Something is Beginning

Something is Beginning

Wait! What? Why?

Mike was so glad to be home. Prison had been more horrible than anyone can imagine. Sixteen years for a crime he didn’t commit and had no part in. A rather violent rape that had left the girl completely disabled. She had apparently been waiting for her sister to appear and didn’t see the man coming at her. The park was dark and quiet, broken only by the sound of Sandy gasping for air as her attacker held his hand over her mouth. He had brutalized her for almost 20 minutes before passing strangers happened by. She had been beaten so badly, the doctors weren’t sure she would recover, if she even survived.

He was to have no contact with Sandy, the girl who had been so badly damaged by someone, but not him. He deeply wished to apologize to the family.

The door of the old house needed a fresh coat of paint. The forest green clapboard was buckled and needed repair. Grass growing so high, you couldn’t see the front walk and looked as if there might be something living in there. Inside, dust on the furniture so thick it looked as if it needed to be chipped off with a chisel.

Sarah had taken good care of the house . . . paying all the bills and getting the mail, which was now piled high on the kitchen table waiting to topple over at the slightest touch.

He had lost sixteen long years of his young life and several family members . . . some passed away while he was interred and some just cut him off because of “his” violent crime. Horrific was the word one of his cousins had used.

He reached over to open the note he had spotted on the table that read “for your eyes only.” He assumed that meant him since he was still the owner of this old house which had been willed to him by his father a few years before his life went down the toilet.

“You better watch over your shoulder and grow eyes in the back of your head.”

Mike read and reread the note several times before falling into his still favorite chair. Dust flew everywhere, choking him as he inhaled. He read the note again and looked quickly around the room.

Eyes in the back of my head? My head is gonna be on a swivel, he thought. Wait! What? Why?

After sixteen years, this was not the homecoming he had planned on. Dinner with Sarah by candlelight had been arranged. She had refused to pick him up at the prison, but would be waiting for him at home with a surprise for him, she had said.

The dinner table was set for two with peach-colored napkins and wine glasses that sparkled in the light. Dinner plates with pastel-colored geographic designs on them sat next to the silverware that had been neatly placed. He had never seen this dinnerware before, so he assumed Sarah had set it up.

“God, I’m so fucking lucky to have her,” he spoke out loud. As he looked around, he acknowledged that this old house needed some new furniture and artwork and everything that would make this a home again. A home with Sarah.

Assuming it was her, the creaking floorboards make him look around. He smiled from ear to ear, ready to take her in his arms for the first time in forever. There was no one there.

He remembered meeting Sarah for the first time. She had been warm and inviting at a perfect time. He was waiting to learn his fate and here was this perfect girl telling him she would wait. To this day, he never understood what had made him so lucky in love when the rest of his life was crap.

“Sarah?” he yelled out, his voice echoing back to him in the fairly empty house. He walked back to the kitchen to look at some of the piled-up mail while he waited. He touched one envelope and it all slid to the floor in a heap. He laughed and thought, I’ll clean that up later. His laughter was cut short when he heard the floorboards creak again and there stood Sarah with a gun in her hand, pointed at him.

Wait! What? Why?