Dog in the closet.

i went down to complain. i didn't have a closet. she'd promised me a closet. she'd said, here's where your room will be, imagine the walls, and there will be a closet, right there. and the price was a bit high, but she said, oh, you're a good girl, i can tell you raised right, just like new roommate Jen, and you deserve it. dark eyes and fat glasses and flyaway hair and mud-colored skin and loose folds on her arms, covered in tiny white hairs, a few on her chin, she was my lebanese grandmother but thinner and with an accent i couldn't identify and without the eight children and the two dead children and the three almost-dead children and the suffering, well maybe not without the suffering but with a different kind of suffering (i'd asked her and she'd had no children). you come home long day at work and relax, and open window and sit on patio and relax and oh, beautiful garden in back, too, down there, flowers and we keep it real nice, real clean for down here in city. can i cook on that grill there? no, that is someone else's, but you buy one, cheap. i would not grill anyway. i took the place. i bought it all. the good girl, the patio, the closet. but when i unlocked the door, there was no closet. so i went down to complain. to yell. she kept the door mostly closed, "sorry, it's messy, it's such a mess," she said, her fat white husband in the background blocking the view, the sound of little dogs yapping and fighting. i told her about the closet, and she denied it. "i never said," she said. "yes, you did," i said. "what you want to do?" she said. "move out?" after loops of logic she wasn't getting through it was hopeless. she'd used the accent and the lebanese grandmother and the messy apartment and the fat husband and glasses to beat me. i lost with light hair, ghost-white skin, blue eyes, a college degree and assumption. one of her dogs slipped out the door (she'd left it cracked). it was bone-thin and one-eyed and the eye it had was glossy with a layer of milk and nearly hairless but the hair it had was mangy, and it had two teeth (i could count them) so it couldn't hold its tongue in so it flopped out, you could touch it (i did) and it wouldn't go back in. he was 18 years old (four years younger than me), she said. "see what time does?" she said. i forgot the closet.