Matt Starr is from North Carolina. His work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Empty House Press, Farewell Transmission, and Schuylkill Valley Journal, among others, and his fourth book, american bastard, is a forthcoming title from April Gloaming.
Home invasion sounded so aggressive. Grievous. Especially when the house in question was a place he had been before. Denning parked his liquorsickle on the curb a few mailboxes down. He had been casing the spot for a few weeks. Knew it would be vacant at this hour. The current occupant, a young woman, worked the graveyard shift. Some kind of nurse. Sometimes there was a boyfriend, but his visits were accompanied by daylight.
It was dark now. Denning only allowed himself to exist in the darkness.
He circled round back of the millhouse, high, veins humming like livewires. Used the jimmy to gain entry to the kitchen. He padded over the floor, still the same buttercream linoleum he remembered. Yellowed by a single bulb above the sink. In the hallway, a lowboy housed framed pictures; he turned them facedown as he passed into the smaller of two dimly lit bedrooms. The jewelry box on the bureau might have piqued anyone else’s interest, but he rummaged through its contents with a gloveless, intoxicated indifference. Head cocked like a hounddog on a scent. Trying to summon the trail. After a moment or two, he plopped down onto the bedspread behind him. Gazed into the bureau’s mirror. He had an animal look about him. A thing trapped and scared.
There was no telling how long he had been there — maybe a minute, maybe an hour — when a noise issued from across the hall, from the larger bedroom. A tensile creak, the groan of something shifting. Denning stood. Pocketed the jimmy in his bomber, drew the buckknife from the sheath on his belt. Aware, even through the chemical fog in his mind, that his misdemeanor had just become a felony. That’s how quick it happened.
Breathless, he tiptoed through the hall and into the main bedroom. Sweat binding his clothes to his flesh like a second skin. He thought he might weep when he saw her, the little old lady. Bedbound in a sage housedress. Convalesced. Her eyes were paled over, and her white hair fell in two braids, one down each shoulder. For all he knew, she was staring at the popcorn ceiling. Asleep with her eyes open. Why didn’t he run then? He could live a thousand years and never come up with a good enough answer.
“What are you doing, child?” she asked without once turning her head. A sibilant whisper. An angel or a demon, he couldn’t say.
How could she have known he was there?
Denning ran his tongue over the top row of his dope-rotted teeth. An invisible hand squeezed his voice to nothing. He bit his fist, tears welling in his eyes.
“Who are you?” she asked. Teetering somewhere between panic and acceptance. “Why are you here?”
“I used to live in this house,” he said, dry-throated.
“Arlo?” she said. “Arlo, is that you?” She did not sit up. Merely worked her liverspotted fingers in a frantic dance over the covers on either side of her.
The glint of the buckknife’s blade. Lightning. Out back, any sound was deadened by starless night. Barefoot, he ran through it once. A different creature. Shaped by some force other than pain. He had the urge to make her steeple her hands. Pray like he prayed. A pagan song from a cathedral of hurt. Of longing.
“Arlo, child. Arlo, what is it you want?”
He stared at her. A speedball of chalk and booze, each jockeying for dominance over his bloodstream.
“I don’t remember,” he admitted. “I don’t remember.”
In the room that used to be his, the smaller room, he turned off the lamp. Lay on the bed with the buckknife balanced on his undulating chest. Trying his damnedest to recall what he had come back for. Whatever it was, he realized, as the blue and red lights careened off the walls, as the house swallowed him in its shadows, he would never get it back.
~ fin ~
Matt Starr is from North Carolina. His work has appeared in Barren Magazine, Empty House Press, Farewell Transmission, and Schuylkill Valley Journal, among others, and his fourth book, american bastard, is a forthcoming title from April Gloaming.
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