MicroHorror

He started leaving dead things on her porch–yanked-up vegetables or rose bushes, then small animals, rodents mostly, then ducks that must have come from the lake where their property lines intersected.

People had warned her: the old man was a lunatic, scary. He claimed to own all of the land this side of the lake. But she was a fighter. She’d dealt with worse. Besides, she’d taught her son that quitting was the worst possible sin.

She always found the items in the morning, so she spent many nights waiting, watching by the window for the sight of the old man. After a week of this, she was depleted at work, foggy-headed and brain dead, too tired to function.

She started sleeping in her son’s bed. She knew the boy thought it odd, but Aaron had been lonely himself, still coping with a father who’d shot himself at their old place in the city.

When their cat went missing, she called the police. “That old man killed her. I know it. He’s had it out for me, ever since we moved here.” The officer said he needed more than a hunch. He wouldn’t even bother to question her neighbor without some kind of proof. When he hinted that she might move, she snapped. “Damn it, this is my house. I don’t give up that easily.”

She bought a dog, a black Doberman. She named him Atlas and taught him how to snarl and nip. She knew it was cruel to use an animal this way, yet she had grown tired of being manipulated by men.

One night she heard Atlas clawing at the front door. Aaron asked, “Aren’t you going to let him in?” She told her son to go back to sleep, that Atlas wasn’t a house dog. “But he sounds sick or something.” Together they heard the dog mewling. By the time she got downstairs, the animal was a heap of steaming fur and guts. His innards sat outside his belly, tossed together like bloody spaghetti.

“You bastard!” she screamed.

She got a butcher knife from the kitchen. A flashlight.

The fog was thicker than normal. Tree branches rustled in the breeze. Squirrels and possums skittered when they heard the sound of her feet stepping on dried-up maple leaves.

The fence was rickety but tall enough that it required some effort to scale it. In doing so, she dropped the flashlight and it clicked off. She searched the ground like a blind person, thinking of Helen Keller. She started to weep, out of frustration and anger.

When she looked up, he was there, holding a lantern, his face a grizzled gray mask.

He put her in a root cellar dug out of the ground like a bomb shelter. The only thing in it was a row of jarred pickles and beets.

He’d said, “I should slay you right here for trespassing, but I’m not as evil as people make me out.”

When she tried to run, he brought down a horse whip. It ripped a slice of flesh off her shoulder.

“If you can make it out, I’ll let you live. If not, you weren’t meant to.”

“But I have a son,” she said.

“I’ll take care of him.”

“Please?” she begged.

That was last Friday. Now her fingers have gone raw from digging. The hole smells horribly, of urine and excrement. All she’s eaten is a few handfuls of beets.

She takes two jars of pickles and cracks them together. There’s no light at all so she has to feel to find the largest piece. She’s disappointed to realize she’s a quitter, no different than her husband, disappointed that she’s letting the old man win, yet when she rakes the glass shard across her wrist, the pain is a hot release and it makes her smile.