It’s one of those neighborhood watch stories

Bernadette looked out of her second-story window because she didn’t want to work. She heard once that if you give yourself nothing to do but look out a window or work, eventually you choose to work. So far, the advice was wrong. She kept dozing off, not working and not looking out the window.

It was only from this intense looking that Bernadette first noticed the people coming out of the side door from a house across the street and to the right. In one of her dozes, she was startled awake when she saw a man carrying four green balloons out of the house’s side door. The man turned and walked away from her house to continue down the street. 

Bernadette assumed she must have imagined the guy with the green balloons and promptly forgot about him until a couple of days later when she looked out the window during her boss’s video call meeting. 

Suddenly, a zebra walked out of the side door. After a double-take, Bernadette realized the sight was two men dressed in zebra-striped suits. Again, they turned down the street away from her and disappeared.

The funny thing was that Bernadette never saw anyone enter the house’s front door. One evening, she went for a walk and found that the house also had no back door. How were the people getting in, and where were they going?

Over the next two weeks, she watched the following men walk out of the house:

  • A man in a sandwich board advertising the letters UFO
  • A man dressed in a yellow hat
  • A man pushing a hot cart down the path
  • A man wearing a purple police uniform
  • A man wearing an entire bathtub around his torso

A couple of times, Bernadette raced out of the house and tried to follow the men. A man with a chocolate sombrero was gone before she could reach him, although she did see drips of chocolate on the sidewalk. She also didn’t catch a man juggling butterfly nets but noticed butterflies where he had been. 

Bernadette searched online for information about the house and went to the library. She set up a security camera that never caught anyone leaving the house while she was gone. 

About three months into her obsession with the side door, she was looking through binoculars, eating Cheetos while her boss praised her presence at work on a phone call. She gave affirmative answers but listened to nothing when the front door to the house opened for the first time.

Out came the two zebra-suited men and the man now with six green balloons. The sandwich board man had a picture of an alien this time, and the man in the yellow hat had a monkey on his shoulder. As she ignored her boss, Bernadette poured over the list of the people she’d seen. All seemed accounted for as they walked out the door. Bernadette also noticed a woman who looked similar to herself in the mix. She had on a brown sweater with her hair pulled back. She even seemed to be wearing binoculars.

Bernadette’s doppelganger cut away from the pack and crossed the street while Bernadette watched the man with the chocolate sombrero. 

Bernadette was so focused on the parade that she didn’t hear the doorbell ring, but she did hear her boss say on the phone, “Bernadette, is there someone at the door?”