exited. “I guess I fell asleep. You know how it is, with so much ****.”

“I guess so,” said Robert. “But usually you can’t really fully sleep.”

“True,” said Roman. “Sometimes you just get these weird drunken dreams.”

“Yeah, I had a dream like that,” I started to say, when I noticed the two police officers standing with the group. One was taking copious amounts of notes on everything and anything that was said, while the other merely nodded at every word spoken. Both officers were female, and both had the same last name.

“I didn’t realise I was gone so long, Officer Cox and… Officer Cox,” I said, my last word ending on a higher note, almost in a questioning tone.

“We’re married,” said the Officer Cox with the notepad. She had her hair arranged tightly into a ponytail that stuck out only about three inches from the back of her head. Her whole body was a small frame upon which were built many muscles. She was short, too, far shorter than any of the people assembled. Yet, somehow, her presence was commanding, as if a large projection of her face, with a keen and staring eye, looked down upon you no matter where you moved.

“Three months next month,” said the other Officer Cox. She showed us her ring, which was very simple and carved out of wood. “But tell me, sir, just what happened in the wood? Normally we wouldn’t come out until much later, but as you are bringing so many jobs to the community we felt it was indeed important to find you.”

“I just fell asleep after we partied, perhaps a bit too much,” I said. “I had a dream but it wasn’t too much, just a strange jumbled nightmare. We were trying to find out if this house had a name.”

“It does,” said the shorter of the Coxs. “Didn’t you know about this house before you bought it?”

“No--” I said.

“It just sort of drew us in,” my wife added. “There’s something… calling about this place. It makes you feel like you need to be here, you need to belong.”

“That’s just what the old woman said,” the taller of the Coxs said. She took the notebook from her partner, and flipped through it. Pulling a pencil out of her front pocket, she licked the tip, and began to write something down. She passed it to her wife, who laughed, and nodded.

There was a long silence then. I wondered what was funny, but dared not ask. So we stood, as people all too often do, in a sort of semi-circle, and waited for what must have been about ten seconds but seemed like an eternity before the shorter officer spoke once more.