…and when I walk through the door, she’s sitting there on the couch, holding a cup of tea to her lips, one leg tucked under her, staring out the window and I stand there, watching her for a moment and she looks up and sees me, and she smiles.
And I wake up.
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated January 6th, 1997]
I stand in the front window and watch as the car makes its second pass, making myself as visible as possible to the men inside . . . letting them know that there are people home and they’ll have to find someone else to rob.
On their fourth pass, I make eye contact with the driver and I know then that this is no normal robbery. They want me to see them.
We stand there, watching the pass and I realize that we’re being diverted.
Misdirection.
Someone is already in the house, I know. Someone came in the back — the car had been empty? The car had been full on the first pass, but the last few times, I could see that the men inside were not so cramped; one of them was gone.
They were already in the house.
Through the house I go, searching.
Passing by my room I see that the french doors have been kicked in.
Someone is in the house.
In a back room, my teenage daughter’s room, I find them. He is sitting at the piano, holding a gun in her face. She sits on the bed, crying.
With a broken crystal candlestick, I stab him in the back — just to the left of the spine — before he can turn.
Push the splintered end deep into him, glancing off the shoulderblade, scraping against the bone.
He breathes once, heavy, and then dies.
When the car passes by the window again, I am there — his head in my fist, raising it high, my fingers in his hair.
I see the eyes widen as they see his glazed, empty gaze.
I meet the eyes of one in the car as it speeds off — that is the one, I know, who will return for revenge.
The car drives off into the night and I drop the head, realizing that — for the first time — it is snowing in the Midlands.
[2013 Addendum: This is a odd one to look at now. In 1997, I did not have a daughter. Now I have two. And, for what it’s worth, my bedroom (four houses and sixteen years later) has French doors. That’s not going to help me get to sleep any easier.)
[This is directly transcribed, without changes or edits, from a journal entry dated December 6th, 1996]
…I’m standing in front of a shelf full of journals and books in the dead man’s rooms. I take one down, finding [ILLEGIBLE] and poetry, handwritten recollections between the pages — it dawns on me that these are the rooms of my great uncle, the missionary to Burma, and that only I know he is dead.
The guard eyes me through the front windows and I move on to the inner rooms, marveling at the collection of antiques, souvenirs, and artifacts [ILLEGIBLE] the grimy gray walls, the peeling paint, and the dusty windowpanes.
Within the inner rooms, I come upon a woman — elderly and wholly lovely. She embraces me and slowly we back to an old bare mattress with a brass frame and headboard tarnished and lovely.
…and then the guard is knocking at the window and shouting and I am still standing at the bookshelf, a book open before me with a picture of an alluring elderly woman open on the page.
And I know I am dreaming, but still I set the book back upon the shelf and move once again into the inner rooms, coming to the place of the woman yet again, embracing and being embraced yet again, awakening once more at the shelf of books with the guard behind me, knocking on the window of the dead man’s rooms.
And again, I turn to pass back into the inner chamber again,
And again.
Again.
Until I wake in the dark morning.