I’m standing in the middle of the street, screaming into the phone. I can hear my voice like someone else is shrieking, but it’s me. My breath is short and my heart beats hard, and fast. Blood pumps up between my ears with such force that I hear and feel it at the same time. The 911 operator says, “honey, just take a breath and calm down,” but she can’t see what I do: the front door of my house shaking, yanked from within by the burglar trying to get out.
The door is locked from inside, with a key I keep in the kitchen. The shade down taut over the glass panes hides his face from view. I back away, behind my car, stopped hard at a messy park near the curb. I want to be as far away as possible. Pounding continues. Whether this sound is adrenaline pushing through my veins or the retreat of feet to their exit, I don’t know anymore. The door no longer shakes.
The local stoop sitters are ambling toward the sound of my scream, feigning urgency in the rising heat. “Hey lady, you awright,” one of them asks. I don’t bother to answer; from their perch, they’ve seen it all through their usual fog.
He is back there. He rifles through my things while I am frozen. I should go in. I should go see him so he doesn’t get away, or it will keep happening.
The chain link fence that normally blocks my driveway is pushed inward at an awkward angle. I slip past it, hand trembling through a ring of keys.
“What’s happening now,” the operator asks. Her voice in my ear startles me; I forgot I was holding my phone.
“I’m going to look.”
“Ma’am, don’t do that…don’t hon. Stay where you are.”
But I keep going, the alarm getting louder the closer I get to the speaker. My insides are on fire with the speed of fear running through them, but my feet feel like cement, and I move slow as the flow of molasses. Up the driveway. Through the garden gate, which has been carefully closed by whoever passed here before me: the semblance of normalcy.
I hear scuffling, like the sound of the possum that saunters around the fence at night. Not that slow, but not as fast as the squirrels that race down the pecan tree and onto the neighbor’s roof. I’m not sure I am ready for this. I don’t know if I want to see what I’m about to see.
“Ma’am? You still there? You hold still…the officer is just about there.”
He’s heard her, and now he’s the squirrel. To catch him, I must be the dog, and I rush into the yard, around the back corner of the house, but all I see is the fingers, gripping white knuckled to the top of the fence as the body drops to the other side, and runs.
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